War for Westeros is a real-time strategy game for real-time strategy enthusiasts, but the developers at PlaySide know they’re going to get inundated with Game of Thrones fans who have never played an RTS before when the game comes out — so they’re planning accordingly.
The Game of Thrones franchise is, as everyone knows, incredibly popular, and that popularity is maintained by spinoff HBO shows such as House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms years after Game of Thrones itself came to an end. And so, War for Westeros will surely find itself beset by players from two camps: RTS fans who are looking for their next strategy hit, and Game of Thrones fans who fancy playing a game set in Westeros.
RTS games, though, can be pretty complex and hard to get into. RTS developers have for years tried to solve this problem with various systems and tutorials. War for Westeros will, obviously, have tutorials to help newcomers learn its systems, but PlaySide has built approachability into the very design of the game to help.
Game of Thrones: War for Westeros Screenshots
“That’s what we want!” game director Ryan McMahon told me in an interview at gamescom, when I asked if the studio was prepared for the flood or RTS-shy Game of Thrones fans to descend upon War for Westeros.
“Approachable is the key word,” he continued. “So you’ve got accessibility and approachability. We kind of look at it more through the approachability lens. It’s not trying to dumb down what makes a good RTS, but more so how we onboard players to that experience.”
So, expect a “very robust” tutorial at launch to onboard new players to skirmish mode and teach players its various systems through campaign mode. But most interesting to me is that War for Westeros’s worker units do not require any high level micro mastery. In many RTS games, you need to assign workers to farm resources and construct buildings, then, once they’re done, you need to give them another job to do. And another. And another. In short, workers require constant attention.
War for Westeros, however, employs a ‘set and forget’ system where buildings will farm resources on their own once they’re build, leaving you free to focus on other things, like killing super powerful dragons.
“At the base top level of the game, there’s no high level micro mastery required of your workers or your builders,” McMahon explained. “All they need to do is build a building and it’s ‘set and forget.’ You don’t have to assign workers to buildings to farm resources. The buildings will farm the resources on their own once they’re built. So that reduces a lot of macro or mental overload of what you’re trying to think about while you play the game, and allows you to focus more on the units you’re building, the heroes you’re fielding, what type of buildings you’re placing, and creating the moments that you want to see.”
Meanwhile, the AI is tuned to give players the breathing room to learn how War for Westeros works through single-player in the hope that they’ll come away considering giving multiplayer a chance. “If they ever want to dip their toes into multiplayer or play with their friends, there’s enough layers of complexity that they’ve been onboarded to over time without having to master straight away to enjoy a game,” McMahon said.
Certainly, War for Westeros will have plenty that is familiar for Game of Thrones fans. It has iconic characters complete with their likenesses from the HBO show — although soundalike voice actors were employed for dialogue (“Obviously choosing the actual actors would be a very expensive endeavor and also some of them aren’t necessarily available to work with us on the timelines that we have”). Jon Snow, with his likeness approved by actor Kit Harington, is just one example. At gamescom, PlaySide announced Gregor ‘The Mountain’ Clegane and Arya Stark. The Mountain can be recruited by House Lannister, “utilising his massive size and strength to shock battlelines and strike fear into the hearts of those who stand against him.” Arya, on the other hand, “is a master assassin for House Stark, trained under the Faceless Men of the House of Black and White.”
I had suspected that Jon Snow would be the most popular pick in playtests because, well, it’s Jon Snow. But according to McMahon, as the game has evolved and staff have got to grips with it, other famous characters have risen to the top of the popularity tree — and with good reason.
“Tywin [Lannister] and Robb [Stark] are actually the most popular,” McMahon revealed. “The cavalry definitely helps so they can get around the map really quickly. But they have a strong kit in how they buff units around them as commanders, which helps reinforce the army rather than being individual strength.
“But it changes a lot. We do weekly play tests every Friday afternoon after lunch, we just play the game for the rest of the day. And at the end of every milestone we do an internal tournament as well where we basically play whatever the game is currently at, and we have a bracket system and whoever wins gets the trophy and that gets passed around desk to desk based on who won the last tournament.
“So we get a lot of data from that because we’ve got data in the game that we’re tracking and we can see win rates from different factions. We can see how many heroes get spawned. We get a heat map of where people build buildings on the map that informs our level design and informs our faction balance and informs how we basically gear up heroes in different factions against each other.”
Currently, players are picking heroes based on what they believe will be most effective on the battlefield as opposed to going with their heart and their favorite character. That makes a lot of sense if you’re running internal tournaments.
“As the game gets more mature, it sort of moved that way,” McMahon said. “For a while it was Jon [Snow] and Jaime [Lannister] because they were very strong heroes. But now if we put more emphasis on the units being important, because the game needs to be grounded. You can’t just have one hero fighting off hundreds of people. Commanders start to become more important because they’re not that strong on their own, but they’re also reinforcing the units they’re paired with.”
I suspect when War for Westeros comes out on PC next year, Jon Snow might rise to the top once again.
Wesley Yin-Poole
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. He’s obsessed with fighting games, sports games and first-person shooters. His favourite game of all time is Street Fighter 2.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.