What we want from Telltale's Game of Thrones

Telltale’s Game of Thrones is coming. The developer that brought adventure games back into the mainstream with its Walking Dead series, Back to The Future, and The Wolf Among Us, is developing another series based on the HBO show, which is in turn based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. It’s hot brand right now, with a built in and very loyal fanbase, PC Gamer staff included. Here’s what we’d like to see Telltale do with it.

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Even if Telltale can secure all of the actors from Game of Thrones—both voices and likenesses—focusing on characters we know well from the HBO show would be a mistake. Those characters are already on a set path, their past actions accounted for and future schedule busy with shocking death scenes. Trying to work around their existing timelines would be awkward and unnecessary. It’ll be great to see them pop up in cameos, but Westeros is a huge and brilliantly imagined place. There are an infinite amount of stories that can be told, with new characters, new locations, and new events that expand that world. That’s the strategy that worked with The Walking Dead, and we think that’s the correct strategy here.

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We want new characters, and for a few of them to be playable. One of the great things about Game of Thrones is that it shifts between the perspectives of different characters. You may have a favorite, but the show doesn't have a protagonist in the traditional sense. We want Telltale to similarly explore Westeros from different perspectives. This not only allows for much-welcomed variety in mood and scenery, it also demands that you constantly reevaluate your opinion on what’s happening in the big picture, which is one of the franchise’s defining characteristics. The developer has done this before with 400 Days, the Walking Dead DLC that uses shifting perspectives to tell its story. Telltale says that the Game of Thrones series is a multi-year, multi-season commitment, and that's a promising sign that we'll get what we're looking for.

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Westeros is not only but in terms of scale. The history and mythologies that Martin created for it are also extremely detailed—and only rarely explored in the show. In fact, as fans of the books know, one element that’s lost in the televised adaptation is how the rich history of families, regions, and religions affect the politics of the era. It will be great if part of Telltale’s games took place before the show’s events, showing us important moments in Westerosi history as they’re happening. Seeing the Battle of the Trident would be great, for example.

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The Walking Dead proves that games can be engrossing and financially viable with very little of what we consider traditional, action-oriented gameplay. It’s great despite its clumsy and unnecessary attempts at shooting, so we’d like to see Telltale shed itself of these vestigial mechanics altogether. What it’s really good at is making choose your own adventure stories, and the “action” there is making often terrible choices, at times under time constraints. Counterintuitively, shooting only slows down The Walking Dead, so it’d be nice if Telltale didn’t bother building sword combat controls, archery, and so on into Game of Thrones.

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One way in which the HBO show falls short of the books is its scale. Epic battles with legions of soldier, gigantic monuments, and huge, strange creatures that are described beautifully in the books, are all downsized to accommodate the television show—it's an impressive HBO production, but one that is still bound by reality and budget. Even when the show does depict one of these events, it doesn't seem nearly as epic as Martin’s descriptions. Recreating some of these locations, creatures, and events with 3D models will be significantly less expensive, and hopefully Telltale takes that opportunity to show us what HBO can’t. It’ll be even better if they could do it with a ...

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This one might be a tall order, but it’d be nice. We’re not asking for the best that technology has to offer, or even fixated on polygon counts. Still, that Telltale engine is starting to show its age. It seems a little dated even with The Walking Dead’s simplistic, cartoonish visual style. Telltale can’t use it forever, and Game of Thrones' popularity could potentially earn Telltale a lot of new eyeballs. It should use the opportunity to show that it is making “next-generation” games.

Photo: HBO/Time Warner