Game of Thrones - Preview, Interview

Eurogamer has a preview of Game of Thrones that, surprisingly for such an article, offers some genuine insight into the game. The author notes the production values are not on par with the likes of The Witcher 2 or Skyrim and the linear nature will be disappointing to some, though the combat looks solid:

Such linearity will likely come as a disappointment to those who wanted to explore Westeros, but at least its backbone, the RPG combat, looks dependable enough, and comes with pleasantly aged elements. Alester and Mors are the two stock characters, though both can be set on different ability paths at the outset. You can pick classes - the defensive Landed Knight or the more aggressive Hedge Knight for Mors, for example - as well as assign a selection of passive and active skills.

And in a somewhat charming nod to role-playing games that are acted out via paper and pencil rather than a controller, it's possible to select character traits. You can choose whether to be a born leader or a master of poisons, but each strength must be balanced out with a weakness - being witless, perhaps, or being afflicted with greyscale, the imagined affliction that can slowly turn skin to stone.

Combat itself is slightly more modern, though it still bears a staunchly traditional heart. Commands can be stacked up in an Active Pause menu, while targets can be selected on the fly with the d-pad - so while the action plays out in real-time you're free to step back and tinker with the grander strategy. It's a system that's worked well enough before in BioWare's hands, and there's nothing to suggest it won't be as satisfying once embedded in Cyanide's own fantasy world.

Over at XBox360Achievements is an interview with Lead Designer, Sylvain Sechi and Project Manager and Art Director, Thomas Veauclin:

Was there anything that you had to invent specifically for the game or was everything you needed in George RR Martin's fiction?

SS: On a couple of very specific occasions – I don't want to spoil it – we were doing some very special stuff with magic, but how to approach these kinds of characters that are very basically described in the books, we'd ask a lot of questions to make sure they were right. So, we'd talk about these kind of things with Martin, discuss it at length and then make certain decisions to flesh out these characters. What's good is that I think he also now sees that as definitive, so he will add it to the future books to ensure that the universe remains coherent between the books and the game. There are no big things, but I'd say the red priests were the biggest thing, because there aren't loads of details on the red priests until book five, which at the time he hadn't even written yet. He gave us loads of details about them.