Game of Thrones Preview

Fans of HBO’s TV show might be happy to hear that Game of Thrones is coming to our consoles in June. Fans of good games might be happy to hear that this game is no tawdry cash-in based on the popularity of the show.

Paris-based Cyanide Studio has been working on the game for the past three years, starting before the show was even commissioned. In a nod to the show’s fans, the characters models for stalwarts of the show like Queen Cersei were subsequently built to match the actors and are now voiced by the TV actors themselves.

The Story

You’ll play not one but two separate RPG heroes, alternating between them to follow parallel storylines that will occasionally cross over. The author of the original A Song of Ice and Fire novels, George R. R. Martin, was consulted on every aspect of the story to the point where the team at Cyanide know where everyone in the series is going even for the novels yet to be published. Don’t worry if you love RPGs but have seen neither the show, nor the books. The introduction will provide plenty of context to newcomers.

The game is set some years after Robert Baratheon rebelled against his Targaryen king to take the throne – the same time period as the first novel and TV series. The demo I saw opened with our first hero, Mors Westford confronting a man who has allegedly abandoned the Night’s Watch, a military branch assigned to guard Westeros against the horrors that lay beyond the Wall.

Mors is a war veteran of Baratheon’s Rebellion and an old friend of King Baratheon’s Hand (chief advisor) Jon Arryn. For reasons not made known to us in the demo, he betrayed King Baratheon and was assigned to the Night Watch’s Rangers in lieu of execution. Mors is primarily a warrior but has a skin-changer ability that lets him take direct control over the body of his doggy companion to follow scent trails or ambush an unsuspecting guard through the power of QTE.

Our second protagonist is a man named Alester, son of Lord Raynald Sarwyck who served the family of the King’s wife, the Lannisters in some capacity. Where Mors focuses on combat skills, Alester has been spending time with the priests of R’hllor, learning to use powers like wildfire to set his sword ablaze.

While this is a fun power to wield, it’s more akin to napalm than magic flames. Get too close and you’ll set yourself on fire.

The Combat

From what I saw, combat in Game of Thrones is quite different from your typical action-RPG, veering more towards BioWare-style menus. The D-pad switches between locked targets and you can queue up to three attacks chosen from an “Action Pause” menu wheel. Bringing up this menu doesn’t pause the game, it just slows things down drastically. Spending ages peering at all your powers is fine but you will still get pierced by that slow-motion arrow if you don’t make a choice soon.

In the sections where Alester and Mors are together, you can switch between characters on the fly to make combat reasonably complex. As you would expect, certain attacks will apply conditions to your enemies, such as bleeding. If you choose your skills properly, you can have Alester hit someone hard enough to bleed while Mors follows up with a blow that targets open wounds, giving him a 2.5x damage bonus to bleeding opponents. You can stack up to three actions in the pause wheel so it’s a good way to encourage tactics and coordination between the heroes.

The Stats

Customising Mors starts with a choice of three different characters: Landed Knight, a defensive crowd-controlling build; Edge Knight, specialising in two-handed weapons; and Magnar, the fast-moving dual-wielder who can use axes and hammers. Alester’s option are: the Archer, focusing on ranged combat; the Sellsword, a mercenary class adept with most melee weapons; or the Water Dancer, an agile dual-wielding class specialising in swords and daggers.

Your basic character stats are fairly typical: strength, agility, luck, endurance and intelligence. With a large focus on story-telling and preserving the atmosphere of the franchise, nothing in the character build will actually affect your dialogue options. Instead, intelligence is used for bargaining and for increasing the skill points you get each time you level up.

What’s more interesting is the stance points – these are used for active and passive battle abilities, with groups like defense, domination and dexterity. During a battle you’ll choose actions relating to your battle stance like defensive ability Resistance, which requires a shield to increase your damage resistance, or domination ability Death From Above to raise a two-handed sword above your head and strike an opponent in the face.

The skill points are entirely separate to stances. Based on the weapons available to your class, you can use skill points to customise your characters further by making Mors into a dual-wielding Magnar who is very adept with hammers and cutting projectiles yet completely useless with axes, if you so wish.

Each character also has a set of optional strengths and weaknesses. Adding depth to your role-playing, you can choose to make Alester or Mors gifted in the “Art of Medicine” or turn him into a “Bruiser”, but each strength you choose must be balanced by a weakness, such as “Witless” or “Greyscale Disease“.

The Setting

Not only sticking true to the character designs, Cyanide Studios have faithfully rendered the environments of Westeros. As described in the novels, The Wall is a full 600 feet high, towering over the neighbouring Castle Black. There is no way any blue-eyed demons will get across it without some serious firepower behind them. The mullions and pillars adorning the Kings Landing throne room have been modelled on the show’s design, as has the Iron Throne itself.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you’ll just be following the events of the novels and the show. Mors and Alester will have their own entirely separate adventures, crossing paths with visiting other familiar areas like Riverspring. Sadly for fans of the desert-dwelling Dothraki, this adventure will remain inside Westeros.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Game of Thrones without sex and jiggly bits all over the place. Fear not, fans of pixellated breasts. I can confirm that there is at least one brothel filled with women wearing dresses slit open from armpit to ankle and revealing plenty of cleavage from the front.

While the aesthetic of Cyanide’s Game of Thrones doesn’t compare favourably to the incredible visuals of similarly-themed The Witcher 2, I find the gameplay and combat system very intriguing. Using Mors’ dog to spy on conversations between guards is a fun way to open up new dialogue options. The voice-acting is just as good as the show and character animations in cut-scenes and conversations are superbly filled with emotion. I can’t wait to play this game.

Game of Thrones will be out in Europe in June and is available for pre-order on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.