Renaissancepunk colonial dandymage GreedFall greed-all

Thanks for the updates. I'm a noted Spiders fan but this one had me very nervous given their track record.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:

I finished as well, but I kumbaya'd the sh*t out of everyone - pretty much everyone made it out in better shape than they started.

Therein lies the rub, and possible the cause of dislike from the Kotaku reviewer. Can the natives be truly said to be much better off with the invaders still there?

strangederby wrote:
Alien Love Gardener wrote:

I finished as well, but I kumbaya'd the sh*t out of everyone - pretty much everyone made it out in better shape than they started.

Therein lies the rub, and possible the cause of dislike from the Kotaku reviewer. Can the natives be truly said to be much better off with the invaders still there?

I guess it depends on when you pick your starting point? The moment the game starts? Definitely. The invaders stopped doing the horrible sh*t they were doing, and stick to their enclaves. And unless you think isolationism's a virtue in itself, the fact that you can have a peaceful excange with someone not from your island and sign up with the sailing guild and go see the world is dope.

From the point of contact with the mainlanders though, yeah, that's a different equation.

I don't think the narrative's unaware of that though, or ever stops siding with the natives.

You raise good points. I think a truly good situation would be the natives travelling to the continent and offering to trade there.

strangederby wrote:

You raise good points. I think a truly good situation would be the natives travelling to the continent and offering to trade there.

Spoiler:

In my game, the natives travel to the continent and help heal the land, plant forests, etc.

mateofalcone wrote:
strangederby wrote:

You raise good points. I think a truly good situation would be the natives travelling to the continent and offering to trade there.

Spoiler:

In my game, the natives travel to the continent and help heal the land, plant forests, etc.

Right. But the better option would be

Spoiler:

Kicking out the colonists and then trading with them on the islander's terms.

I'm about 4 hours in and thoroughly enjoying it, though there are a few quality of life changes that I'd love to see fixed or modded. In particularly the crafting interface, which could give you some easy way of knowing/sorting if you have the right combination of ingredients and skills to actually craft something. Also, do I understand correctly that companions do not level up skills? Or am I just missing something?

They do but it's not a set schedule. For instance, on their skill screen if you mouse over some of the skills it will say things like available at level 21 or something like that. They don't let you distribute skill points like you do with your player character, unless I've been missing something big.

I'm 8 or so hours in (I'm out of the starting area) and quite enjoying it!

I'm still getting the hang of the menus, but the quests and combat are quite fun. The levelling system is stingy with points, so it makes levelling choices hard. It feels like you have to commit to a specialist style of combat and play, rather than be a jack-of-all-trades. I'm a mage with intuition. It was hard to forgo potion-making, crafting and lockpicking, but there just ain't enough points and they didn't seem to synergise so well.

Anyway, the renaissance setting and "not-witcher" feeling of familiar difference are propelling me through.

No opinions yet on the big themes of the game.

Wowee ... so I hit THAT quest and suddenly, it's difficult choices everywhere!

Kudos to the devs for putting in some consequences.

I need to get back to this. I still haven't left for Tear Fradee yet. Been trying to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which I've been playing since launch two years ago.

I'm around 30 hours in and I think I'm starting to wrap things up now. Getting a lot of companion quest resolutions, finishing up threads, etc. As a mage I'm now steamrolling every combat encounter even the big bosses they've put me up against so we'll see how that plays out.

One note on skills if you're still early on. Take a look at what skill bonuses your companions give if you have them at "friendly" level and also hold on to armor that gives you skill bonuses like blacksmith gloves. Even if you have no skill in science, you can craft an armor enhancement that gives you +1 to science and it will allow you to use level 1 science skill even though you haven't put any points into it. With the right companion and accessories it's possible to pass some level 3 skill checks (the highest level) with only 1 point being spent on a skill.

One of these days I intend to replay as a mage. It looks fun.

Finished it at somewhere between 35-40 hours finishing all quests except the "find all the journal pages" one. Ending I went with was....

Spoiler:

I was friendly to all the major factions and friendly with all my companions, in a relationship with Siora, I'd backed Deirdre as high queen, and chose to kill the big bad at the end. What that essentially amounted to was the continent continuing to suffer the malichor, all the continental powers are kicked off the island, most of their buildings are torn down, the island heals, my guy stays on the island, Siora becomes mal of her clan but still visits me from time to time, Vasco becomes a commander of a fleet, Petrus becomes a cardinal or bishop, can't recall, Aphra goes back to being a researcher, and Kurt got some kind of promotion or other.

I enjoyed my time with the game but not sure if I'll be going back to.The story went places I wasn't expecting from the intro portion and was more interesting than many rpg's I've played lately but I'm not sure just how different another playthrough would be aside from a couple of major choices at the end and what style of combat I choose to use through the game.

Just started last night after my other gaming plans fell through. The facial and character animation is quite jarring after playing through Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Horizon Zero Dawn. The movement and camera is really floaty. I'm using a Xbox Elite controller and am not sure if that's a sensitivity setting or the game just feels that way. Looting and opening doors can be slightly delayed because of this.

I do still love Spiders' progression towards mid-era Bioware. I haven't left the first city yet and am basically just doing the tutorial sidequests. A bunch of the quests had alternative paths to solving them. Really like that I don't get any experience until I finished the quest. I'm encouraged to solve quests in different ways and that's been fun so far.

The setting of the first city is quite bland and brown, however. Hope that changes when I reach the "exotic" tropical island. Spiders' is always heavy handed with how they set-up their games so the lore is fun but nothing new at the moment. It has my attention at least.

Playing a charming magic-user. I like the spell effects because they aren't very flashy right now. Leveling system is spread out and limited enough that it seems your build choices will matter.

I'm not really sure what to make of this game. On the one hand, I find the setting interesting, it's nice to take in the sights. The missions usually have an interesting story to them, but they are written in a way that seems a bit goofy at times. Also, who thought it would be fun to have the player find a merchant who needs help, need to run over to one office to talk to them about why they are harassing him, run across town to get a document, run back to the merchant, run back to the first office, etc...?

So, it's walking this line of providing a world I kinda want to see what's going to happen, but trying to sabotage it with goofy writing and making me an errand boy. Also, the game makes a point of saying - "you can't just walk into this warehouse because you shouldn't be here", but all I need to do is hop a fence and walk through a different door that seems to be in plain sight of workers?

It's like the devs put a nice surface polish on the game to make it have a nice appearance but underneath nothing is fleshed out. Still, this is a cool world so it has that going for it. I probably never played a game by Spiders before and went into this with expectations that were higher than they should be.

Definitely had higher expectations than what Spiders is capable of. They make KOTOR-era RPGs but filtered through a translator. I’m glad they do what they do and every game is better but there are problems.

I’m making my way through this now. It’s interesting and I enjoy their take on combat magic. There’s a lot of pointless running around but the maps are small and load times aren’t bad.

Finished this late last week. It's both Spiders' best game and one with a lot of flaws. The writing is vastly improved and it feels very cohesive. The quests also waste a lot of your time by making you run between quest markers filled with load screens. Enemy variety is quite poor and the magic skills make most fights extremely easy even early in the game. The setting was, visually, boring with lots of browns and greens.

It was fun but needed to be closer to a 30 hour game and priced accordingly. They are getting better at this, though!

Commenting here because I realized that of course there's a thread for this game and I am about a dozen hours in, playing on Series X via Game Pass. Looks like everyone in this thread has already expressed my opinions so far--basically, I have wanted to like many Spiders games, but they all ended up being just too busted (in writing and/or gameplay) for me to get through, but this one seems surprisingly solid!

One question maybe some of you all could guide me on: I've had a couple of quests with explicit timers (X hours to complete task), but I've also had multiple situations where I had a more vague suggestion of urgency in the dialogue (e.g. on multiple steps of Siora's quest related to her mother, she has commented that we should hurry). Should I take this kind of urgency the same way as quests with an explicit timer? When the first part of Siora's quest came up, I did it immediately, but when the second step came up --

Spoiler:

after I had arrived at the battlefield and discovered her mother had lost and was likely captured

--I did not feel like continuing to explore that thread at just that moment. I told Siora I couldn't help right then and she basically said "okay, but please don't take too long," I completed one other smaller quest, and then returned and found--

Spoiler:

a camp site where the soldiers said basically so sorry, she's dead, you can go take a look at the body

--and I'm wondering a)is that the way that quest would've played out if I had immediately followed up on Siora's request and b)would it have played out the same way had I waited several hours before coming back to that quest?

I do really like the idea of games treating the passage of time as meaningful and letting you know that you can't just twiddle your thumbs forever, this is a world where things continue to happen whether you're involved in them or not, BUT, I think games need to be very clear about how they communicate this stuff, given how common it is for other video games to say "you must find your son, it's the most important thing ever, but also you can do 200 hours of other quests firsts if you want and it won't make a difference."

The other, related question I have is, when you do have an explicit timer, is there any clue as to how much time after the timer runs out before you're in trouble? As one example, in a quest involving extortion by the coin guard, I had a merchant agree to refuse to pay up, with me promising the merchant I would return in 2 days to protect him from the fallout. I carefully watched that timer ticking down, and literally the second it expired walked up to the merchant and advanced the quest. But, what if I hadn't? Presumably I was not required to advance the quest the exact second the timer expired (especially since I was not able to advance it before the timer expired), so how long did I have, and was there any way for me to know?

The game does the "if you do another quest or leave the area we will alter this other quest" a few times but does not indicate that in any real way. That's why I describe Spiders' games as early-2000s BioWare games. They are still rough around the edges in a lot of ways.

I'm having a good time with this one. We're not long docked in New Serene. The current (side) quest is to aid merchants who have been facing extortion. If not for work monopolizing my very being I'd likely be a lot further in.

I believe I've said it before, elsewhere, but the writing and the artistry are both very good. This is akin to what I was hoping for when I opted in with Dragon Age: Inquisition, only to be bitterly disappointed. Where Inquisition offered forgettable characters and mundane writing, amidst verbose lore, GreedFall has stoked intrigue and stirred momentum. I'm so very interested to learn more. About characters. About factions. About the island!

I'm hopeful for the early wave of success to continue.

I'm glad I waited on this one since it turned out to be a free PSPlus game this month. It sure doesn't make a good first impression though, the prologue being just a bunch of running to and fro in a fairly boring city environment and a lot of talking throughout some mundane questing. I started enjoying it more once I adjusted to the fairly leisurely pace of the game and started exploring the wilds of the main island. Not a big fan of the way environments are set up with the odd campsite mechanic stuffed between the explorable areas, feels like a kind of old fashioned take on what should have just been a proper open world, but I guess you get used to it. I don't really find the companions particularly interesting but the story is ok so far. Currently level 18 and focusing on Magic.

You're a ways ahead of me. I'm approaching level 6.

I quite took to the leisurely pace. I eased into the beginning area, strolling to and fro, conversing with townsfolk, and taking in the architecture. I appreciated that there was less fluff and fewer spaces to roam. If it had been more open I'm not sure I'd have connected as well. Less can definitely be more. More can certainly also detract.

I found intrigue in the discovery for the factions, and for the lore, and with those early quests. I was getting into the role as a noble legate. The setting also felt befitting for an endemic ravaged area. I thought it a pretty solid opening, if not spectacular by any means. Different strokes, as they say.

I'm running, at present, as a Technical. I've had little combat, but where I have it's been guns and traps, aided by Kurt going toe to toe.

Free PS+, maybe I'll try it sometime. Tagging in so I remember.

I scrapped most of my weekend gaming plans to put more time into GreedFall. Very interesting. The dialog and voice acting is quite good. Easily on the same level as a BioWare.

The late title card was awesome. I’m just a couple quests into New Serene and I think I could see myself playing this all the way through.

The story definitely gets more interesting as you get further along in the game. At first I was meh but this is actually pretty good stuff.

I've put more time into it and still am enjoying it. The design of the cities and the houses is pretty uninspired, though--they look nice enough, but they are not built to create any semblance of a real space. The cities have so many spots that are basically cul-de-sacs, you'll turn a corner and just be in a squared off set of buildings with no way through. Of course every city isn't on a perfect grid or anything, but so much of the cities I've seen here are built with these spaces where there are hard stops that prevent you from passing through or going around in a way that makes some sense as a video game level but not at all as a real place.

The houses are even more ridiculous. In the initial area I had a quest that involved visiting some noble family. I went through their front door and was greeted by a servant who asked what I wanted. I said I needed to speak with the lady of the house, and the servant said "Okay." Dialogue ends, and the servant immediately turns and walks straight into a wall, stops, and just stares at it. In that entrance room, there are a bunch of bookshelves and maybe a table, nothing else, and no other doors or entrances. I go up the stairs, and at the top of the stairs is just one room, with a bed and a dresser in it, and the lady just standing there. I looked again, both upstairs and down, to confirm there weren't some doors somewhere that I just couldn't pass through, and there was nothing. So this wealthy noble family's house consists of: an entry room with a table and some bookshelves, where one servant just stands there, and a bedroom with a bed and a dresser. No place in the house to cook food, no place to wash up, no place to store anything other than books or some clothes. Very silly! And every other house I have entered so far, aside from palace-type buildings, has been more or less identical. It's okay, this isn't like a NaughtyDog game with fabulously detailed living spaces, but this is utilitarian to the extreme.

This had me chuckling and nodding in agreement. I actually like the look of the cities so far but definitely feel you on the pathing through these spaces not being great. I'm also not a fan of the quest marker and way point system they use. This game begs for an elegant system like bread crumbing footsteps on the ground to lead me to where I need to be.

The "indenti-kit" design of the interior spaces is also very noticeable and clearly a budget & scope limitation they set for themselves. The servant turning to stare at the wall is classic AI behaviour. There's some other quite gamey-game things that happen, like immediately going into romance options in conversations with party allies and the relative emptiness of content outside of following quests. Surprisingly, none of these things have pulled me out of the world.

One thing that is peculiar to me is the visual design of the indigenous people (ack forget their name atm). Sorry to say, it looks like some of those NPCs are wearing black face. When I came across that merchant in New Serene I was like, WHOA...whoa there, buddy.

Maclintok wrote:

This had me chuckling and nodding in agreement. I actually like the look of the cities so far but definitely feel you on the pathing through these spaces not being great. I'm also not a fan of the quest marker and way point system they use. This game begs for an elegant system like bread crumbing footsteps on the ground to lead me to where I need to be.

The "indenti-kit" design of the interior spaces is also very noticeable and clearly a budget & scope limitation they set for themselves. The servant turning to stare at the wall is classic AI behaviour. There's some other quite gamey-game things that happen, like immediately going into romance options in conversations with party allies and the relative emptiness of content outside of following quests. Surprisingly, none of these things have pulled me out of the world.

One thing that is peculiar to me is the visual design of the indigenous people (ack forget their name atm). Sorry to say, it looks like some of those NPCs are wearing black face. When I came across that merchant in New Serene I was like, WHOA...whoa there, buddy.

You are not wrong. Even the NPCs without tattoos or facial scarring look weird. It's really distracting, which is a shame because there's a lot to like in this game.

I don't know if they're using someone else's tool for lighting effects or something they designed themselves, but it is awesome, at least on the highest graphics settings. It's not just sunset and sunrise, which a number of games have done well. Lamps, campfires, the way light shines out between cracks from interior spaces at night, etc., look better than any game I can remember. While the rest of the graphics are just satisfactory, I sometimes stop just to admire some of the lighting. If it's something they made themselves, they should license it out.

Agreed, Maclintok, the depiction of the native people definitely makes me a little squeamish, looking around like "uh, is this okay?" as I meet another person with brown face paint with a kind goofy face speaking in broken English with an almost infantile quality to it. That merchant you meet early on was definitely a big uh-oh moment for me. As I've met more people on the island there are some less problematic-feeling characters, which honestly I don't know if that makes the bad examples better or worse. Like if they could make some of these people seem like full human beings that are just from a different culture, what does it mean that others feel like cringe-inducing caricatures of indigenous people that could've been in like a 1930s Loony Tunes cartoon or something? It's not so bad that I can't enjoy the game, but it definitely produces a periodic "yikes" out of me.

On the houses and cities and such, my instinct is to say yeah, I understand why they don't have the time or resources to design bespoke 4 bedroom 3 bath homes for these people, but, can't they just have a locked doorway to the rest of the house, have you meet the residents in a sitting room as they pointedly enter from a door that you can't follow them back through? As someone who is not a developer, it feels like it should be a relatively easy solution even with budget limitations, but I imagine there's a reason it's more complicated than I would guess. Either way, a bit clunky.