Summary
Game of Thrones: Kingsroadisout of early access, making it free-to-play across PC and mobile. However, judging by the reviews, the full release is suffering frommany of the same problems that players encountered before launch.
Over on Steam, the reviews are still mixed, with many of the most recent reviews being negative. Just as we saw with early access, many of the complaints revolve around the game’s monetisation, as the playerbase complains that, even on PC, Kingsroad feels like it’s intended for mobile, with the in-game economy to match.
“The game was fun in beta when they didn’t demand money for literally doing anything in the game,” reads one review. “£40 battlepass. £40 cosmetics […] every aspect that might be remotely enjoyable is monetised. Whoever owns the rights to GoT should be ashamed of selling out to mobile slop producers.”
Other reviews note that the gameplay itself is initially quite appealing, but then this too is brought down by the monetisation. “The combat’s acceptable, environments look quite nice, and there’s a little spark of something here that reminded me of old-school 360 RPGs,” says another player. “But then the real game shows up: ‘momentum’ gates, multiple unnecessary currencies, limited daily rewards unless you pay, loot locked behind timers, tiny inventory unless you cough up cash - just nonstop monetisation garbage. It’s like they made a decent-ish RPG and then smothered it in mobile game sludge.”
These complaints are nothing new, but developer Netmarblehad addressed some during early access. The devs said that they would work on giving players more to do when they’ve run out of RP, since activities can be quite limited as you wait for more. This was just another way in which the game very much felt like it was made for the mobile market, which certainly isn’t what Game of Thrones fans were looking for in a Westeros-themed open world RPG.
We’ll have to see if future updates address these complaints, but it seems like they’re part of the game’s foundations at this point. With this in mind, it might find its audience over on mobile, but it pulled in a decent Steam concurrent player count at launch too, with just over 10,000 fans playing at once.
