Did you know there have been numerous Game of Thrones video games? I don’t mean the mobile game HBO advertises before every episode of House of the Dragon or the middling Telltale game that ended on a cliffhanger and never got its planned second season before the studio went under. I mean, did you know that there have been a goodly number of Game of Thrones games going back to 2011, including a whole-ass action RPG that released just last year? Me neither.
I don’t understand how the Game of Thrones franchise has been so thoroughly squandered when it comes to making a competent video game. But after playing a demo for Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, I think there might finally be one worth remembering.
War for Westeros is a strategy RPG with an attractive premise: you get to command an army of your choice in a struggle to rule the Seven Kingdoms. It’s a power fantasy for players still mad about how HBO ended the series (i.e. me) and War for Westeros gives me the chance to put it right by essentially playing with high-powered dolls.
In the demo, you choose between the Lannister or the Stark houses—each with their own unique structures, hero units, and abilities—to fight over control of a map. Fight against a computer or real opponent to either dominate the map for a certain amount of time or simply annihilate your enemies a la the Reynes of Castamere. Gameplay will be familiar to anybody who’s spent time with Age of Empires or Starcraft. Workers build structures, structures passively generate resources—in this case gold and influence—and players use those resources to pay for advanced military units, buildings, and technology upgrades.
What delights me most as a Westeros Lore Nerd is that each faction (it seems like at launch there will be four but the demo I played only had two) has its own unique, canon-compliant way of generating resources and fielding units. The Starks, who were my chosen faction because The North Remembers, can dot the landscape with their weirwood trees or call upon packs of direwolves to fight. Once enough resources are accumulated, I can field hero units Robb Stark or his bastard brother Jon Snow, each with their own direwolves and special abilities. On the Lannister side, you generate resources with gold mines while Jamie Lannister and his father Tywin fight in the field.
The best thing about the promise of War for Westeros is that playing it is effectively writing fanfic at the point of a sword. I got such a thrill in commanding Robb Stark’s direwolf Greywind to tear the throat out of Tywin Lannister because, like I said, The North Motherfucking Remembers. It was neat to see, despite the fact there were only two factions to choose from, that the depth of those factions really spoke to the factional alliances each one has in the series. Not only can the Starks summon direwolves to fight, but go deep enough down the building upgrade trees and you can call upon wildlings and Night’s Watch brothers too. There’s good worldbuilding here, and I’m excited to see how deep that goes in the full version.
However, gameplay in this demo seems really shallow. It is a demo, to be sure, but I can see how it might be a bit too simple. There are only two resources to manage and it seems like resource nodes don’t deplete over time, meaning that at a certain point, resource collecting becomes trivial. The game does warn you that oversaturating your economy (which I guess means building too many gold and influence collectors) will diminish your earn rate, but it never depleted so much to be a problem for me. I always had the gold or influence I needed to do the thing I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Part of the tension in other RTS games like Age of Empires is that you’re forced to go far afield, potentially venturing into enemy territory, to keep the resources flowing. In War for Westeros, you can set collection and forget it, and that’s boring.
Hero units are also kind of boring. They come equipped with all these cool abilities but they seem so superfluous. I never had to use those abilities once in a fight because they’re so powerful, especially when supported by a decent-sized army, that their auto attack is enough to win the day. I want more tension in my RTS battles. I want to weigh the risk of gathering more resources to build my army faster against potentially extending myself too far, and too unprotected, from my base. I want more resources to juggle; only two makes things too far too easy.
For a simple demo, however, I’m hooked. Westeros is such a rich world, and a game that gives you power over that world is like catnip to me, a nerd.
