First impressions of GreedFall II from Early Access: It’s looking good!

I’m not usually one to get invested in Early Access games. I’d much rather just experience the finished product, when I can experience the full extent of the vision of the developers. However, Spiders’ GreedFall had a particularly powerful effect on me (I actually ended up buying it three times over), and so I felt an urge to drop into GreedFall II at the earliest opportunity.

The first thing to understand is that this Early Access is, apparently, really early access. Spiders seems to be going around claiming that there’s only around 30% of the game in there at this stage. And given that we are talking about the Eurojank RPG space, with a developer with B-tier resources trying to produce something of the scope of A-tier developers, you need to go in expecting some wild bugs and issues. In one stage early one of my party members ran into a wall, for some reason died, and then the game rewarded me with the loot from a successful battle. A few minutes later I wandered past some dead soldier bodies. I’m not nearly good enough with coding to understand the kind of cause-and-effect that could have created this chain of events in the code, but as anyone who has played Eurojank RPGs in the past knows, I’m not even talking about a particularly egregious bug here.

GreedFall itself also had some bugs and weird moments of jank. So why did it impact so strongly on me? Simple: The narrative. GreedFall was, broadly, a criticism of colonialism, and a surprisingly sharp one at that. Played through the eyes of one of the colonisers that came to sympathise with the natives, the way the game explored several European and Middle Eastern-coded factions carving a nation up between them while actively destroying the native culture was often surprisingly blunt in its assessment.

It wasn’t perfect because you were, ultimately, still playing a coloniser. You were still exploring a largely “uncharted” island, you still ended up in conflict with the native spirit-creatures that the native people revered as they made for handy boss battles at the end of “dungeons” and quests (though very rarely the natives themselves, as you were broadly aligned with them), and you were still taking resources from the island to improve your wealth and gear. The RPG side of GreedFall did come into conflict with its anti-imperialist intent, but nonetheless the intent and narrative really were there and GreedFall is perhaps the most strikingly critical of a theme that RPGs (and our broader society in the West) tends to take for granted that I’ve ever played.

GreedFall II changes things around a bit in that you’re playing as a native, who is initially kidnapped, taken on a ship, and imprisoned back in the “mainland.” They escape and form a party that then heads on out to try and understand why they were taken and what’s going on. I’m far too early into the game to have a proper sense of the direction the narrative’s going, but aside from one of your allies, whose hatred of foreigners seems designed to be so extreme as to make him a close-minded bigot and, by extension, pass something of a commentary on the native’s capacity for bigotry, the characters and plot is otherwise intriguing. Removing native peoples from their homeland to serve the European empires was, of course, a major part of colonialism, and if Spiders can put the same earnest effort in that they did with the first then this will be a narrative to stick in the mind.

The other big change in this game is the combat system. GreedFall’s combat was purely action-based, whereas GreedFall II has been more inspired by the pausable real-time combat of the Baldur’s Gates of the world. When battle is joined you’ll pause, issue up to three commands to each character, and then unpause to wait for those actions to play out.

As a fan of turn-based combat, I prefer this as it’s more strategic than an action combat system. At the moment GreedFall II’s combat system is nowhere near as elegant as a Baldur’s Gate, but it’s still highly playable, challenging and strategic, and there’s a good variety of skills to make each character interesting and unique on the battlefield. There are bugs, glitches and UI fixes to come, but that’s fine. It’s Early Access. What we can see already is the intent, and the intent is very solid.

I wasn’t sure if GreedFall needed a sequel, but from what I’ve played of the Early Access release, it seems like Spiders has taken a genuinely additive approach to the franchise and world, rather than simply retreading old ground. It’s going to be fascinating to see what it’s like when the 70% is added in.