Sometimes a good trailer is all it takes to make me buy a game.
No, that’s not true. But it helps. If a game floats across my Steam feed (whose algorithms might be getting scarily accurate at showing me things I might like) and the trailer intrigues, I’ll stick it on my wishlist which basically bookmarks it for later consideration. Greedfall was one of those and I can’t remember if it was this trailer specifically which caught my attention but it’s close enough:
Like many trailers this one has the fault of not bothering to show any actual gameplay but the concept alone got points. It looked like a fantasy RPG set not in the usual faux-Medieval or Early Renaissance period but instead the Colonial era of the 17th and 18th Centuries, complete with a “New World” being encroached upon by the Old.
Focus Interactive is the publisher and while I can’t say all their stuff has been hits with me they’re an indie studio that at least doesn’t leave the bad corporate taste in my mouth that a soulless megalith like EA does. Anyhow when Black Friday rolled around a sale came up and I decided to take the plunge, though foregoing my usual hours-long character customization process for RPGs so I could get in and make sure nothing was a deal breaker before my two hours of active play were up and I couldn’t refund the purchase.
So anyhow, the EA comparison is relevant for more than my disgruntlement with the modern AAA gaming industry. Or I should say, more relevant than I expected.
Greedfall is a Bioware RPG in the classic sense. Meaning before EA bought out Bioware and gutted it into a corpse wearing a label it no longer deserves to brandish. Yes, I have opinions. I will not go into them right now. Just suffice it to say that Greedfall’s gameplay reminded me so much of the first Mass Effect that I was shocked to discover it doesn’t appear anyone on the dev team is a Bioware expat. In fact, the game was made in France, by spiders.
No, really.
Behold the opening titles
But seriously, it feels so much like Mass Effect and other Bioware offerings of their golden age, right down to the way your character reverses direction while running. Companions, dialogue choices, reputations, interactions, combat… and while I haven’t played through enough yet to find out if it’s got one of those big twists Bioware was famous for back in the day, the story is maturely presented and interesting in its complexity. Meanwhile the world is delivered pretty much as promised, and thankfully isn’t just a matter of “greedy invaders versus virtuous natives” (or vice-versa as it might have been in an earlier era). Bioware always liked having some grey areas even in a morally bipolar setting like Star Wars, and the Spiders revel in the moral murkiness of their original setting. There is a New World and there are natives and there are three main nations of the Old World each laying claim to a part, and you happen to be a highly important diplomat of the most neutral of them, a merchant kingdom who is trying to negotiate a place for your interests between the natives, the religious nation, and the science nation. Also there’s a terrible plague devastating your homeland and you’re hoping to find a cure.
You can choose to be male or female and customize your looks to an extent, including being non-white if you so wish (your name will always be De Sardet however, much like a former protagonist was always Shepherd). There are debates to be had on how white and male history truly was but the world of Greedfall establishes early on that it is most definitely not Earth, neatly sidestepping any such conversations. That said, the religious nation definitely has Catholic trappings and a Spanish flair to its style while the science nation is very Ottoman. The natives near as I can tell are somewhere between Amerindian and Pictish/Celtic in their inspirations, with a rather unplaceable accent that sounds like someone who isn’t Irish trying to sound like what they think an Irish person sounds like. As you might expect the natives have a druidic nature magic going, but the church folks have their own divine magic and the scientists have guns and alchemical mixtures for days. The New World (which is more of a large island, really) is definitely going for a temperate feel rather than Caribbean and you’ll be journeying through some lovely Autumnal forests and other tableaus of primeval North America on your quests, though no one seems to want to talk much about the active volcano at its heart.
It’s not on sale at the moment so the price tag on Steam is back up to $49.99 and I wouldn’t necessarily gush and say to pay it, unless you really pine for the good old days of Bioware past and want to support an indie title which really does have a surprising amount of polish to it. And even if the Spiders aren’t actually Bioware, they sure do seem like Bioware’s biggest fans in a way that so far I can only praise.
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2 thoughts on “536 – Great State Of Tech Sass”
Anonymous
Amusing spam above … Things are about to get weird with Casa De Chuck!
Dawn
Ugh, I try to get to the SPAM quicker but we have a new kitty and I have been distracted. It is gone now. 😀