GreedFall: The Dying World

[b] I dont recommend the game unless either its on a good sale or you really enjoyed the world and plot of the first game. If you like other games made by spiders you will most likely enjoy this one. It hits a lot of the same notes. [/b] Overall this game is a bit of a mess. I enjoyed playing it and was enamored with the world just like I was the first game but several things held it back and really brought down the experience. [h1] Problems that hindered my experience [/h1] 1) The combat: It is kinda obvious they wanted to make combat similar to the first game(more action RPG) but the success of BG3 made them pivot to a more "tactical" style game play. They tried to bridge a connection between the two styles of combat and ended up with something that is mostly boring to play and feels limited. Early on you have barely any skills and combat feels really rough to do. Once you get to level 30 and can get the skills at the end of skill trees you quickly become very overpowered. The balance of combat is really all over the place. You have 5 different DoTs that each deal % health damage and stack with each other making bosses a complete joke. Even the final boss which was immune to 2 of the DoTs just melted. Some physical builds also just 1-shot most fodder enemies. As a result so many skills are just invalidated in their use and just feel confusing what their purpose is. 2) Writing/Dialog: This is vastly improved from the first game however there are plenty of moments that feel so out of character and simply exist to create conflict. You will have characters who will seem to be acting one way and suddenly they switch up to something else. As well some of the party companions who are just "yes men" and really dont have much of a personal story beyond wanting to help you. I can only assume some of the reason for that is the fact the game was rushed and content was cut in order to push it out. The main villain of the game is on the screen maybe 4-5 times mostly during the big important story beats which means we dont really get to develop much of a relationship with them. Dealing with him felt kinda just like stopping another named bad guy. 3) Lack of Quest: Once you get about 1/2 through the game you just have no more quests to do beside the main story and some companion quests. The game is sold as something where choices have consequences and ripples. There are times where this is evident but mostly its a +/- on a "relationship" scale. There are so few consequences shown outside the main quest and a few NPCs. 4) Talents: The talents from the previous game were mostly left intact with a few getting revamped or changed around. However the way talents work in gameplay is fairly different for some. Each talent has a direct mechanic attached to needing a certain talent level to get access similar to the first game. However there is also a % chance skill checks for most of the talents. The problem comes that for some of these skill checks the % given feels like lies. Unlocking a box will have % chance to unlock of 15%, 35%, 65%, 90%, or 100% based on the difficulty of the check vs your talent level in Mechanisms. The percentages truly feel like is 0%, 10%, 30%, 100%, or 100%. So many times you just fail a skill check unless its a 90% or higher chance. [h1] The things that kept me playing [/h1] 1) The graphics look really good and the world is well detailed in its environment. A lot of the cities actually feel like a large collection of people live there. Something so many games fail to do. Plenty of other games will say "here is a major city that houses 100k+ people" and then have 2 major streets with a handful of buildings/houses on it. In this game you get to explore various sections of a couple cities but you can tell its a small section of the city and it feels full. The detailing in the environment is very nicely done and you can tell a lot of care spent trying to make the spaces interesting and look believable. 2) The plot is interesting enough to have kept me going and I was looking for more to draw me in but as I mentioned before a lack of quests left me wanting. The world building in this game is excellent and so much of the continent is fleshed out. We get to learn so much about the rest of the continent and better understand the relationships between all the nations as well as their organization and power structures. We get to see more and more of the infighting we were teased in the first game. The companions who are not just yes men tend to have a unique view of the world and are dealing with problems that typically clash with their ideals. You get to navigate some of that with them and its quite fun for the short little stint that is each of their individual quests. 3) We get full control over our party and what skills they press in combat. The new "Tactical" pause system they created allowed full control over your party members and plan out their skills. You can queue up a bunch of moves/skills/targeting so you dont have to pause constantly to issue a new command all the time. This allowed comboing of skills to be fairly easy to set up. One character can apply an affliction while another queues up skills that are buffed when attacking someone with those afflictions. You can sync up attacks to start a combat allowing you to get the jump on many combats. 4) You have a large amount of control on the builds of the MC and companions. You have full access to all the skill trees in the game as the MC while companions have access to 2 base trees and one unique tree for themselves. The unique trees help lean each companion towards a certain playstyle but gives each of them a unique feel. The MC can fill any role you want and give them a unique feel as well. I never felt like a certain party make-up was required but there were some combos that are definitely stronger. [h1] Things that I felt indifferent about [/h1] 1) I know others have said the game was really buggy for them but I never encountered anything that was particularly game-breaking or detracted from my experience. Most of the bugs I encountered involved a single line of dialog not going off which happened maybe 5-6 times throughout the game. As well the camera in dialogs get really wacky and gives some really strange angles particularly with specific NPCs. Otherwise I didnt notice any combat bugs, visual bugs, or story bugs. 2) There are a lot of stats in the game and most are unnoticeable. You have affinities for favors(buffs) and resistance for afflictions(debuffs). I never noticed the difference when one character had a really high amount of affinity or resistance. Additionally so many of the enemies do not take advantage of favors/afflictions that its almost a shock when they do. There are plenty of typical stats like health, armor, dodge, crit, etc that function exactly like you think and you do see the difference in boosting the stat. As well attributes give stats for their chosen stats but again most changes are unnoticeable so you just funnel the attribute points into damage, health, and action points. They really wanted a nuanced stat block that made you think hard about certain upgrades but ultimately it was very simple for most items that whatever gave you the most damage or defense was just better with occasional outliers in things that gave you attributes to push you past certain thresholds. [h1] In Summary [/h1] Overall again the game is a bit of a mixed mess. It has things to enjoy but that is mostly the story and characters. The gameplay holds it back in the typical manner that happens with most spider games. There is something to enjoy and those that do will enjoy it very much so.