Admittedly, GreedFall II: The Dying World was my first experience with the franchise, and it really wasn't a good one. Even though the game is in Early Access, I don't think it's even ready for that. Within the first 30 minutes of the game, I was immediately aware of how janky this game was and how dated it felt despite being developed and released for a modern audience. Admittedly, after seeing the main menu, I was hopeful and thought that the game had a lot of potential, as it's very aesthetically pleasing. However, my feelings were in the wrong place.
I got into the opening cutscene, which then took me into character creation, and I was hugely disappointed. The character creation was severely lacking- with the only options that 'mattered' to change being the hair. The several face presets that were available didn't offer much variation, and most of them had no 'attractive' qualities. There was only one face preset that I found remotely tolerable with the wild, untamed curls I used. It has been confirmed that face sliders will be added in the future, which is at least an upcoming benefit to making pretty characters in the game. Overall, the character creation is severely lacking, and the physics of the hair reminded me of that from The Sims 3. It had a chunky choppiness to it and didn't really provide much realism.
GreedFall 2: The Dying World is my first introduction to this franchise, and I immediately struggled to get to grips with it. Perhaps if I had used a controller, I would not have struggled as much, but this was really tricky. While there were tutorials given to you, it didn't really feel as if they were beneficial in any way whatsoever. As someone who had never played a game with this kind of combat system, I immediately found myself struggling. I read the tutorials, but they did not really provide enough information about them. However, once the combat clicked, it really clicked. It became much easier to deal with battles once I understood the system. In the early stages, the combat is very samey, as you don't have many skills to use at this point. Once you get into the later game, there's more variety to it, and you can choose to use abilities or just auto-attack, depending on how many action slots you have.
Navigation can be a little bit tricky to get used to, especially when you're in the starting area and trying to navigate yourself out of the weaving city. To make matters worse, running is a toggle. While I'm very much used to pressing Shift for running, most games I've played typically have you holding the button down. Every time my character stopped moving to look around, I had to toggle it, and sometimes it would toggle by itself, and my character would walk instead of run. The animation of running and walking is very stop-and-start and could do with a bit of buffering.
However, one feature I did really like about GreedFall 2: The Dying World was exploring the environment. A lot of the areas were very aesthetically pleasing to look at, especially with large flora and fauna in the overworld. The sun shining through the leaves was a great touch, and it helped provide an element of realism to the game. it reminded me of a lot of other games I've played with Celtic influence.
Questing is quite fun, but sometimes they take longer than they need to because of the markers on the map. If you are asked to look for something, the game sometimes highlights the area on the map and minimap to show you where you should be looking. However, when asked to look for clues near the river to find out what was poisoning people, the item I was looking for was way out of the area specified. I ended up scanning the area multiple times and searching absolutely everything, just for it to be nowhere near the river.
While exploration is a lot of fun, and there are items to be grabbed along the way, the transition between opening a door and stepping into a new area needs some work. Of course, at this point, I am fully aware the game is at the beginning of its Early Access, and the team is already working diligently on adding fixes and making the game a smoother experience for all. Still, I couldn't help but laugh, noticing how doors would lose all graphical fidelity when opening them, and you and your party would clip through the doors into a blinding light if you stepped outside.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with GreedFall 2: The Dying World, and I'm eager to see what improvements are made during the Early Access period. However, in its current state, I don't think I'll be playing it much more - it needs a lot of improvements.
