Greedfall: The Dying World Review

Greedfall was an interesting and fairly distinctive RPG that, whilst it had its issues, was able to capture my imagination. From the direction of the cutscenes, through the interesting companion characters, to the surprisingly dark and well thought out world, it gripped me from the very beginning. Greedfall: The Dying World is a prequel set three years before the first game. This time, rather than playing as one of the colonisers, you’re playing as natives of the island of Teer Fradee who, through the game’s opening act, is taken by said colonisers back to the old world.

It begins on Teer Fradee, with your character “Rootless,” or “Vriden Gerr” depending which language you’re speaking, undertaking a rite of passage to become a sage. A sage is a wise person who helps the tribe and its members by, apparently, investigating issues that affect the tribe. To become a sage, you’re given a task to discover why the village is getting sick. So begins the biggest problem I have with this game: it’s quite predictable.

The first game was often surprising, taking quests in a direction that was novel. Here, you are the native tribe on an island that’s being colonised, so you already know what the root to every newfound problem, I don’t even need to tell you what was making the natives sick. From the perspective of the colonisers, you had more agency, you had a cast of characters from your own side so who exactly was responsible for things on your side was an interesting mystery. From the native’s side, the answer is always just “It’s them.” The reveals of the details go from surprise to just “Well of course it is. They’re the bad guys.”

After this six hour opening, where you find out something you already knew the moment the question was asked, you find yourself captured and transported to the mainland. Thankfully the game picks up pace at this point, but it’s still another hour or two until you get proper open world status. Pacing is an issue throughout the game; whenever it feels like it’s speeding up, something else comes along to slow it down again. Finish the opening and get taken to the mainland? It’s a long trek through a sewer as you escape from prison.

Once you do get out of prison and find somewhere to go, you’re ambushed and are whisked away to another city where you’re immediately attacked and a companion character ends up in prison, pinning you down once again so you still don’t have access to the open world. Only after this is resolved are you finally given access to three more locations and free reign to go where you like. This took about ten hours for me. There’s Lord of the Rings prequels that move quicker.

The bigger issue is that the way things happen is sometimes… a bit absurd. Obvious moustache twirling villains leave an actual contract, signed by both parties, explaining not only the nefarious scheme they’ve concocted, but also include their motivations in said contract for doing so. Imagine your contract with someone fitting a window including “So I can look out upon the pretty birds and feel the sun upon my face during the two weeks of the British summer.”

Now this is all feeling quite negative so far. Greedfall gets off to a rough start, and admittedly even has a rough everything else, but it does have bright spots. The overall worldbuilding is excellent and the companion characters are varied and interesting. I particularly like Ludwig the smuggler, but Safia and Sybille are up there with him.

Unfortunately outside of this I feel like the game isn’t really finished. Jumping from action RPG to a Dragon Age: Origins style tactical RPG style is…passable. It has its moments, but most abilities are very same-y. My character has three different abilities that deal damage in an area and cause “projection,” which just means it knocks people over. He also has two that deal single target damage and cause projection. That’s after switching my class because I was bored with the sword-focused class, almost all of its abilities caused armour damage which isn’t as useful as stopping eight enemies from attacking for a second or two mid-combat. The attacks all deal similar amounts of damage and usually cause the same statuses as well.

The bigger issue is that the tactical combat just isn’t all that exciting. I would prefer either the style of the previous game, which is Mass Effect style third person with orders for companions, or a full on turn based system. This is a mid-point that feels messy and oddly slow, as navigating the UI to give orders to all for characters is cumbersome on gamepad. Not to mention that characters like to run all the way across the battlefield to attack a different enemy than the one they were just fighting, wasting time and often health to do so, not to mention ruining the tactics you were relying on. Namely, the cunning tactic of “Don’t split up so we aren’t torn apart.” This particular issue is truly infuriating.

There are also bugs in combat, such as one that stops the camera from moving when you move the cursor so you can’t see what you’re doing properly. This happens at least once every single battle. Then there was the biggest breakdown I’ve experienced in a game for quite a while. First, my character, on its own, ran away 100 meters in combat. Then, my companions were “following me” about 30 feet in front of where I was, which made it difficult to start fights because my character was alone and immediately swamped by enemies. Then, they stopped following me entirely. After that, everyone, including my character, stopped auto-attacking completely, which caused me to have to aim every single basic attack for all four characters for fifteen minutes. It was miserable. I spent 90 minutes trying to figure this out by reloading, restarting, rebooting, leaving the area and returning, before giving up for the day. When I came back it was fixed and I haven’t been able to reproduce it since, but for a while there I was incandescent with rage.

There are just a lot of bug in this game generally, though no others that are as terrible as the above thankfully. I have seen placeholder names from the game’s code on guards, enemies respawn after I went around a corner, I’ve avoided conversations but character then behaved as if we had had that conversation, referencing things that would have been mentioned in it. I’ve released a beast from a cage, expecting it to fight the nearby enemies, only to stare at it whilst it stood completely still in exactly the way a giant freed lizard wouldn’t. I blew up a fence that was supposed to cause a distraction, a companion warned we should leave before guards investigate the noise, and then neither of these things happened. The list goes on and on.

As you can see, there are a lot of issues here that get in the way of the experience. You can overlook a lot of these issues, embrace them as a bit of charming jank, even, but the merely serviceable combat and the bugs that really do get in the way are going to really get on your nerves. It ruins the better parts of the experience, which is namely the writing and dialogue, but even that has its issues. Graphically, it also looks at least a generation out of date as well, but that’s much easier to forgive.