Greedfall (Xbox Game Pass Review)
Bioware is dead.
At least that’s what I told myself as I sat and played through Greedfall. The small French developer called Spiders has carved out a particular niche for themselves. One that involves channeling the action RPGs of of the past into the now.
Greedfall feels like somebody asked what Dragon Age might be like if there were tricorn hats and flintlock firearms. In a 17th century colonial style world multiple factions vie for control of a mysterious island. You play as a diplomat for one of these factions desperate to find a cure for a plague ravaging your people and the island’s natives may hold the key to said cure.
Throughout my 50 hours or so put into the game I found myself occasionally wowed by a studio that proudly proclaims they have over 20 employees on their website. There is an aspect of wanting to root for the underdog, of willfully ignoring the cracks as they present themselves. In between the cool moments is excessive tedium. One quest line involved an evil slaver exploiting the natives. Most games would lead to a binary choice of kill/don’t kill him. Here instead you go to a library and find his land contract. Since your character isn’t a lawyer you have to go to multiple people and get them to interpret the deed followed by finally killing him. It isn’t the conversation or the goal that’s the issue to me. I’d pick interesting dialogues and world building over shoddy combat every time.
The issue here is literally walking and fast traveling. Most of my time spent with the game was just getting from place to place. Cities are far too large for the amount of NPCs. Forest paths intentionally curve and bend to steal time from the player. Fast travel points are all over and yet not enough of them get you where you want to be. The game even cuts in multiple times towards the endgame and lets you instantly teleport around in a guilty admission of all the time wasting.
I don’t even know if I blame the developers. This is just where things are now. Skyrim came out ten years ago and pushed open world gaming into a place where distance and time equals money well spent. The Witcher 3 came out 6 years ago and made it so every piece of a giant open world game now requires writing, voice acting, and a twist to let you know that the writers have played one of these before.
This is what makes Greedfall so refreshing in certain moments as it’s limitations feel like a gift. A quest giver will tell you to pick up that thing and you go pick up that thing. Then modern gaming rears it’s ugly head as you sprint to a fast travel point, teleport to a town, and then sprint again to turn it in. It’s even more frustrating as the combat is not bad at all. While presenting as rather shallow when fighting copy/paste mobs, boss fights had a lot of room for strategy and ducking out of harm’s way at just the right moment. It also never got old for a bunch of dorks wielding swords to come at me and in response I blast them with a blunderbuss. I could’ve gone for a little more of the very intense metaphor that presents itself whenever you pull a gun on an ancient nature guardian.
The main overarching story is rather dry for the most part. It dips it’s toes into reckoning with a colonial narrative, but it’s mostly surface level. The factions are all portrayed neutrally which leads to a few murky moral choices. Most of the mileage I get out of these types of games are the companions and they are a little underwritten, but well acted. Petrus, an old religious warrior who is also a bit of snake, was one of my favorites due in part to some great voice acting and a quest line involving blackmailing high ranking cardinals with info on secret orgies and gambling fraud.
The game’s faults seem to lie in the modern AAA need for more. Mass Effect and KOTOR were stiff, clunky, and would be over in 30 hours. Yet I loved them and play them over and over again. Now a game in the Assassin’s Creed series takes a lifetime to finish and is still just as clunky and crudely formed. Bioware says don’t worry about that whole Anthem thing, they’re making Dragon Age 4/Mass Effect, but I am very worried. A genre that I love seems to be on the way out of AAA gaming and relegated to spiritual successors with small budgets and an isometric top down camera view. I love those games as well, but it’s a shame that there is a disconnect between interesting role playing experiences like Disco Elysium or Wasteland 3 and the AAA gaming space. Maybe the CRPGs of old don’t make the same money that shooter franchises make out of the gate, but it’s easy to point to Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim and see a fan base devoted to playing and buying them wherever they can. We’ve just passed the 10 year anniversary of both the aforementioned games and neither has received a true sequel. Think about that, it’s been a whole decade and nothing other than what feels like a few dozen re-releases for Skyrim and Bethesda intentionally sidestepping New Vegas. Say what you will about Hollywood movies churning out infinite franchise fare in a short amount of time, but it at least makes sense from a business standpoint.
Bioware was doing something a little more refined and focused than the giant open world Bethesda RPGs for a time, but then swiftly found the gutter last generation with Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda. Now I sit and watch whenever they send out the never ending barrage of teasers and sneak peaks with dread knowing that it’s probably over. The Bioware I know and love is dead by the hands of corporate EA stooges and a gaming audience that increasingly demands perfection along with enhanced fidelity even though the games we all love are most often the messy ones with character and charm.
I don’t regret the time I’ve spent with Greedfall, but I wish it played to it’s strengths which are the strengths of the genre without the smoke and mirrors needed to make the game seem larger than it is. They don’t have to fall into the trap that these big studios have. It’s depressing to pop story achievements on the Xbox and they’re designated as rare with low percentages of players getting them.
On the whole I’m excited for the future of Spiders. It gives me hope to see a small group of talented folks on the verge of making something great and their next game titled Steelrising, features King Louis XVI creating an army of Automata to stop the French Revolution. An appropriately wild setting for the French studio to sink their teeth into. If Bioware is truly gone as I suspect then someone has to pick up the pieces and maybe they’re a worthy successor.
