Videogame of Thrones

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Thad
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Videogame of Thrones

Postby Thad » Wed Sep 03, 2014 6:44 pm

Image

So it appears that the Telltale game has picked a minor House very briefly mentioned in the latest book, which makes good sense; a game set in-universe but focusing on the fringes of the conflict is the best way to handle a story like this. (See also: The Walking Dead. Obviously.)

Of course, GoT being GoT, io9 has ramped up a whole lot more probably-bullshit speculation. (Warning: article contains spoilers up through the most recent book; lots of important shit that hasn't happened on the TV show yet.)

I can totally understand how they'd want to see more of the North story from the latest book filled in, given the vague unreliable-narrator cliffhanger that story ended on, but let's be real: that shit is fucking-well not going to get resolved in a licensed video game.

Pretending is fun, though.

Still, the prospect of fleshing out a little-known Northern House seems like a lot of fun. I really enjoyed Walking Dead (season 1; haven't played season 2) and Wolf Among Us and am onboard for this.

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Re: Videogame of Thrones

Postby Thad » Sat Apr 11, 2015 10:04 pm

Picked it up in the "free first episode/25% off season pass" Telltale deal Amazon's got going on right now. It's the first Telltale game I'm playing on a tablet instead of a desktop. As you might expect, the touchscreen is a pretty natural fit, though playing on a 10" tablet cramps my neck when I hold it in my lap and cramps my thumb when I hold it in my hands, so I'm probably going to have to end up playing it at a desk or table anyway. Still and all, movement seems pretty natural so far, if less precise than with WASD; the actual point-and-click stuff, as you would expect, translates really well. (Though I died twice on an early QTE before figuring out that concentric circles meant "tap repeatedly"; needs better tooltips.)

It looks like it's got wider device support than the other Telltale games; Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead both say they're incompatible with both my phone and my tablet. (Is there any way of overriding that shit and trying to install them anyway, like on a real computer? Or is this just one more thing we're going to have to put up with in this new world of app stores protecting us from ourselves?)

It also took three fucking tries to install the game, and for some reason it re-downloaded the damn 1GB game every time. Which probably belongs in Unforgivable Sins of UI Design.

It mostly runs pretty smoothly on my tablet, though it got choppy during the opening credits.

So far it...definitely feels like a Telltale game set in the Game of Thrones universe. Bunch of no-win choices and dead motherfuckers. They seem to have a pretty good budget behind it, what with using cast members from the show and their likenesses, and reproducing the opening credits sequence in-engine.

(I'm kind of curious if it's possible to transfer save files from a desktop to a tablet. Telltale doesn't appear to have a supported way of doing this, but you can copy your save from a PC to a Mac or vice-versa with just a simple filecopy; I wouldn't be surprised if you could do the same between a PC and an Android device. Though you might need root; I know that, for example, World of Goo will read a save file copied from the desktop version, but you have to be able to write to the World of Goo program directory, which requires root.

This is all just curiosity for curiosity's sake, though. While I'd be interested in importing my Windows save from The Walking Dead Season 1 into Season 2, Amazon's telling me Walking Dead won't run on my tablet anyway. Again, anybody know if there's an override so I can just install it on my damn tablet and try to run it anyway? I've seen some tutorials on how to spoof another device's ID using MarketEnabler or by manually editing the build.prop file, but none of them are recent and I suspect they may not work anymore.)

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Re: Videogame of Thrones

Postby Thad » Sun May 03, 2015 12:54 am

You know, I was playing the game, and it occurred to me, you know, being able to get the cast from the TV series is kind of a big deal.

It's easy to forget, but remember, say, the TMNT arcade games? Handful of voiced dialogue, and they didn't even try to make it sound like the TV VA's.

It was a big deal when X-Men: CotA got the cast from the cartoon to do the voices. And that was just a fighting game. Drill claw! Tornado claw!

And then a few years later there was that mediocre Beast Wars fighting game, which had maybe 2/3 of the cast from the TV show.

And today, a company as niche as Telltale can get the cast of one of the biggest-budget series on TV, including Emmy Award winner Peter Dinklage (and including likeness rights), and make a licensed game that is not a hastily-assembled cash-in, but which really captures the feel of the world.

There's a lot of cynicism about the industry and the way it's going these days. But man, there's sure a lot to love, too.

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Re: Videogame of Thrones

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 09, 2015 10:36 am

Okay, yes, I'm gonna be that guy:

How the fuck is the timeline on this thing supposed to work?

It quite clearly takes place between the ending of season 3 and the beginning of season 4 (because the game begins with the Red Wedding and they're still planning for Joffrey's wedding as of episode 3, which is as far as I've gotten at this point), but then Gared goes North to the Wall, where he trains under conditions pretty similar to when Jon headed up there at the beginning of the series, under apparently low stakes with nobody saying anything about a Wildling army being days away from invading.

I mean, it's obvious what's actually happening here is simply that content is dictating story -- they wanted to use the Wall, Jon Snow, and the Night's Watch, ergo they put all that shit in there and continuity was an afterthought --, but...it just seems like they could have still had all that shit in there AND made it fit the timeline with only minor modifications. Like, a few lines of dialogue suggesting that your class of recruits is essentially a small group of stragglers at a time when the Watch desperately needs a lot more than that, just more of a general sense of urgency that the shit is about to hit the fan.

Then again, I guess season 4 WAS largely spent dragging out the impending Wildling attack, and even gave Jon a chance to take a trip to go fight Owen from Torchwood and almost run into Bran. Maybe this is just everybody taking their sweet damn time.

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