Greedfall 2: The Dying World is finally here, with the followup to Spiders’ 2019 RPG Greedfall opting for an Early Access launch. Diverging from its predecessor substantially in both premise and gameplay, Greedfall 2 still demonstrates some strong potential and preserves the depth and scrappy charm of the last game, even in its current nascent state.
Taking place three years before the events of Greedfall, Greedfall 2 flips the perspective of the first game; instead of a pseudo-European coloniser from a noble house exploring the island of Teer Fradee and encountering its native population, you now play as Vriden Gerr, a native Teer Fradeean sage-in-training who is abducted from their home and taken overseas as a captive. After being sprung from prison and joining up a small group of abolitionists and fugitive Teer Fradeeans, the portion of the campaign available to be played so far sees Vriden Gerr fight to prove the innocence of a ship captain so that they can find a way back home.
It was exciting to have a new perspective on Teer Fradee society, unlike the one we saw in the original Greedfall. The native population being steadily walled out of their homeland while being made sick by new infectious diseases and environmental damage caused by the newly arrived colonists is certainly not without real-world precedent. The game’s status as a prequel makes the narrative a little awkward stakes-wise; no matter what Vriden Gerr accomplishes in Greedfall 2, it isn’t going to have particularly substantial ramifications for the relations between the natives and outsiders in three years. The campaign as it exists so far is also basically just an extended prologue, giving only teases of what the full game will have in store.
Another way that Greedfall 2: The Dying World departs from the first game is in its combat. In an inverse to how the Dragon Age franchise has steadily become less tactical and more action-focused as of the latest entry, Greedfall 2’s combat is essentially real-time-with-pause in the vein of Dragon Age: Origins or the original Baldur’s Gate games. You and your allies will attack enemies automatically and can use skills equipped on a hotbar. Skills use skill points, which slowly recharge as you use your main attack. The action can be paused at any time with the space bar key, letting you select multiple allies to move them around or target different foes.
It can get a little chaotic micromanaging four party members simultaneously, and I certainly have a few concerns. As of writing, there aren’t any tactics you can assign to your party members to act in certain ways automatically; all they will do is auto-attack the nearest enemy unless instructed otherwise. This means that if you are low on health, you’ll need to manually organise someone to use their healing ability, they will not do it unprompted. Combat isn’t so difficult on the normal difficulty setting that it is completely unmanageable, but when the first major boss fight caused rocks to fall down and wiped out the rest of my party who was milling around the boss and not getting out of the way, it definitely cemented the notion that just leaving my party members to their own devices and focusing only on managing Vriden Gerr’s actions was not a good strategy. It certainly left me nostalgic for Final Fantasy XII and the massive degree of control you had over your party members’ artificial intelligence in that game; hopefully something similar to that will be implemented later on to make your party members not totally useless without player involvement.
In comparison to some very polished early access triumphs in recent years, such as Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hades 2, Greedfall 2’s early access nature slips through rather often. Sometimes it is in weird placeholder location names, such as “#FACTION_NAU_ALLIES”, or strange and hilarious bugs like my character’s hair randomly turning invisible after some cutscenes, or miners lacking props and picking at ore with invisible pickaxes.
The skill trees in Greedfall 2 are also quite short for now, and you’ll probably acquire enough skill points to nearly max out one or two trees by the time you’re through with the campaign as it stands. Couple this with some strange oversights, like guns being a usable weapon category that lack any skills associated with them, and you get the sense that the combat and levelling system have a lot of development left to go.
“… there are plenty of alternate methods other than violence to accomplish your objectives.”
Nonetheless, Greedfall 2 embraces the first game’s open-ended nature. While many encounters can indeed be resolved through violence, there are plenty of alternate methods to accomplish your objectives. There are talent trees to level up Vriden Gerr’s ability to persuade or bribe people, sneak past foes unseen, track footprints and pick locks. Even in the 5-ish hour amount of content present so far, I was rather impressed at how many solutions the game gave me to many quests.
In one mission to rescue a captive Teer Fradeean native, I was given the option of convincing his captor to let him go, sneaking in and picking the lock to his cell, or just massacring all the guards in a violent jailbreak, among other potential solutions. I also appreciated that the game also doesn’t drag the player by the nose to quest objectives; it indicates their general location on the map, however, you still need to do a bit of your own exploration to find what you are looking for.
All in all, Greedfall 2: The Dying World has left a mostly positive first impression. While it has a lot of polish and expansion left to go, the game’s foundations are strong. With an interesting setup and diverse band of main characters, I am looking forward to how it all develops further as the campaign receives new chapters. With the developers acknowledging that existing saves will not be compatible with future updates for the game, players may want to hold off until the game has been developed further to not lose progress. However, based on what we have so far, I am at least cautiously optimistic that Spiders can develop Greedfall 2 into a really special RPG at a later point.
About the Author
Tom Quirk
he/him
Tom Quirk plays a lot of video games, but when he isn't, he is reading fantasy novels and watching way more television than is healthy.
