Hi all. GreedFall recently took place, and since the game is quite controversial, I wanted to share my opinion about it.
In short, is it worth playing?? Then the answer is yes, if you are not against low-budget RPGs and the main thing for you is an unusual, not often encountered setting and the presence of fairly well-written companion characters (as in games from Bioware), because everything else in the game is still done rather poorly.
And then in more detail, if you are still interested.
GreedFall was developed by the French company Spiders, which previously released such games as: Mars: War Logs, Bound by Flame, The Technomancer. And if we compare GreedFall with them, then it turned out to be two heads higher than any of their games before, although it is still far from other AAA games of 2019.
Although the game was released only a couple of years ago, its gameplay and design are similar to RPGs from the mid-2000s. It’s really similar in many ways to Star Wars Knights of the old republic from 2003, The First Witcher or Dragon age, so you might also like the fact that such RPGs are not often made anymore if you miss the old game design.
And now about the Plot
The game’s setting takes us to a fantasy world close in spirit to the 16th-17th centuries. The times of great geographical discoveries and colonization of America. Real magic, muskets and rapiers are in use, and medieval outfits have been replaced by camisoles and cocked hats.
The Old World is rotten, malichor, an incurable disease similar to the plague, is spreading across the polluted and overpopulated continent. But at the same time, far from the main continent, sailors discover a new island, Tir Fradi, whose indigenous inhabitants are not susceptible to the disease.
And now about the Plot
The game’s setting takes us to a fantasy world close in spirit to the 16th-17th centuries. The times of great geographical discoveries and colonization of America. Real magic, muskets and rapiers are in use, and medieval outfits have been replaced by camisoles and cocked hats.
The Old World is rotten, malichor, an incurable disease similar to the plague, is spreading across the polluted and overpopulated continent. But at the same time, far from the main continent, sailors discover a new island, Tir Fradi, whose indigenous inhabitants are not susceptible to the disease.
The main character of https://richmoosecasino.co.uk/mobile-app/ the game, the nobleman de Sardet, goes to Tir-Fradi as an emissary from the Trade Commonwealth. Together with him, his cousin, Constantine Orsay, arrives on the island, who is appointed governor of the city of New Serena, founded by the Commonwealth on the island. You will find a cure for Malichor, rivalry between countries trying to establish colonies on the island, and establishing relations with the indigenous population. And the main mystery is why the main character, born on the continent, turns out to be similar in appearance to the inhabitants of the island. (By the way, this is not a spoiler; already in the first 10% of the plot, almost every resident of the island informs the main character about this).
So what about the locations and gameplay??
The very beginning of the game takes place on the mainland in the city of the Trade Commonwealth of Serena, but after a couple of hours you go on a journey and all other events take place only within the island. The game world is quite large, but not seamless.
The layout of the locations resembles, for example, a cross between Kotor and Dragon Age Inquisition (there are a lot of things here that are reminiscent of DAI), that is, there is no full-fledged open seamless world like in Skyrim, but there are a number of fairly large areas in different parts of the island, between which you move by approaching the edge of the location or with the help of special guiding stones (or landmarks like The Witcher 3). But on the one hand, these individual locations are larger in size than they were in old RPGs like Kotor, and on the other hand, they are made in the form of several intertwining corridors. They are built schematically and are less interesting to explore than, for example, in Gothic or even in the latest Elex.
By the way, when you move from one large location to another, you always find yourself in a kind of camp in nature, where all your companions, a merchant and a crafting table stand. I believe this was done in order to hide long downloads, on the other hand, because of this, every time you move to another location, you have a chance to change allies, craft, buy or sell something.
There is also a very similar mechanics to DAI for establishing camps in all territories, you will even be given a quest in which there is a huge list of how many camps need to be founded and where, but in DAI for this you received a resource of influence, which further opened up the main plot and new locations, that is, it was necessary to do this, which many were disappointed after the first two parts. But to add to the advantages of GreedFall, there is no artificial limitation on progress through the plot, and the establishment of camps simply allows you to quickly move between them in the future or replenish your health. You can also sleep in the camp until a certain point, and some rare quests depend on the time of day, but everything is again very sketchy, there is no life simulation and NPCs usually stand in one place and wait for you, just at a certain time of day, so such mechanics can only be more annoying, due to the fact that they are used so one-sidedly. Doesn’t create an atmosphere, but makes you run around extra.
Personally, I was annoyed that the log in the game does not show what level the quest or territory is, that is, opponents and tasks are tied to a specific level and are not scaled based on the player. But at the same time, the player is free to complete most of the missions in any order, but in this way you can accidentally come to a high-level location in which enemies can be defeated, but this will not be very easy to do.
Fortunately, the combat system depends on the abilities of the player himself, and you can defeat even opponents much higher in level than you if you spin and roll around them for a long time.
The combat system is active in real time, you have a light attack and a strengthened one when the special scale is filled, also block and parry, plus you can also kick the enemy to throw him off balance and upgrade himself to guns and magic. Although the guns are not made as full-fledged weapons, but as an ability that can be displayed on the quick access panel and simply pressed on cooldown as a skill if you have gunpowder.
You cannot jump in the game, which of course reduces the ability to explore locations, so the default is to pause on space. If you want, you can give all commands after a pause, but, in my opinion, in most cases this is not useful.
There are several skills that are responsible for interacting with the world, for example, with the help of athletics you can climb into some hard-to-reach places or walk along a thin beam to take a shortcut. There is a level of charisma which, as usual, is responsible for persuasion in dialogues. There is a skill for picking locks of only three different levels, but, unfortunately, there is no mini-game during hacking, the character does everything himself.
In general, it is almost impossible to level up incorrectly; your hero will in any case be a jack of all trades, because the game has a crafting system and you can insert special stones into the free slots in the armor that give a bonus to skills. That is, you can level up alchemy and charisma and get the lockpicking skill due to the armor you are wearing.
There are even stealth missions and surveillance missions, but of course they are made very simply; during stealth missions, opponents do not pay attention to the noise or light from the flashlight, or even more so to their companions, only to the. It’s especially funny when you have 2 companions and 4 temporary companions and you pass by a guard in stealth, and behind you 6 more people just run straight towards the guard and he doesn’t pay any attention to them.
You can complete missions in different ways, although of course this is done very schematically and simply. Similar to how there is a guard standing in front of a warehouse and if you have upgraded your charisma, you can convince him to let you in, but if you have upgraded your athletics, then please, here is a hole in the fence a few meters from him.
Yes, I would like to mention the companions again, after all, this aspect of the game, in my opinion, is done very well. There are always 2 companions walking next to you, who very often intervene in dialogues and comment on what is happening at a level no worse than Mass Effect, and each of them has their own personal quest, and quite a long one, and not, for example, in Pillars of Eternity, some characters had personal quests from several stages and only for half an hour.
In the end, the game is definitely not bad, but simply average in almost everything. But as I already mentioned, if you are interested in a similar setting and you liked playing Kotor and the first Witcher, then you can try Greedfall. The main thing is not to expect much from the game.
It’s interesting that mid-budget games of 2019 have begun to resemble their most expensive counterparts from 2007.
By the way, in May 2022 they announced the second part of GreedFall, which will be a prequel to the first part and will tell about the whole old continent and not just about the island of Tir Fradi.
If anything, the blog will only contain reviews of games, attempts to reproduce the tilt-shift effect in games. So if you are interested, subscribe and check out the stream too, all the strange old games will be on the stream later.