GreedFall
Developer Spiders — the team behind titles like Bound by Flame and The Technomancer returned to our screens this year with GreedFall. This was a classic, old-school RPG that really honed in on world building and fully-realizing its characters.
While GreedFall certainly feels budget in some ways and its combat leaves a lot to be desired, it makes up for this with its excellent writing and quest design.
The story is great, following our protagonist as they explore a remote island teeming with magic, creatures, and of course, quests.
Quest design is something Spiders has clearly taken a lot of time with in GreedFall. Each one is long and complex and often dives into the characters they follow or involve under a microscope.
It gives you more of an insight into the world and that character’s connection to their surroundings and the narrative. This makes quests feel like so much more than just doing a fetch quest for some random, inconsequential character you’ll never see again.
What makes GreedFall stand out from the rest of the pack is the way in which it forces you to think about what your saying to NPCs. Each faction in the game has its own relationship with you and what you say to them will affect this.
Faction relationships change the story and ending, and companions can just leave you if you don’t complete their quests and rub them the wrong way.
Ultimately, GreedFall takes a basic RPG foundation and then tries to fashion something new in its complex quests and relationships systems. If you’re an RPG fan and missed out on GreedFall, go and right that wrong before the year ends.
