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.
“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.”
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-war-for-westeros-developers-are-planning-for-a-flood-of-game-of-thrones-fans-who-have-never-played-an-rts
