A few years ago, I was first introduced to the term eruojank. This endearingly refers to ambitious RPGs from small European studios that punch above their weight class to deliver a game with an expanded scope, albeit with their fair share of jank. I’ve since learned that it’s a dying subgenre, with only a handful of developers left to carry the torch. French developer Spiders happens to be one of them. Previously known for The Technomancer and Steelrising, GreedFall: The Dying World, the follow-up to their 2019 RPG, is their most ambitious game yet. After 18 months in Early Access, the game has finally entered 1.0 with a full release on PC and consoles. I’ve already shared my in-depth first impressions on the game, which I recommend reading first, as I have so much more to say about my experience with the game that I won’t reiterate much of what I said there.
For this review, I want to focus on friction. In physics, friction refers to a force that opposes the relative motion or attempted motion between two surfaces in contact. In gaming, I’ll define it as issues that oppose the player’s relative enjoyment or attempted enjoyment of a game. The reason why this is so important for this review is that the amount of friction a player is willing to withstand will massively impact their mileage (and enjoyment) from said game. And for games in this particular subgenre, the payoff can be as rewarding as the jank can be painful.
To set the stage, in GreedFall: The Dying World, you play as a Teer Fradeen of your creation. The character creator offers a fair amount of customisation, though beards are notably missing. In the opening hours of the game, your protagonist becomes a Doneigad. (A sage in the Teer Fradeen language of Yecht Fradi.) This makes up a majority of the prologue and gets you familiar with the game’s mechanics. No sooner do you perform the profound ritual with your childhood friend Nilan than you are ambushed, captured, and taken to the continent of Gacane as a prisoner. This is where the game really begins. The setup is an interesting role reversal on the first GreedFall game, and I find it rather compelling to play a foreigner in a land, not because of your adventurous nature but because you had no choice in the matter.
As a whole, it’s the premise and setting that made me stick with The Dying World as long as I did, despite the factors I will get into later. The writing for GreedFall establishes interesting characters that all feel opinionated in their own way, and they’re brought to life by just-as-good voice acting. The Teer Fradeen cast especially speaks Yecht Fradi so fluently that I thought it was some real foreign language rather than a real fictional language made for the game. While it does have its fair share of fantasy tropes, the way they’re blended with the old European aesthetic feels fresh. As such, part of me does feel the game might function better as a more linear narrative experience centered around the main plotline. There are programmable game profiles, which can be tweaked in the settings, giving you the ability to change party attack stats, modify enemy damage, or even turn on invincibility, but they don’t really make the rough parts of the game any less noticeable.
Making it a linear game sounds nice on paper, but, truth be told, it would also rob the player of experiencing the best part of the game. It’s funny that The Dying World is often such a beautiful one. Spiders has crafted an alluring backdrop for their expansive story, and visiting the various regions of Gacane offers a mix of great-looking vistas with flocks of flying birds and gorgeous sky boxes to boot. It’s definitely one of those games that make you want to slow pan around the character as you play. As a bonus, each of these different regions feels unique, representing its own beliefs, customs, and architectural styles. The fleshed-out world, paired with the story of a hero trying to return home while being dragged into an intercontinental conflict, was the most compelling aspect of GreedFall. I wanted to see more and do more on the way to freedom and, potentially, revenge. But this is where the friction comes in.
You won’t be exploring the continent of Gacane alone. The Dying World is a party-based RPG, similar to Dragon Age: Origins, meaning that before you head out, you must pick at least three other companions to join you. Whether you choose to control each of them in combat via the Tactical mode or not, you are still responsible for the entire party’s skills, attributes, and equipment. This brings me to my first real issue with the game’s design, which I won’t count as a direct negative because it’s admittedly a matter of opinion. I don’t think the companion gameplay suits the game, and the aforementioned Focused mode mainly pertains to the way companions function in combat, not for getting rid of them entirely. They are still with you every step of the way, breaking immersion and adding little content of value.
They do, however, add additional controls you have to memorize. The L1 button is crucial for several functions in The Dying World. On PlayStation 5, L1 + X makes you and your party crouch to be less visible, L1 + O toggles investigation vision, something you’ll use often to find clues littered around an area, and L1 + △ temporarily untethers you from the party. There are also other party-wide actions that you can control outside of combat, such as disguises. These can be equipped in the menu to help you enter areas you wouldn’t be allowed into as yourself. And these apply to the whole gang, so you and your team can roll up to the party as clerics if you so please. A cool spin-off mechanics of disguises is that some guards can question your presence, and it then takes a successful stealth roll to not have your cover blown.
In my first impressions article, I mentioned that I wanted to break out of my stealth archer stereotype and go with a canonical heroic sage for my main character. This was an exciting prospect, and I was eager to shape the character as I played. Making him more magically gifted and handsomely chivalrous. However, after a few hours with the game, it dawned on me that I didn’t like GreedFall: The Dying World‘s tactical real-time with active pause combat system. This is completely redesigned from the first game, and it might have given fans complaining about the original what they wanted, but it just wasn’t fun for me. Attacks feel like they have no weight behind them, and since everyone just sort of replays the same few animations over and over again in an opponent’s general direction, it feels no more exciting to watch than 3D printed pieces on the table during a session of D&D. (Without the friends and booze to help.) Not to mention that you can sometimes get repeatedly stun locked by enemies, so you just have to sit there and get attacked.
If you’re yearning for the combat of old BioWare games, then you might find the combat engaging. For me, this made it so that, if given the option, I would avoid combat whenever I could. In other words, if I could quietly get around trouble, I did. The problem was, for someone who likes to play with my protagonist at the center of the gameplay experience (both in terms of narrative choices and combat encounters), the companions skulking behind me were a constant reminder of the gameified world I was inhabiting. I would be hiding in the bright red bushes, sure, but two of my companions are all the way out as a guard passes without any alarm. I get that it’s designed that way so NPCs don’t constantly blow your cover, but I’m not a fan of the solution here either.
On the note of immersion breaking, there are parts in the game where you will enter an area you don’t really belong in. Not a restricted area where you would be attacked/confronted on site, but you’d better behave nonetheless because they supposedly have their eye on you. However, you can walk up to every interactable chest and barrel in sight and pocket any gold coins or bracelets you find inside with no issue. I’m not suggesting that the answer is to punish the player for every infraction, but give me some more incentive to care. To make the NPCs feel like they’re more than just set decoration.
If you’re looking for a deeper connection with the NPCs in the game, you’ll be happy to know that some of the companions are romancable. Throughout your playthrough, you can stop to chat with your friends to check in on them or find out more about their past. This isn’t available all the time, as they can sometimes tell you to save it for later if you want to chat, but doing so does shade in a given character’s backstory. Do note that only the dialogue options with the heart icons beside them seem to push the romantic subplot forward. There’s been a fair amount of friction so far, but, depending on what kind of player you are, it might be negligible. I mean, yeah, you had to relisten to the dialogue about a character’s dead mother a few times because it replays every time you approached her in the tavern, but since the NPC she was talking to was gone after the first interaction, it just stays on her face for an awkwardly long amount of time, but that might not bother you.
This brings me to the real friction. The kind that can make you burn out of interest. Up to this point, after nearly a dozen hours, I was fine with pushing forward with my stealthy sage. Not to keep referring back to my first impressions, but during the prologue, a glitched loadout made it so I couldn’t equip the Teer Fradeen gauntlets for the magic build. I mentioned in parentheses that I eventually found a better set that I began to use instead. Since that article was published, my second, better magical weapon also bugged out. Despite having two different weapons equipped, the game constantly thinks the main character still has the gauntlets on, and I can neither remove nor re-equip them, and during combat, that means I can’t use most of my spell-based moves.
Seeing as there’s no consequence for it, I loot quite extensively, and there came a point where I realized I had to cut my losses. I wasn’t readily finding more of these magic gauntlets in the open world or at vendors that I came across. The good news is that GreedFall: The Dying World has an item called the Memory Stone that can be used at a camp or base to reset your stats. Since this was oddly happening to the one class I had built my character for, most other weapons were not that effective in combat, so I decided to refresh my character stats, building out a two-handed axe-wielding character instead. For those following along at home, that means that my brave sage was now no longer as brave and no longer a sage.
But whatever. It’s no big deal. I adapted my headcanon so that my hero picked up the cold steel of the Gacanians in his fight to stop a war and return home. The story was ramping up with multiple threads laid out before me, so I pressed on. And then the game crashes. Not once. Not twice. But a few times. Enough to scare me into frequently saving manually, so I didn’t have to rely on the auto-saves or backtrack from my old one. There isn’t a quicksave button, so this was done the old-fashioned way, as generations of save-scummers have done before me. I play and review a lot of games, but I will admit that nothing quite dampens the mood like slowly warming up to a game despite its shortcomings and having it crash on you.
You can play the game in either Graphics or Performance mode. Performance does feel smoother, but looks a bit muddy. Graphics added much-needed sharpness, and framerate wasn’t impacted enough on my PS5 to make it much of a trade-off. The one place where the game strikes gold is the soundtrack. The music from Olivier Derivière, best known for A Plague Tale and the recent Dying Light games, is perfect for the 17th-century-inspired world of GreedFall. The Dying World sets the tone immediately by serenading you on the start screen, and the tunes continue to impress and immerse you with each new area you explore.
This review is getting a little long, so let me quickly run through some random notes that I couldn’t squeeze in anywhere else. Let’s start with some good. It’s impressive that once you’re in an area, be it a village or a city, you can enter and exit key locations without a loading screen. You just open the doors and walk on through. If you don’t want to run around everywhere, there are quick travel points that you can unlock around the map, and the load times were near instantaneous. Now for some bad, the bugs that I mentioned above are the most significant examples I could think of, but there are plenty of smaller hurdles along the way. A couple of times in the major cities, I came across a weird glitch where my character would just be stuck in place, unable to move forward. In one instance, the game’s main menu didn’t load. Meaning I couldn’t actually play the game.
As you can hopefully tell by now, I really wanted to like GreedFall: The Dying World. However, 15 hours into the game, roughly halfway through the estimated playtime, I found the friction too persistent. At every corner, there was something that was either breaking my immersion or ruining my gameplay experience, and at a certain point, I couldn’t carry on. Among the slew of great games releasing right now, every little issue I brought up made me more and more reluctant to load up GreedFall. At least, not with the game in its current state. Most of the issues can be fixed with patches, and if the old school combat system interests you, then there’s no reason not to check it out. But as it is, I cannot confidently recommend the game, and unfortunately, with publisher Nacon going through insolvency, I am not sure how long the support of the game will last. GreedFall: The Dying World is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.
