Planned Release Date: To be announced

About This Game

The Last Banner is a session-based, faction-versus-faction battleground with action combat, resource gathering, crafting, and siege warfare. Three factions. Real class depth with sessions running around 20 minutes for fast skirmishes, up to two hours for full 30+ player sieges. Pick a side, drop in, gather resources, craft tools of war, fortify keeps, and fight to raise the banner.

The World

The Lore

Long ago, the peoples of the world stood united under a single banner, until the faction that raised it vanished, leaving its standard behind. No one agrees what The Last Banner stands for. Whoever raises it claims its power and bends the will of every people in the world to their cause. Three factions have been fighting over that claim ever since.

The Battlegrounds

The battlegrounds in TLB are not arenas. They are places. Forests thick enough to lose someone in. Open hillsides where you can see a fight and decide whether to enter it or flee. Keeps that sit in the landscape like they belong there because they hold the scars of war from years past.

The world is designed to be contained but not feel small. You may eventually explore outward and find new locations, and possibly secrets along the way. The various battlegrounds span biomes from snow covered hill tops to deep murky bogs with ancient secrets hidden throughout.

Choose Your Faction

The Elderborn

They claim divine inheritance, heirs to the First Forge, chosen to restore the order Avenor once bestowed. To them the Banner is a birthright.

The Hollow Oak

They see Avenor not as a blessing but a scar, the wound that seared the sky when man first defied the earth. They call its light the False Fire. Their faith is wild, beautiful, and merciless.

The Iron Pact

They believe none of it. They speak little of stars or gods. Long ago they withdrew into the mountains and were changed by them, tempered, hardened, forgotten.

Each faction carries distinct bonuses, faction-specific stats. Who you chose to be isn't just an appearance.

Build Your Fighter

A Classic Lineup

Four starter classes: Warrior, Mage, Rogue & Cleric. Each with unique abilities and roles in combat. Weapon variants and item upgrades reinforce your chosen skill path. Each class has a clear identity and a ceiling worth pushing. As you play you gain Realm Rank, unlocking new equipment, and special abilities that grow with your commitment to the faction. More classes are planned for the future.

Gather

Each battleground has discrete resource nodes scattered across contested terrain: wood, stone, iron. These are the inputs for everything you build during a session. NPCs patrol the frontier and drop basic materials. Getting to a resource node means moving through them, and usually through whoever else from the other factions is heading to the same spot.

Craft

What you gather goes into a crafting pipeline: siege weapons, consumables, tools, and defensive structures. Nothing you deploy in a match appears from thin air. Someone gathered for it, someone built it.

Build and Repair

Once you have materials you can deploy and maintain tools of war: catapults, battering rams, ballistas, spike barriers, ladders, traps, and barricades. Keeps have persistent structure states within a session, moving from Pristine through Cracked, Damaged, Broken, and Destroyed. A hammer system handles repairs and upgrades directly on deployed assets as control points shift. When a wall starts cracking, someone needs to be running materials and hammering it back.

Fight

Combat is action-based. You swing to attack, hold to block, and run your class abilities off a classic quickbar. A Warrior going berserk plays nothing like a Rogue slipping into stealth or a Mage holding position to cast. The class identity is built into how you physically play it.

Battle across modes built for every kind of fight: King of the Hill, Capture the Flag, and Horde Survival. Drop into a fast 9-player skirmish that wraps in about 20 minutes, or commit to an epic siege of 30+ players that can rage for up to two hours.

Game Modes

King of the Hill

Hold the territory. Your gather-craft-build loop runs in parallel with the fight to keep it. The team that works together wins it.

Capture the Flag

Speed and coordination. The siege loop makes running the flag meaningfully harder when the enemy has had time to prepare.

Horde Survival

Three factions, one shared enemy. Coordinate across faction lines or fall together. Playable solo or with others.

PvP modes support up to 30+ players per session. Matchmaking keeps servers populated so you never drop into an empty game.

Feature Highlights

- Three factions with distinct lore, bonuses, stats, and faction-tied class abilities

- Action combat with class ability quickbars: Warrior, Mage, Rogue (more planned)

- Gather wood, stone, and iron from contested resource nodes across the battleground

- Crafting pipeline: siege weapons, consumables, tools, and defensive structures

- Breakable and repairable keeps with persistent structure states per session

- Deployable siege tools: catapults, battering rams, ballistas, spike barriers, ladders

- King of the Hill, Capture the Flag, and Horde Survival modes

- Realm Rank progression: unlock armor sets, equipment, and special abilities as you play

- Session-based: no open world, no daily grind, no pay-to-win

A Work In Progress

The Last Banner is in pre-alpha, built by two people out of Denver, Colorado. What you've read above is our vision, where we're headed and what we're building toward. Features will evolve as we test, learn, and shape the game around what's actually fun. We have a server up and a small community already forming. If you want in on the ground floor, we're accepting applications for early alpha testers.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Built by a two-person studio, The Last Banner deploys AI tools as supplements only. All art and code are curated, hand crafted and built by us. We strive to create the best game possible with the best tools of the modern day.