After Baldur’s Gate 3 finally reclaimed the CRPG throne last year, Spiders’ Greedfall 2 is poised to enter a very different landscape than its predecessor half a decade ago. Larian’s critical darling is a colossus that looms large, but it proves there’s an audience with a hearty appetite for this niche. It’s also the poster child for the benefits of early access: another success story to add to the pile. The truth is, an early access launch is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get… and sometimes, it’s better to wait.
With Greedfall languishing in the bowels of my backlog, I relished the announcement of a sequel. Finally, I have an excuse to dip my toe into a world that initially passed me by. It came with a hint of trepidation (“Am I jumping in at the deep end? Should I play Greedfall first?”), but credit where it’s due, it’s easy to get stuck in. An exposition dump bookends the character creation menu, delivered in a conversation between Vriden Gerr, Greedfall 2’s native protagonist, and Furkan, an outsider from the Old Continent. As he catches me up on Greedfall’s world politics and the Malichor plague, I get the overall impression this world’s lore is expansive but familiar; easily digestible for any fantasy RPG fan.
That said, I’m not enamored with Greedfall 2’s opening gambit, which inexplicably shares its pitch with Disney’s Pocahontas 2. After a tutorialesque jaunt in Teer Fradee, Vriden Gerr is enslaved and brought against their will to the ‘new world’ of industry, commerce, and colonial rule. There’s ample room for nuance here, but the launch build’s story spends too much time flirting with the myth of the noble savage. I investigate the disappearance of a gift from the Bridge Alliance to the Teer Fradeean and encounter a Thélèmean, who warns me that the Alliance “seduce with their so-called scientific progress” and threaten the Teer Fradeeans’ spiritual beliefs. I’m afforded the agency to choose how to resolve this situation, but these tropes strike me as severely outdated, especially when placed in counterpoint to the Teer Fradeeans’ ecological way of life.
On a positive note, I appreciate Greedfall 2’s quest design, which foregoes the modern trend of pointing me to exactly where I need to go in favor of a map marker in the general vicinity. I relish the friction of being handed an objective that I have to solve for myself, to listen to what NPCs are saying rather than having progression handed to me on a silver platter. My efforts to look for alternative means of approaching a situation have me eavesdropping on bandit camps, ransacking parchment-laden desks, and picking the lock on every door I come across. There’s just one problem: I’ve already seen a better execution of this kind of friction just six months ago.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 had me missing masquerade balls, failing to stop an assassination attempt, and generally being the worst kind of fantasy hero, all in the name of player agency. It also doesn’t help that there seems to be very little consequence to my, er, unscrupulous actions in Greedfall 2. When I murder a cohort of Bridge Alliance members for the sake of retrieving explosives, I suffer a hit to my reputation but I never see any real downside to killing them in cold blood. Later, I cut a bloody swathe through the dockworkers in Uxantis to pay off a false witness ahead of a court case to, ironically, absolve myself of a murder charge. Again, I see no material difference in taking this violent course of action than if I’d opted for a stealth approach; it isn’t even brought up at the trial.
Unless I’m going out of my way to pick a fight, actual combat encounters in Greedfall 2 are comparatively few and far between. This is not a complaint; I’d rather an RPG respect my time than throw an endless procession of mobs at me. However, there’s no getting around the fact that Greedfall 2’s real-time combat just feels a bit uncomfortable. Sure, CRPG combat has always been a little clunky, but the crush of character models makes it difficult to select a viable target, and repositioning the camera is an arduous affair. Instead, I become fast friends with Greedfall 2’s shiny new tactical view – no surprises, really, after the hundreds of hours I’ve poured into Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age: Origins. At the beginning of each encounter, I queue up three actions per party member, unpause, and then sit back and watch as everything around them dies.
Unfortunately, the dialogue-driven crises that serve as Greedfall 2’s focal point are all fairly straightforward to untangle. Of course I shouldn’t needlessly threaten someone with preconceived notions of Teer Fradeean savagery, and it’s not hard to deduce that the root cause of a mysterious illness afflicting fishermen and pescatarians might be, in fact, the fish. Compare these quandaries to Baldur’s Gate 3, where I’m licking dead spiders, dressing up as a clown, and carrying an ox disguised as an apple in my pocket. By contrast, Greedfall 2 provokes a déjà vu; in some other permutation of fantasy RPG, I’ve been there, done that, and worn the T-shirt.
Case in point: a father entreats me to search for his missing son. I track the little rascal down in the wilds of Uxantis, only to discover that the pair have had a classic “it’s not my dream, dad, it’s yours” disagreement. I stage an intervention, pass a lowball Diplomacy check, and that’s it. Problem solved. There’s no unexpected twist; no surprising turn of events. The son reveals his true passion, the father begrudgingly accepts it, and the two go on their merry way. At least the son gave me his coat for my trouble, but even this scant reward is left to gather dust in my inventory.
To make matters worse, this particular T-shirt is also riddled with bugs. Generic NPCs are marked with the prefix “[TODO]” and tooltips come with programming strings attached. To some extent, this is what early access is all about – but when the errors are this in-your-face, it’s hard not to see myself as a glorified QA tester. My crash-to-desktop count averages once per hour; a dialogue bark for a quest I completed hours ago triggers whenever I fast-travel; my hair doesn’t make the journey from Teer Fradee to Uxantis, and I arrive in port inexplicably bald. Worst of all, this early access build also suffers from the most egregious texture pop-in I’ve ever seen. As the camera cuts between characters, they appear as amorphous blobs of color that occasionally resolve themselves into clothes and skin. No matter what I do, nothing seems to fix it.
I reach the end of Greedfall 2’s early access launch build after ten hours, though you can probably eke out a bit more time if you explore every corner of the map and speak to every NPC. Unfortunately, once I reach the “Thanks for playing!” screen, I don’t have much of an impulse to fire up an earlier save. Instead, I come away with the sense that Greedfall 2 is launching in early access out of necessity, spurred on by budget or time constraints, rather than an earnest collaboration with its fan community. Consider Dead Cells, Hades, and even Baldur’s Gate 3 itself. These titles arrived in early access feature-incomplete, teeming with placeholders and bugs. However, all three were true to the final experience right from day zero, and delivered as much (if not more) value to the player at early access launch as they received. Right now, I can’t honestly say the same of Greedfall 2.
If you’re a dedicated Greedfall fan – and believe me, I know you’re out there – then you might relish the chance to be a positive force for change in the development of its sequel. This is, ostensibly, for you. However, I would caution anyone who, like me, saw Greedfall 2 as an opportunity to dive into this fantasy world for the first time. This early access launch build does not make for a good first impression; it has all the second-hand embarrassment of walking in on a stranger half-dressed. This game needs a lot of work, and in its current state, it’s not so much rubbing shoulders with giants as it is tugging at their ankles.