GreedFall 2: The Dying World Early Access Review – A Love Letter to Old-School RPGs

GreedFall 2 is a bold and ambitious project from developers Spiders that follows up on the incredibly popular GreedFall from 2019. Greedfall was a throwback to the golden age of Bioware games and fans with a love for AA titles from that generation of games found themselves with a nostalgic homage to the greats of the past like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. It was not a shiny AAA title with tons of budget and polish, however, what the game did possess was a heart and a vision that resonated with over a million fans, which was amazing for a smaller indie company like Spiders.

Fast-forward to 2024 and fans have been eagerly awaiting a follow-up to the game fans always claimed suffered primarily from a lack of budget. Now that the developers had more budget and several years to cook up GreedFall 2, what are the results and what should you expect? It was a mixed bag for me as someone without much exposure to the first game. However, there’s a certain passion and charm present here from the old PS2 era of games that draws me into this strange mess of a game (Early Access) and I’m sure it will captivate many others as well.

For some clarification, GreedFall 2: The Dying World is currently in early access and the developers have been very open about not having built anything of this scale yet. They’ve mentioned that they’re very much open to feedback and as it is with early access games, some degree of jank is acceptable until the full game is ready for release. As a reminder, Baldur’s Gate 3 was in early access for two years, so it’s become a fairly common and practical practice for smaller studios. Many of the things I will complain about will hopefully get fixed with time and feedback, and I sincerely hope they do because GreedFall 2 is a game that deserves love and support for what it’s trying to do. It’s an old-school RPG with a sole focus on its campaign and storytelling, while delivering graphics and performance fitting for modern-day hardware.

Screenshot by Twinfinite

For the uninitiated who might not know anything, GreedFall is set in a world plagued by the Malichor virus and people are fleeing to Teer Fradee island, to avoid the plague and find a cure. The inhabitants here had been living peacefully and in harmony with nature, but now outsiders have arrived. The first game had you take on the role of an explorer searching for a cure. This time around GreedFall 2 will have you take the place of a young native with mystical powers trying to protect their tribe from the settlers who have no regard for the land or their traditions. However, it doesn’t end at the island, as you get abducted and are now placed in a fish-out-of-water situation in the industrialized continent of Gacane. You get dropped into this colonial-era situation where you must now navigate through the situations your tribe faces through either force or bureaucracy.

Speaking of bureaucracy, there are a lot of RPG checks, which is something I honestly really enjoyed. It made putting points into each of the trees seem much more meaningful. The attributes you put points into such as diplomacy, mechanics, stealth, and whatnot actually do have an impact on both the gameplay and story, and the story decisions have some weight and consequence to them. This dedication to an old-school RPG system that’s not afraid to let you miss content is a bold choice for a small studio and it’s quite well implemented to boot. Fans of RPG games who enjoy decision-making along with their gameplay will not be disappointed by this aspect of the game.

Screenshot by Twinfinite

Most quests and stat checks will also have alternate success conditions even if you manage to mess up on the first try. This leaves room for old-school creativity and exploration to try and find loopholes for certain conditions as long as you have the right stats. Pair this with a story that makes you initially dislike the settlers, and you end up getting some tense situations that can either be resolved with the right stats or watch the situation immediately devolve into violence in this ruthless world. 

Speaking of violence, one of the main things you will notice once you start the game is the new combat system. For those of you who might still not know, combat has been completely overhauled from the original. Whether it’s for better or worse will completely depend on your tastes. Going from a real-time action game with a simple optional pause, GreedFall 2: The Dying World has fully embraced its identity as a real-time action game with dedicated pause mechanics. Fans of Dragon Age: Origins will be very familiar with that formula and the developers for GreedFall 2 have not been shy about mentioning the inspirations taken from that game.

Technically, the pausing and queuing of actions is completely optional. However, there’s a distinct feeling of losing out on all the depth of a dedicated system that gives the experience of a much shallower version of the gameplay. If you dive into the pause and action-queue mechanics, you’ll have to control your own character and command your teammates while you’re at it as you plan your every move. With the pause button, you fully engage with the action point system and keep track of all your basic attacks and cooldowns down to the last millisecond for the tougher fights.

Screenshot by Twinfinite

For a simpler and more widely understood analogy than Dragon Age: Origins, think of GreedFall 2’s combat like Baldur’s Gate 3 but without the turns. The combat is actually much more satisfying than what I initially thought it would be, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Many of the auto-attack situations feel incredibly slow and clunky, and you can’t always accurately gauge how much damage you’re about to take. However, my biggest complaint is the lack of a dedicated mobility button for dodging or defending, leaving your ranged units running around like headless chickens for most of the fight.

There are lots of abilities for you to unlock for each of your characters in GreedFall 2 and they can all serve a unique role for your team. There’s a variety of weapons, skills, armor, and other enchantments that make for a compelling team-building experience that I’d love to explore more of, as long as they can work out the chinks and make it feel more fluid overall.

Screenshot by Twinfinite

GreedFall 2: The Dying World also looks great and performs incredibly well for how good it looks. Environments are details with good lighting and textures that make even casual strolls in the forests you call your tribal home look incredibly beautiful. FPS remained smooth throughout my experience and while areas loaded a bit slower than I’d prefer, I’m glad to see that the team did not get lazy with performance optimizations with an over-reliance on DLSS or other frame generation technologies that are becoming all too common nowadays.

The story and roleplay feel great, the combat needs a bit of polish but feels satisfying, the environments are gorgeous and the performance is great, so what’s the issue, why did I say my feelings were mixed? Well, it mostly boils down to quality of life features. I eventually got frustrated and stopped playing the game due to a soft lock that would require losing an hour of progress. I’m not sure if that’s my fault for not being enough of a gamer to figure it out or if the quest marker simply broke on me. Quests are generally well cataloged in the Journal menu, which is great, but sometimes the directions and how to achieve them are incredibly confusing.

One of the starter quests requires four potions but one of the key components is nowhere to be found nearby no matter how hard you look. It doesn’t help that there was no merchant in the village to purchase anything from either (which does make sense in this tribe, but it’s still rather annoying). Ultimately I gave up on that endeavor, but this was just a starter quest. You can imagine what happens in future quests that come later. Some people love this style of quests—I’m personally usually a fan of these—but some incredibly unintuitive design choices make interacting with the systems in GreedFall 2 feel like a chore.

Screenshot by Twinfinite

As someone with hundreds of games under his belt including an undying love for even the roughest of soulslikes (looking at you, Enotria), I don’t mind a bit of jank or some degree of getting used to new systems. However, it felt like every other system I tried to interact with came with its own nonsensical confusion. How do I use a healing potion? How do I equip my new spells? Oh, there’s a stealth button? The sensory vision is cool, but why does it slow your movement so much? What do you mean there are strange controls for climbing up ledges and then I can’t drop off ledges or jump over even the smallest of obstacles on my path? Worst of all, what do you mean panning the camera to the right with my mouse sends my cursor to the secondary monitor so I need to turn it off?

On their own, these are all manageable minor issues that I can brush off and expect to be fixed with a bit of polish eventually. But, when these issues keep compounding, no matter how charming the core experience, it genuinely becomes a bother to have to deal with issues that should be basic quality-of-life measures. You’ll have to remind yourself that the game is in early access.

I see the passion behind GreedFall 2: The Dying World and having played it myself, I’m personally very excited to go back to it once they iron out the quality of life issues, because the combat and story were engaging and made me want to experience much more. I hope the developers are receptive to the player feedback, because RPG games like GreedFall 2: The Dying World are a love letter to the single-player story mode days of gaming make a comeback. 

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