This is one of those mornings where I am baring skirting by and don’t feel like I have much at all to talk about. I am fully enthralled by Greedfall at the moment and will be pushing forward until I have reached the ultimate conclusion of the game. The experience is far from perfect, but it does make me wonder what other gems in the rough are out there. Paradox for me at least has been a very hit and miss publisher and I guess this is just going to happen with the sheer number of titles they are willing to put out there. This is my first game developed by Spiders, and from what I can tell this is sort of their thing… releasing interesting but flawed game experiences. I do plan on poking my head into The Technomancer at some point which was their last release prior to Greedfall.
I guess I should at some point expand a bit on what I mean by a flawed game. It is just the little things that are not quite as well implemented as they could be. The camera and movement feels a little off in a way that is really hard to explain. Combat while enjoyable also feels a little less fluid than it maybe should be, and it gets real tiresome listening to your companions spout the exact same line over and over every time you engage anything and often times multiple times during that engagement. The character models and facial animations are maybe just a little stilted as well, nothing to the extreme of pre-patch andromeda but still not quite there. As a whole the game is extremely enjoyable and I am very impressed by the voice acting, which while not going to win anyone an award doesn’t drop me out of immersion into the world. What I mean by flawed is that everything feels just one or two degrees off what it should be and as a result it feels like an imperfect experience, but nonetheless one still worth experiencing.
I think more than anything what is keeping me tied into the game is the setting and its story, because I feel like this is someplace video games have not really successfully gone yet. The colonial era is a stain on the many countries who participated in this age of conquest and it isn’t often that you see this played out in any manner other than through a 4X/Strategy game. I choose to play the Legate of the Congregation of Merchants as anything but a neutral party. I side with the native population and have been doing my best to mend the way between the colonists and the original inhabitants of Teer Fradee. As a result I am more or less always running around with Siora the daughter of a tribal chief and Vasco the Naut that brought us here and seems to be a similarly inclined character.
On the opposite side of this… I have no interest at all in running around with Father Petrus a missionary of Theleme the faction of religious zealots. I am also not at all interested in running around with Aphra, who at face value seems fine… but is representative of the Bridge Alliance a group of scientists that seem to do all manner of nasty things to the native population in the name of progress. Kurt is more or less neutral and I am fine using him whenever I need to, but I am just way more comfortable with Vasco and Siora as my primary party. This is a thing that happens when I play these sort of games, is that I develop a group that I prefer to run with and then never really mess with other characters unless I am doing side quests that require them. I played Dragon Age Origins almost exclusively with Morrigan, Alistair and Leiliana.
While I feel like I have spent a lot of time dwelling on the imperfections, I feel like I need to drive home the point that I am extremely well engaged with this game. I am going to be playing it to a fault of pretty much everything else until I make my way through the story. It took me a bit to engage with it due to those flaws when it initially released and as a result it was placed on the shelf until I recently restarted it. However now that I am in the mix of the game play I am driving forward towards the eventual conclusion of the story arc. One bit of warning that I give for players however is to maybe look up some guides on the romance options, because I almost accidentally found my way into one without really knowing that was where I was heading. Unlike Dragon Age there will be no icon with a heart on it to tell you that you are heading in that direction. I legitimately look forward to seeing what the next game from Spiders looks like, because based on my reading each time they release a new title they improve and iterate slightly on the one that came before.
