GreedFall 2: The Dying World Hands-On Preview (PC) – A Quick Shift To Early Access

GreedFall 2: The Dying World Hands-On Preview (PC) – Ever since I happened across Bound By Flame nine years ago, I have been hungry for every new title from French studio, Spiders. The steady trend with all of the team’s games is they come with several flaws but the strength of writing always helps to take the edge off.

Still, after this much time and the amount of developed games, fans start to expect a sense of organic growth. In many ways, Spiders has maintained that kind of growth, even with a foray into the Soulsborne genre. Above them all, though, GreedFall arguably stands as the team’s best title to date. This means a sequel demands a certain level of expectation much greater than what comes from a new IP.

Spiders is trying something different this time around by leaning heavily into Early Access. After my time with an early build of GreedFall 2: The Dying World, I get the feeling that the team doesn’t want to let down its fan base.

GreedFall 2: The Dying World Hands-On Preview (PC) – A Quick Shift to Early Access

To preface this preview, I only played the beta version of GreedFall 2: The Dying World using code provided by the publisher.

Just like the first GreedFall, you start the game getting your portrait painted, introducing you to the character creation screen. This time, though, you do not play as someone from the colonizing population. Instead, you take on the role of a person (your choice of gender expression) who is native to Teer Fradee, the location you explored in the first GreedFall. At present, character creation is quite limited with very few options.

A couple differences here, though: The Dying World takes place three years prior to the events in the first GreedFall. The other caveat is that you, a native to Teer Fradee, have already been seized by colonists and brought back to Gacane, the continent where the original GreedFall started.

Narratively, much of what I experienced during my beta access is relatively straightforward. Just like in the first game, you get dialogue choice along the way and can use your passive skills to avoid confrontations and combat. These choices didn’t affect the grand scheme of things too much during my playtime.

With that in mind, GreedFall offered some choices that affected the outcome long-term, but nothing outside of the ending choice truly moved the course of the story. So far, this seems to be a similar delivery with The Dying World. Again, I only played a small portion of the game, so speculating doesn’t help much with that small of a gameplay pool.

One significant addition I truly love seeing in Dying World is the ability to find other ways to traverse certain stop gaps in the map. What I mean is that the first GreedFall required that you have a certain level of agility to jump larger gaps. Here, if you don’t level up to accommodate jumping gaps, you instead can find kits and objects to get through the stop gap. In this case, you build a plank bridge to get across.

In combat, you also have free reign to either control all three of your combatants manually or set the other two to fight on their own. The D-Pad allows you to jump between characters on the fly, making this process very straightforward. Then, you also have control over the pace of combat. Naturally, you can pause the battle to strategize.

Conversely, you can run combat at double speed. This helps to make the automated aspects of combat feel more visually stimulating. In a couple of ways, this reminds me of how combat was handled in Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age (but without the Gambit System). You set the auto-attack and then input skills as needed.

Ultimately, though, this is a stark contrast to combat from the original GreedFall. The first game used action fighting controls, complete with dodge mechanics. I can get into both styles of gameplay in most games. To credit the new gameplay in GreedFall 2, I tend to respond well to the “set it and forget it” approach of some RPG combat mostly because I go after Platinum Trophies.

Combat potentially intimidates me due to one thing: its “real-time with pause” nature. This combat combines bits and pieces of Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins. Despite those comparisons, though, it took me an hour or so to come around to what combat wants me to do. I initially took to combat like I did in the Dragon Age games, where I make inputs on the fly and swap between characters.

However, GreedFall 2 asks a fair amount more of you if you wish to manage the battlefield manually. This is where the pause option becomes practically mandatory, especially when learning the ropes. Without using pause, another one of your characters has already died by the time you make adjustments on your first character. This is where I got held up: I wanted to keep playing in real-time.

Considering GreedFall 2 is coming to consoles, another factor to consider is controller support. Currently, the game does most of what you want to do. However, random commands like crouch require manual mapping. Then, getting the camera to properly cooperate requires some doing. There’s generally a joystick input delay, even on the lowest settings. This is why I started to lean heavily into pausing combat. I can input a few skills per character, do a little positioning, and let them do their thing.

The benefit of this situation is the game is still in Early Access. This leaves some extra time for players to provide feedback and for Spider to improve the game before its official release. Unfortunately, that official release is quite a ways away, with the early access roadmap talking about incremental updates to the game through this winter.

From an overall experience, GreedFall 2 reminds me of my first run through Bound By Flame, flaws and all. The big difference here is that Spider has developed several games between then and now, and the types of flaws here don’t coax the same kind of empathy that they did in Bound By Flame. With that said, only 30% of the game appears in Early Access. However, I get the feeling that the team is worried it might be making some creative missteps and wants the player base to give it some feedback.

Much like my time with Bound By Flame, I like the potential that GreedFall 2 hints at. Either way, Spider still has a long way to go to finish its latest offering.