If you’re like me, you probably never heard much about GreedFall up until the final weeks before release. Indeed, advertising for GreedFall seemed almost non-existent for the longest time, but the more I learned about it the more it intrigued me.

RPGs are sparse these days, especially ones that deliver that classic Bioware experience. So suffice it to say once GreedFall got on my radar, it firmly stayed there. That’s not to say I wasn’t cautiously optimistic and viewing the game from afar with some trepedation.


The last game I played from Spiders’ studio was the painfully mediocre The Technomancer. When I first saw the trailers for Technomancer I thought the combat looked fun, and since it came out around this time a few years back one of my friends got it for me as a birthday gift.

While I was genuinely excited to try it out, the game bugged out on me and a button prompt wouldn’t appear to allow me to traverse past the early stage of the tutorial initiation sequence, which made me shelve the game for a good several months since reloading wouldn’t fix the issue.


Then as I picked the game up again after it had been patched a good bit, the combat seemed lackluster and lacking in variety, the setting was a drab and uninspired Mars colony in the same vein of Red Faction and ultimately I got bored of the game less than three hours in.

Understandably, this time I made sure to test the waters with GreedFall to avoid repeating the same mistake that I did with The Technomancer. Given that I not only actually managed to finish GreedFall but also wish to do other multiple playthroughs, that should be telling. So you may want to stick around as I share pros, cons and my overall opinions on why I think GreedFall is a game you should play, despite its very abundant and prominent warts.


Story & Setting



One of the best qualities of GreedFall is easily and unquestionably its story and the people and places within it. The worldbuilding is surprisingly in-depth to the point it’s Tolkein-esque and the characters and their dialogue are extremely well-written.


It also happens to be a very unique and refreshing fantasy setting. Most fantasy settings are based on the middle ages with chivalrous knights and dragons, but GreedFall’s fantasy setting draws heavy inspiration from 17th century colonialism. Though while the colonialism serves as the foundation of the setting, on top of it are a myriad of cultures, factions and individuals that give GreedFall’s world an unprecedented level of cultural variety and history.

We play as De Sardet, the daughter of Princess De Sardet who is sister to the Prince d’Orsay of the Congregation of Merchants, one of GreedFall’s several factions. The Congregation is a nation of merchant princes with with a strong emphasis on sea trade who serve as the most neutral nation on the continent of Gacane. They take most of their inspiration from Revolutionary era France and Britain, mostly France.


De Sardet is the newly-named Legate of the Congregation, an esteemed diplomat whose education and skills involve diplomacy and espionage. He/She is tasked with traveling to the newly discovered island of Teer Fradee with her cousin Constantin d’Orsay, who has been appointed as the new governor of their colony on the isle by his father the Prince.



There, De Sardet will serve as the chief diplomat and ambassador for the Congregation, as well as trying to find a cure for The Malichor, a devastating and fatal disease which turns blood into black bile and drives its victims insane through a slow and excruciatingly painful demise.


Other nations have staked claims on the island as well:



The Coin Guard is a mercenary guild whose men and women make up the bulk of all the other factions’ guards and soldiers.

Theleme is a nation of monotheistic zealots who seek to convert other nations to their religion. They’re mostly inspired by Britain and The Vatican.



The Bridge Alliance is a large coalition of small nations with a largely middle-eastern inspiration, who value scientific progress and knowledge.

The Nauts are a faction of sailors who own the manopoly on seafaring. All the other nations rely on them exclusively for voyages across the sea. They’re essentially pirates for hire who wear badass coats and tricorn hats.

The island of Teer Fradee also has an indigenous people who call themselves Yecht Fradi in their native language. The Yecht Fradi natives are basically druids in all but name, who take a very heavy inspiration from ancient Celtic, Scandanavian and Germanic cultures. Their language was created by the dev team with the help of a linguist, and was inspired b y various real dialects such as French, Celtic, Germanic and more.


We begin the game in the Malichor-ravaged Congregation port city of Serene, which serves as a one-off starting location to introduce us to all the other factions and teach us the basics of the game. Beyond Serene, the main playable areas of the game are located on the island of Teer Fradee.

Teer Fradee itself is an island of breathtaking vistas guarded by lumbering nature golem creatures, called ‘Nadaig’ by the natives. It’s split up into about twelve or so explorable zones with its own quests and dungeons. There are a surprising variety of locations from rocky seaside cliffs to redwood forests and bubbling, sulphurous bogs.


Along the way you’ll meet a diverse cast of companions from the Naut captain Vasco and his growly pirate accent, to the plucky and bookish Aphra. Each companion has their own motivations and backstory, and it is an utter joy to get to know them. In my first playthrough I spent the most time with my Master at Arms, Kurt, and the native Siora. Though I did also complete Vasco’s loyalty quests and he grew on me like a barnacle.



Gameplay



RPG Mechanics & Combat



GreedFall is a more hardcore role-playing-game experience akin to some of Bioware’s earlier titles like Knights of the Old Republic and the original Mass Effect. That is to say, it’s a brand new IP and a proof of concept that is fun for what it is, but still has a lot of warts that could use improving upon in future.


The combat is action-oriented, similar to games like The Witcher 3 or Fable 2. After character creation, you begin by choosing a starting class, which will determine the abilities and weapons you start with, as well as attributes and talents.

Warrior focuses on heavy armors and melee weapons as well as guns, where your role will be the classic tank tasked with getting up close to enemies and tend erizing them into ground beef with your sharp, metal implements of death.


Technical serves as your Rogue analogue, focusing on sneaking, agility, damage from behind, elemental traps and guns.

Magic is for mages of course, slinging spells from afar and controlling the battlefield with stasis magic and area-of-effect spells. Magic also ignores armor. Who do you call in to do the most damage? Da mages, obviously! (Pointy hats, robes and long beards for life, bitches!)


The combat is certainly fun and engaging at the start, but it grows repetitive quickly and lacks a lot of variety, at least in terms of magic, which seems almost like an after thought at times. The only types of spells you have are shadow based, which is interesting from a lore perspective but when you can only cast shadow missiles and stasis at the start and won’t be able to unlock a new spell until level 6, it gets old quite quickly.

The game does let you build your character however you like, and you can get extra skill points at Skill Altars by exploring Teer Fradee, making a two-handed paladin who can short-range teleport for example. But for all its branching paths, progression is frustratingly linear and unintuitive. In order to even be able to use a two-handed sword, you must have at least one attribute point in Agility and put six levels into one-handed blades to even unlock it.




Two-handed swords are also an entirely seperate catagory from two-handed axes and hammers, which require strength to use and require you to spend six points down the one-handed heavy weapons skill line to even unlock them. Eight points, if you didn’t choose the Warrior starting class. Attribute and talent points are drip-fed to you at 4-6 level intervals, so ultimately while you can play a ‘jack of all trades’ and the progression system is even designed to incentivize it, you’ll end up spreading yourself far too thin and the game will end up becoming almost unwinnable on the harder difficulties.

This is especially true since you need one Talent point in Science to even craft basic health potions, and you’ll need to spend Talent points on Craftsmanship to be able to upgrade weapons and armor (which does affect how they look too). While you can equip gear that can give you a point of these to make things easier on yourself, progression in GreedFall often feels like being drawn and quartered.


On a higher note, the game feature’s ‘memory cry stals, ’ which allow you to respec your character at any time you wish. So if you do spread your points too thin, you can use the crystal to get all your points back and rebuild your character to be more specialized or more of a purist.



Questing, Speech Checks & Player Agency



It’s so very easy for small developers to ruin the meat and potatoes of an RPG by cutting corners on quests. Thankfully, GreedFall does the exact opposite. Not once did I ever play through a quest that felt like I was just doing some lazy schmuck’s daily chores or asked to hunt 20 bears for their butts with the drop rate being a frustratingly idiotic 1 in 10. Every bloody bear has a butt! Stop padding out your stupid fetch quests by making me farm 80 bears to get 20 butts developers! But I digress.


Every quest in GreedFall can be completed in a plethora of ways. Let’s say you need to enter a faction-controlled location to steal some documents in order to uncover a dangerous plot. You can of course just kill all the guards and kick the door down, but you’ll lose reputation with the faction and they may become hostile to you on site.

You can alternatively sneak in through a side entrance, use Science and alchemy to blow out a weak wall with a bomb, lockpick your way through a door, disguise yourself as a member of that faction by wearing their torso armor, trick the guards into letting you by, bribe them, or even simply just convince them with a charisma check. Your companions aren’t completely useless either, as if one of your companions is part of the faction, you can ask them to help get you in. (Most of the time.)


Exploration & Traversal



Almost exactly a year ago now, I penned an article on why The Witcher 3 isn’t the highest standard in video games and how its hyperbolic praise hurts the gaming industry as a whole. The reason I bring this up is GreedFall’s exploration gameplay takes pages out of The Witcher 3's book by having each location’s map be littered with question mark ‘points of interest’ with mostly dead, empty space in between.


Fortunately unlike The Witcher 3, each zone on Teer Fradee isn’t stupidly massive to the point you’re traveling across 13 miles of empty fields, and each point of interest serves to help you overall instead of just serving as a temporary buff or monster nest. In GreedFall any point of interest that isn’t a village or dungeon will be a camp or skill altar. Camps serve as fast travel points where you can sleep to change the time of day, craft upgrades for weapons and armor or potions, and manage your companions. Skill altars are a guarenteed skill point you can spend immediately, or save up for skills that require more than one point to unlock.

If you don’t use fast travel, you’ll find ores for crafting and plants for potions and bombs scattered abundantly around the map, as well as animals which have alchemical bases and leather for crafting as well. Fast traveling between zones, however, takes you to the Camp in the Woods, a space where you can manage your companions, do some crafting and visit a merchant while the next area loads. The only differences between this and camps in the world is this camp has a merchant, and you cannot travel (because you’re already traveling) or sleep to change the time of day (because traveling also passes time and changes time of day).


This is a great quality of life feature and any RPG that lets you fast travel should have something like this. That said, no matter how pretty the world is, exploration of it is wholly unrewarding. I would often travel to one of the points of interest and find what I assumed was a dungeon.



I’d enter to find a cave that simply just went in a circle and had nothing inside at all but enemies to fight. In a welcome surprise though, I’d eventually pick up a quest that would take me to that very cave, whereupon I would actually have a reason to be there and it would have things to do. So at the least it can be said that it’s good Spiders has given a purpose to every single location, even if it feels unrewarding and disparaging to stumble across it through exploration.


Presentation



GreedFall may be pretty, but it has its warts. Many, many warts. Facial animations are stilted and unsettling at times, particularly in regard to the lip syncing.


Some building interiors are blatantly copy pasted, such as each of the Governers’ palaces being exactly the same in layout on the interior, aside from a few color swaps and some pillows scattered about instead of wooden chairs.

Sometimes I’d come across Teer Fradee’s version of a turkey that would be stuck in a T pose and have no A.I. or collision.


While playing as the female De Sardet a very noticable amount of NPCs refered to her by male pronouns such as ‘he,’ ‘him,’ ‘his,’ ‘sir,’ ‘Sire,’ and so forth. Several names and words would be mispelled in the subtitles and quest log.



Quests sometimes wouldn’t progress naturally to the next stage and would show no quest marker, forcing me to find the NPC I needed through trial and error to continue.


Some scenes are utterly lacking in animations to the point it will fade to black for a character doing something as simple as drinking a potion. One early quest has a charlatan you must arrest. Despite clearly having nowhere to run, the scene fades to black and by the time you gain control again your character is lamenting about how he got away.

The game’s environments are full of invisible walls and insurmountable knee-high barriers. There are hundreds of occasions where you’ll think to yourself ‘I should be able to jump over this’ or ‘climb up this’ or ‘step over this’ and the game just will not let you.


The voice acting and writing are extremely well-done. Each of the factions have their own style, beliefs and morals, and they’re written in such a way as to be realistic without being cartoonishly evil or righteous to the point even Christ himself would be like ‘Whoa easy on the good deeds there, Dudley Do-Right.’ The religious Theleme of course has its bigoted zealots, but the scientific Bridge Alliance has mad scientists who will purposefully infect innocent people with The Malichor just to observe its effects. It’s not all black and white, which I like.

That said, in a world with magic and giant monsters, sometimes the Bridge Alliance scholars will stupidly turn their nose up at witness testimonies involving such things, even though they’re known without a doubt to exist. That sort of arbitrary skepticism is baffling in a setting like this.


Being the Legate of a nation, De Sardet’s role puts them in the right position to undertake most of the quests you go on, which thankfully helps to avoid the typical RPG story trite of some village idiot falling into the refuse heap behind the local tavern and being named God-King of the entire Universe as a result. (Or yet another revenge-motivated hero’s journey.)

Conclusion & Verdict



GreedFall is the sum of many different parts. It’s by no means perfect, but then again, what game is? The progression is restrictive and unintuitive, but the combat is fun once you eventually build your character to suit your playstyle. The environments are gorgeous, but facial animations, particularly lip syncing, are noticably offputting.


For every positive there is a negative, but overall? Despite every flaw, gripe and grievance, I am excited as hell to boot the game back up and start a new playthrough. The world Spiders has built here is unique and refreshing compared to most RPGs on the market, it takes risks that while they may not always pay off help set it apart from competitors.

I very much enjoyed my time on Teer Fradee and can’t wait to return. But there’s a lot to improve on, and I sincerely hope it does well enough for a GreedFall 2 as I want to explore so much more of this world, its history and its cultures. This is easily the best, most stable and most creative game Spiders has ever made, and I look forward to following their work more often from now on.


If you’re a fan of old-school Bioware-esque ARPGs, I cannot recommend GreedFall to you enough. But if you just enjoy RPGs casually or really to any degree, then I implore you give the game a try. It has depth and replayablity in abundance, should you be able to look past its many faults.

To keep up-to-date with DAH news and my other articles in general, or if you’d like to watch me stream sometime, follow me on Twitter @SWJS2, on YouTube at starwarsjoshsmith, at SWJS on Mixer, and SWJS#3513 on Discord.


Stay happy, stay healthy fellow game enthusiasts!

P.S. I find it hilariously ironic that GreedFall allows you to play as a person of color from a noble background emmigrating to a new land where you can then proceed to oppress and wage war against a majority white indigenous people. That can’t be a coincidence!