After playing (and largely enjoying) the second Greedfall game in early access back when it launched, I left the game alone, waiting for its full release. Now it’s here, and Greedfall 2: The Dying World is a confident step ahead from the original. Given that the original was my favourite “Eurojank” RPG to date, that is to say, I’ve really enjoyed this.
The very concept of it is clever and worthwhile. The original game was a critique of colonialism, told through the eyes of the colonisers. You played as a European-coded wealthy-type, dispatched to an island of natives to help your colony thrive, even as other colonists squabbled over it (and the poor locals were, of course, caught in the middle of a war they never asked for). Colonisation made Europe wealthy and supported some significant cultural changes and advancements, but always at the expense of the native people living in the colonies, and Greedfall never shied away from making that observation.
Greedfall 2 behaves like a companion piece, in that this time you’re playing as the natives, and rather than being set on the island, this time you’re whisked away to the mainland, after being captured during a raid. This means that you now get to explore the “homeland” of those colonists that you spent so long fighting with and against in the original Greedfall, and get to experience the “other side” of a world benefiting from its exploitation of the “savage lands” and peoples.
That exploitation and dehumanisation, with all the racism and bigotry that comes with it, is going to come across as being quite on-the-nose and lacking in subtlety. That might come as jarring for people who have played previous Spiders titles – including GreedFall itself – given that the developer, whatever you might think of its games, tends to write narratives with nuance to them. Of course, we also live at a time where the major active colonial project in the world is being conducted by a nation that is every bit the caricature of villainy that this game depicts, so my read on The Dying World has that it is a statement on just how brazen and overt these people can be. And in that regard, I found it to be effective.
I will say, though, that the moment-to-moment storytelling lacks some of the energy of its predecessor. Perhaps it’s just that I didn’t find the character dynamics quite as exciting or interesting (Greedfall has some of the best party interactions this side of the finest moments of Mass Effect). Or perhaps it’s because The Dying World is a prequel, and that hamstrung Spiders to an extent. As with any prequel, you run into a paradox where you can’t really introduce events or characters that would be too distinctive, world-changing or memorable, because otherwise you shatter the suspension of disbelief in the original. i.e., if you kill a king in a prequel, the original no longer makes sense if people are milling around talking about the king because he’s still alive. Or, alternatively, the big events in a prequel don’t have quite the same impact because, thanks to the original title, we already know they happen. It’s hard to surprise players with a prequel while maintaining continuity of the overall property, is the point here, and I’m surprised Spiders didn’t simply make a sequel instead.
But perhaps the lack of storytelling energy is also because once you get past the introductory sequence, GreedFall: The Dying World doesn’t quite have the same memorable side quests and little incidental beats while on the journey. There’s nothing outright wrong with them, but GreedFall was one of those rare games where I actually sought out as many quest markers as I could, because every one seemed to add to the overall picture and world that was building in my head. The Dying World comes dangerously close to being a content-driven open-world game at times.
On the other hand, GreedFall 2: The Dying World has a different combat system from its predecessor, and I very much prefer this new one. Greedfall relied on responsive action, seemingly inspired by The Witcher 3, which had been released just a few years earlier. Not that the combat systems were equivalent, but GreedFall wanted you knee-deep in gritty action.
GreedFall: The Dying World, meanwhile, has been inspired by the pausable real-time games, like Baldur’s Gate or Pathfinder. At any time, you can pause the action, load up to five attacks or special abilities on your characters, and then unpause to watch them play out. I’ve always been partial to this system as it allows you to be tactical while still getting to enjoy the fireworks of action combat.
GreedFall’s take on this system is workable. I could say that it’s missing some depth, and it doesn’t take too long to figure out a “best practice” approach to the use of skills that you’ll come to rely on for one battle after another after that. But it’s still enjoyable and engaging on balance, and the enemy encounters tend to be designed in such a way that there is, at least, the perception of variety. I don’t think anyone really plays a Spiders game just for the combat systems, but this one is, arguably, the most refined yet.
Of course, Spiders is a B-tier “Eurojank” developer, and that means that Greedfall is more ambitious than the team really had the resources for. You’ll come across bugs and quirks, like dialogue trees that are broken and result in odd moments like characters acting like they weren’t aware of an event they just witnessed (or even participated in). For example, at one point early on, I completed a quest that resulted in a guard captain joining me in slaying some spies that were posing as woodsmen. After the combat finished, the captain returned to his office. The next time I spoke to the captain, he expressed a wish that we capture some of the woodsmen alive.
You do get used to those kinds of bugs when you play enough Eurojank RPGs. If anything, they add to the charm of the “genre”. It’s only a problem when such bugs start breaking your games, and to Spiders’ credit, I never encountered a game-breaking bug or major crash, so the developers did use the long time in early access to get the code clean enough for my tastes.
Those amusing bugs aside, Greedfall: The Dying World is an earnest project by one of the most earnest game developers out there. It’s a game that is trying hard to say something important about a topic that is of great importance, while structuring it into an RPG that builds on the truly interesting world and lore conceived in the original. Spiders remains the best of the B-tier European RPG developers, and that’s a compliment. Belonging outside of the big-budget blockbuster developers affords a creative freedom that Spiders has never been hesitant to embrace.
