Westeros

First, a disclosure: it has been a very long time since I seriously played this particular kind of real-time strategy game. The last one I spent much time with was Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, back in 1995. I never moved on to StarCraft, Total Annihilation, Command & Conquer and the rest. Some Total War, yes, but that’s a different beast in a lot of ways. So, with that out of the way, and the recognition that it means I’m not really in a position to tell experienced RTS players whether Game of Thrones: War for Westeros is doing something revolutionary or even exceptional for the genre. But I can give my near-neophyte impressions, and also share how well the game captures the feel of Game of Thrones (and ASoIaF) in its tactical gameplay.

The verdict? Quite impressed!

The build we had access to was an early skirmish demo, limited to one-versus-one matches on two maps, Ashemark and Greywater Watch, with House Stark and House Lannister as the playable factions. There is a larger strategic campaign still to come, as well as two more factions (Targaryen and the White Walkers), so this is only one slice of the game with some bugs and balance issues still being worked on. Within that slice, however, PlaySide has found ways to display how they’ve attempted to bring the flavor of the various factions of Game of Thrones and interpret them in an RTS context.

At the basic level, anyone familiar with old-fashioned base-building RTS games will recognize the structure immediately. You begin with workers, send them out to establish an economy by building structures to harvest resources, put up buildings to produce units or allow research, research upgrades, expand your available units and gradually build an army. There are three principal resources featured in the skirmish game: gold, influence and supply. Gold funds most of what you do. Supply determines how many units you can field and is increased by building dwellings. Influence is another important resource tied partly to fixed points on the map, where the Starks can establish weirwood shrines and the Lannisters lion statues which can then be used to purchase more advanced units (the Lannisters also get a mechanism to exchange it for gold, or vice versa).

Gold itself comes from Lannister mines or Stark windmills. You can establish mining operations more generally, but certain locations contain richer deposits and are therefore much more valuable. Neutral outposts and territories also give you reasons to expand beyond the immediate area around your base. There are hostile camps scattered around the maps as well, occupied in the matches I played by groups such as the Stone Crows or Bolton soldiers. Defeating them gives a gold reward (and also gave me an easy way to test combat out without worrying too much about the bots I was playing against).

The real flavor begins with what the two factions do with this familiar framework, however—it’s not just different building and unit designs, but some very specific faction-specific mechanics that encourage different strategies and playstyles.

The Lannisters revolve very heavily around money, and their special multi-level unlock is called Debt. Once the appropriate upgrade is unlocked, they can continue spending after their gold reaches zero, effectively extending themselves a line of credit. Further upgrades allow them to go deeper into debt. Spending while in the red comes at a cost, because the prices of units and structures go up a bit, but it gives the Lannister player the ability to produce something immediately rather than wait for the economy to catch up. Even with my limited RTS background, the possibilities are obvious since gold is a pretty key resource and being able to surge it to quickly buy up research upgardes or set more units into production could be key to saving the day (or winning it!).

That carries into the rest of their development tree. They can trade gold and influence for one another, hire outside forces through sellsword contracts (like the Stone Crows, the Golden Company and the Knights of Summer), and eventually unlock especially powerful units. The Kingsguard appear as one of their elite units, , represented, appropriately, by seven men in the unit, and only one Kingsguard unit can exist at a time in keeping with the spirit of the Sworn Brotherhood. They can even eventually recruit pyromancers armed with wildfire who show a decided over-eagerness to get things burning…

The Starks are a bit different. At a certain point, after upgrading their stronghold, they can build the Nightfort or a freefolk encampment. That choice opens different units and branches of development—the Night’s Watch upgrades field workers into builders, provides new heavy cavalry equipped with torches, and stout heavy infantry; the free folk allows for swift raiders and hunters, and eventually unlocks giants and mammoths—and importantly the two options are mutually exclusive for much of the game. The last major target for research is the Northern Alliance, which unlocks the ability to draw on both the Night’s Watch and the free folk at the same time.

I suspect there’s a lot of depth in this game that I haven’t even been able to puzzle out, but which a more experienced player will latch on to immediately. For example, if the Lannister scout (who can be temporarily cloaked, and even launch a backstab type of attack; the Stark scout is mounted, swifter, and has extended vision) sniffs out that their opponent has decided to recruit the Night’s Watch, with their heavy cavalry unit and stout infantry, they could invest more in their own anti-cavalry units.

The heroes are another thing that make this game pretty distinct, and give it a lot of that Game of Thrones flavor thanks to the characters chosen and their voice lines. As in other games of this type (including the spiritual ancestor, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth and its sequel), the heroes gain both potency and abilities as they level up, and function as more than simply unusually powerful units but instead can really change the outcome of fights with not just their presence but their active abilities.

In this demo, the Starks have Robb Stark and Jon Snow (plus two more; see below!), while the Lannisters have just Jaime and Tywin. They’ve just revealed in a new trailer two more faction heroes: Gregor Clegane for the Lannisters, and Arya for the Starks.

Robb has a pretty cool ambush mechanic that lets him designate an area in which enemies can be caught at a disadvantage, which is an obvious way of translating the Young Wolf’s reputation as a battlefield commander into gameplay. Eventually he’ll unlock further actives, such as a powerful charge, and finally his top active, an ability to mark a particular target for “execution”, greatly increasing the odds that they’ll be killed. Jon is much more of a rallying figure, strengthening and stiffening the troops around him, while also wielding Longclaw with a deadly temporary boost. Jaime has more of a duelist’s character, with extremely strong offensive abilities and the capacity to force an enemy hero or unit into a one versus one duel. Tywin is the commander of the four. His upper-level abilities are concerned more with strengthening the army around him, most memorably with abilty called The Rains of Castamere. He plants a banner that provides substantial benefits to nearby troops, but in an interesting and unexpected quirk (though maybe others will have seen this sort of thng before) the banner is itself a potential target, so you could try to destroy it to end its effects prematurely.

I mentioned two more heroes for the Starks: if you have Robb or Jon on the field, you can also “recruit” Grey Wind and Ghost. Wolves are already part of the Stark roster as fast attack units—this is one of those things where you just have to roll with the needs of the RTS! — and the direwolves give the faction another immediately recognizable piece of Stark identity. As heroes, they too level up just as the other heroes do,  unlocking their own sets of useful abilities like a pounce attack that knocks down units, or a howl that gives opponents negative effects.

The visual design of the game is, personally, an impeccable effort to bring to the screen the characters and troops seen in Game of Thrones. The music and sound design, too, similarly takes its cues from the show without, as far as I can tell, heavily leaning on samples taken straight from the series. Graphically, I think it looks very good for this kind of game, just from glancing at some other recent RTS games, with nice environmental designs distinguishing the westerlands from the Neck and physics for things like collapsing buildngs as they’re destroyed. Obviously, an RTS can’t give every soldier the individuality or level of detail expected in a character-focused action game, particularly once large armies begin fighting, but the overall presentation is strong. Unlike Warcraft long ago, where one unit was depicted by one character on the screen, here a single unit is depicted as a small group, so larger clashes can have a hundred or more figures on screen. When I threw five or six units at a single neutral camp, the result was understandably chaotic and it could be difficult to tell exactly who was hitting what when zoomed out. In more conventional engagements, with formations meeting one another rather than simply mobbing one target, the action was much easier to read.

Speaking of combat, it uses the very familiar rock-paper-scissors approach where certain types will “beat” others all things being equal, but be beaten by others still. Cavalry, infantry, and ranged units each have situations in which they are more or less effective. A properly timed cavalry charge can smash through a formation of archers (literally scattering them as they’re knocked down, which is a nice touch), but come to a halt against a wall of spearmen is one particularly clear example. There’s a formation feature that has units that are grouped together attempt to sort themselves in an optimal position—the anti-cavalry units in front, archers to the rear, etc.—which is something you can take off, but I did not experiment with that.

Some advanced units also have special abilities, like the hero units. The Knights of Summer, for example, are knights of the Reach (their armor very clearly based on that of Loras Tyrell and the other Tyrell knights in the 2nd season) that can be hired with a contract and can launch a particularly powerful charge as their active ability. I did worry about the amount of micro-management one might have to have to activate these abilities at optimal times, especially in larger battles, but unless I’m mistaken it seemed that at least on some occasions units would activate them on their own. But, I admit my inexperience also means I may have managed to trigger them when I was flailing around mashing buttons! Heroes are important enough that manually controlling their abilities feels much more natural, and they are easily selectable with assigned hotkeys and icons on the screen that show you their current health status.

It’s not all just production buildings and research buildings. Another wrinkle to the game is that it has defensive towers—archery towers that attack enemies in range—that can be placed and then connected by dragging out wall sections, making it easy to shape a defensive perimeter rather than placing every wall segment individually. Although…  there can be issues of creating walls that can’t be closed, leaving gaps, at least in the present build. Workers can collaborate on buildings to speed them up, and they can also be garrisoned in certain structures to accelerate research or production. The latter gives workers continued utility beyond simply putting buildings on the map.

There are some rough edges.  Pathfinding occasionally became confused, particularly when several units were trying to move around a battle field and got in one another’s way. Nothing I encountered was catastrophic, but it was noticeable enough that I’m not surprised that the devs indicated in chats that it was something they were continuing to optimize and improve.

The camera was probably my biggest issue. The maximum zoom-out feels very tight, and others in the Discord for the preview echoed this. I repeatedly found myself trying to pull farther back to get a better sense of the battlefield and hitting the limit. I have no idea whether that is a deliberate design choice (notably, some gameplay videos I watched of BfME 2 had the player mention that they wished that game, too, allowed them to zoom out just a bit more) or whether there are performance considerations involved. Either way, I would like more room, if for no better reason to not be caught quite so flatfooted when reinforcements arrive from the enemy side. Then again, maybe that’s the reason…

As for difficulty, I spent most of my time against the easy AI while I learned how everything worked. For me, much of the challenge was simply learning the ropes, in particular moving around the map quickly and efficiently as I juggled building, troop movements, fights, etc.

Of course, the big question for many will be whether the strategic layer of the game will capture the feeling of Game of Thrones  as well as the tactical side does. We’ve had a glimpse of what seems to be the strategic map in teasers, but the demo doesn’t let us know how the tactical and strategic levels will combine. Will there be diplomacy? Assassinations? Sabotage? Betrayals? We’ll have to wait and find out! And just a look at the trailers show that there’s some decidedly flavorful factions yet to be shown in detail, in Daenerys Targaryen’s forces (with prominence given to Drogon burninating his way across the battlefield) and the Night King and his wights.

For now, I’d describe War for Westeros as looking very promising, just based on this narrow slice of it. It doesn’t feel like Game of Thrones has simply been pasted onto a generic RTS, but some real thought has been given into how to bring the setting into the game and help it define how it works. I’m eager to see more of the game. A beta test has been announced for a future date, and interested gamers should sign up for PlaySide’s newsletter so they know how to get into it.

Game of Thrones: War for Westeros will be launched for PC on Steam in early 2027.

Posted at 19:58 CET by Elio
Tags: War for Westeros, RTS, PlaySide, Licensed Games, Game of Thrones Articles | PermaLink