Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros May Have Finally Solved The Franchise's Biggest Problem
Will you be the one to sit atop the Iron Throne?
While there's simply no dethroning The Lord of the Rings in terms of its impact on the fantasy genre and pop culture at large, the last decade-and-a-half has solidified George R.R. Martin as a strong runner-up. The world he created with A Game of Thrones, the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, has transcended the page and become a sprawling television universe. Eight seasons of Game of Thrones have given way to spinoffs like House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and a film about Aegon’s Conquest is in the works, which means the Targaryen king himself is helping the franchise colonize new territory.
But for as successful as the world of Westeros has been on the small screen, that luck hasn’t transferred to a major video game hit. There have been many attempts, but they’ve mostly been lackluster action RPGs or low-stakes mobile games that just don’t befit the grand-scale conflict and political scheming of Martin’s universe. But there’s an upcoming release that’s challenging the franchise’s middling video game history, and based on our first look at it, it might be exactly what the series needs.
This year’s Gamescom event featured the first trailer for Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, an action-packed real-time strategy game developed and published by PlaySide Studios. The brief gameplay reveal opens on a shot of the foreboding Iron Throne to remind players what exactly they’ll be fighting for, then shows off what looks like a settlement-building element. Of course, the most exhilarating part of the reveal is the combat: players (the game has a single-player campaign and a multiplayer skirmish mode) will control the massive armies of the different Houses seen throughout the show (and even the Night King’s horde of White Walkers), using units like ground infantry, trebuchets, and dragons and recruited heroes such as Robb Stark and Jaime Lannister to defeat their enemies and slowly conquer Westeros.
A massive-scale RTS game feels like the perfect fit for Game of Thrones, as it allows players to immerse themselves in the seismic battles that make up the series, while also thinking about the political decision-making necessary to take and keep the Iron Throne. While it would be fun to play an intense sword-and-sorcery RPG or a hack-and-slash set within the franchise, Playside’s approach feels appropriate, and might be what the franchise needs to kickstart other games. Fifteen years after Martin’s creation made the jump from page-to-screen, fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might be on the cusp of finally getting the fantastic gaming experience they deserve.
