Greedfall - a New RPG by Spiders

So, take Dragon Age companions and choice, the fashion sensibility of Fable 2, throw in some Witcher style combat and tactical pause (Plus some gritty setting and dressing) and give it to the guys who made Technomancer and War logs and you get...

Greedfall! Launches September 10th. Some videos below:

And a companion trailer:

Combat is split with a Fighter / Mage / Bomb thrower style, the design is based on Baroque paintings and the whole thing has an underlying theme of colonisation and native displacement. Maybe this lot can do what Mass Effect Andromeda completely sidestepped!

Now, Spiders have a record as producing some solid games, but with a bit of jank or weird VA styles. War Logs was interesting if linear; Technomancer built on its world.

So far, this looks to be very interesting. Plus... TRICORN HATS! CLOAKS! FLINTLOCKS!

Flint. Locks.

What's not to love?

This has been looking good for a while now; hopefully it gets good reviews cuz the world looks interesting.

I saw a trailer for this a while ago, but hadn't heard anything about it since.

It definitely looks good, and we definitely need a decent Mass Effect and/or Dragon Age replacement since Bioware isn't really doing those types of games any more.

I'm unclear, though, which side do you start on? The colonizers or the natives?

You're from the colonizing land, I believe.

It looks good, but I am somewhat hesitant. The Technomancer, their previous big action rpg thing also looked good on trailers and gameplay demos and wound up not being very good.

Edited by Ghilz on Aug 23rd 2019 at 12:20:44 PM

In stories about colonizers vs natives, I pretty much always side with the natives.

Oh yeah, somehow I forgot that you'll probably have a choice to side with the natives or the colonizers. That... could be done very badly, very easily. There's the whole refugee/invader thing, the native/nationalist thing, all stepping on some very current political issues.

Indeed. It depends mainly on what I'll be seeing in the actual game to make decisions, though.

I don't think the colonist=refugee and native=nationalist thing is really applicable here. It's natives defending their homeland from a technologically advanced invading empire out to take their land and resources for their own.

Has anyone else noticed that in many stories about a colonialist antagonist they often try to make them more well-intentioned by saying they wanted to "spread their prosperity" when most real colonialist empire believed that natives were subhumans only fit for slavery? Really they were just empires who wanted to get richer off of new land and saw what they believed to be a bunch of savages who weren't technologically advanced enough to fight them off.

Yeah, plus this venture is intended to find a cure to a plague that's been ravaging the colonists' homeland. They just see the natives as an obstacle to that goal.

My problem is that a lot of real-life nationalists can't tell the difference between immigrants and armed invaders. They see themselves as the innocent natives defending their lands from colonists. So, assuming this game is going to be properly gray morally with both sides having good points and bad points, they might accidentally pander to those people.

So far there seems to be a balancr - the trailers have shown ghe colonists as both settlers and imperialist... the natives are more magical and seem rightfully angry at being displaced.

Where the monsters fit in is tbc but there seem to be multiple factions so i doubt its as simple as colonist vs native.

I am still looking forward to it, I've just been burned on this sort of thing before. "This seems like an interesting story, let's see what else the author has wrote... oh, he's a literal Nazi. So those Unfortunate Implications were not actually accidental."

That's an extreme example; a quick glance at the Spiders page doesn't show anything worrisome.

Edited by Discar on Aug 24th 2019 at 8:03:45 AM

Yeah, I've had stuff like that happen too, like how the guy that wrote Gate is a right-wing nationalist, which explains why Japan and only Japan is in the show's fantasy world and why every other country is depicted as being sniveling creeps who want to "rob" Japan of its "glory."

I was really interested in that show before I learned all that and now it's just an "Oh well."

Edited by theLibrarian on Aug 24th 2019 at 11:37:11 AM

Yeah, that was bad.

On the colonialist thing I said earlier, I think the reason people would write empires like that is more a case of Good Cannot Comprehend Evil, many people nowadays have a hard time fathoming that a civilisation could simply believe that an entire group of people are just vermin to be exterminated.

My one main worry with this game barring the devs writing it wrong is that from previous gameplay segments I have saw the combat looked pretty clunky. If they tighten that up and they hopefully don't write the game badly I'll be sold.

Oooh, neat. I'll have to keep an eye on this one.

Some gameplay vid and also a preview opinion - he makes comment on "limited move sets" but tbh, looking at the spell lists, skills trees etc, it's not too far off of what Dragon Age does with its rather limited canned animations. And enemies actually REACT to being hit as well at least, so there seems to be an interrupt function there:

And some opinions from Eurogamer:

Some gameplay where we do hear the slightly annoying repetitive combat chatter...

"Why you should care about Greedfall (if you love BioWare)."

Dat clickbait title. It gets me right in the clicks.

I really would love to see a company climb into that empty niche in my gaming heart. Here's hoping Spiders can pull it off.

She actually gives a lot of detail on the skill tree and everything... but her delivery is... ugh. And she uses the wrong words and idioms. Like "Catastrophically large skill tree"... how does that even PARSE?!

Anyway, I think it may be a bit rigid or be on a par with the Gothic or Risen games - a bit "European" in feel. But the Va seems quite good for the most part.

We shall see... got this and BL 3 to deal with...

^ So hopefully good kind of Eurojank?

Ok this does look interesting.

I have no idea WHY those games feel the way they do, or why US RP Gs feel different... but I think so. It may be the menus (That's the one worry I have, although Dragon Age Inquisition had absolutely DIRE crafting and inventory menus) or the slightly off-brand combat dialogue.

I tried Elex and DEAR LORD the dialogue in that is... terrible. And the animation and gameplay feels stilted.

But this looks to be at the other end of that scale, so I'm very optimistic. The fact it's "regions" rather than open world also makes me think it'll be a bit more focused. So far, the player camp looks a bit sparse with all the companions just standing there, but who knows - JRP Gs do the same thing.

^ Well that's Eurojank for ya. The crude-feeling of the games are kinda their charms.

GreedFall gameplay walkthrough trailer

I tried so hard to enjoy Elex. I really did. But everything about it was just not done very well. The dialogue was bad, the story was hard to parse (and bad), and the combat super clunky.

If the combat in Greedfall is as bad as the worst Mass Effect/Dragon Age examples, then that's fine. I can deal. But Elex combat was both exceedingly difficult and exceedingly boring. You could get killed by a random turkey, and they'd send three at you at a time.