The original Greedfall was a cult hit when it launched back in 2019, so fans were excited to find out a second game was being released into Early Access this year. A few eyebrows were raised at The Dying World being a prequel, but early announcements sold the idea of discovering how the island of Teer Fradee and its inhabitants dealt with the influx of colonial exploration. This wider aspect of depicting the impact of colonialism was probably the most interesting part of the first game so I was keen to explore this more. After a few somewhat frustrating hours with the game’s Early Access build, I was left questioning not the story being told so much as the changes made to the game’s mechanics.
The very beginning of The Dying World offers an attempt at transition from the previous game. You choose your character from a very limited creation process (and no option for baldness – at least not deliberately) and have a pretty exposition heavy conversation with a friendly member of the Alliance. You are soon interrupted and told to visit the village leaders to find out more about your destiny as a Sage and the initiation ritual you must undergo to fulfil this role. The first few hours play out as a tutorial that encompasses the initiation tasks and involve you exploring the island and  learning the basics of combat and investigation.
To complete the ritual you are tasked with two main objectives – find out what is causing a mysterious sickness in the village and also what is killing off the local wildlife. It is no real surprise that the answer to both is colonialism, but there are different approaches you can take to resolve them. While these largely revolve around which person you choose to talk to, I always welcome alternative paths in RPGs. Once you complete these initial tasks the story takes a pretty major turn that promises to explore a very different aspect to this world.
So far so good, but what I’ve described here is almost entirely storyline rather than performance or game mechanics. It is here that things fall down unfortunately. First up, while this game is in Early Access, its performance on PC is pretty woeful with frame drops and stutters on a system that exceeds the recommended specs. Many times textures failed to load properly altogether and characters were left with flat blanks rather than clothing. I encountered several crashes and although I didn’t lose much progress due to frequent autosaving it did become annoying. Other players have reported a hilarious bug that leads their character’s hair to disappear and for them to remain bald (an option not available in the character creation). When things loaded in correctly, Greedfall II looks nice enough, although not exactly cutting edge. Some of the visual design is nice though so I’m hopeful that this will shine through in a more polished build.
Perhaps the bigger issue, and certainly the one that is most complained about on the Steam forums, is the change from a real-time action combat approach to a more tactical old-school turn-based one here. The effect is a return to the gameplay of the likes of the first Dragon Age and it feels like a bold choice. The boldness is undermined, however, by how messy the combat feels at the moment.
There are very few abilities early in the game and so most fights feel as if they are playing themselves, an issue not helped by companions who seem to go running off in whatever direction they fancy. Hopefully later builds will explain the group mechanics more helpfully, as well as how to actually use healing potions and consumables. There are accessibility sliders that enable you to customise the damage dealt and taken to your preference which again is welcome, but I maxed these out to make the combat go as quickly as possible during my time.
Voice acting is decent and a fair range of regional accents are present, although a few characters seemed to veer between different accents almost at random. Most interestingly, a lot of the early dialogue takes place entirely in the Yecht Fradà language with subtitles for translation. I liked this approach but those who don’t enjoy the possible immersion breaking effect of reading subtitles may think differently.
All in all, Greedfall II is a strange beast and I can’t really recommend picking up the Early Access unless you are passionate about following its progress towards 1.0. The performance issues, the graphical glitches and overall instability are annoying enough (albeit a common feature in pre-release games) but the change to the combat is a controversial one that could well alienate many returning fans.
