GreedFall II: The Dying World

I went into The Dying World carrying real goodwill from the original GreedFall, a game that charmed its way past obvious budget constraints on the back of political storytelling and a genuinely interesting colonial setting. That goodwill gets tested fast here. Developer Spiders made a bold pivot for this prequel: out goes the responsive action combat the first game built its rhythm around, and in comes a real-time-with-pause tactical system where you can queue orders for each party member or pause to manage all four at once. The ambition is obvious. The execution is shaky. The story sets you up as Vriden Gerr, a native of Teer Fradee - the name means 'Rootless' in the game's fully constructed, fully voice-acted indigenous language, which is one of the most impressive creative touches here - who has been ripped from the island and dragged to the colonists' dying continent of Gacane. Themes of enslavement, cultural erasure, and political factionalism are front and centre in ways that feel more pointed than your average fantasy RPG. The writing earns its ambition more often than it stumbles, and the companion roster is generous: you can accumulate upwards of eight companions in the first act alone, most with their own personal side quests that give them actual shape beyond combat utility. The problem is getting to all of that through the combat. The tactical system has real ideas - swapping between party members mid-fight, pausing to redirect flanking moves, building a party composition around complementary skills - but AI pathing misbehaves, characters sometimes ignore queued orders outright, and enemy AI locks onto targets in ways that make positioning feel pointless. The gear progression is actually solid: equipment has quality tiers from Uncommon up to Legendary, and the Craftsmanship skill lets you upgrade weapons and armor at a crafting table in ways that reward attentive players. But late-game encounters rarely demand that you use any of it, because the challenge curve flattens before it should. The world design is a genuine bright spot. Multiple large regions replace the first game's single-island setting, and while it stops short of a fully open world, the environments are carefully built with a 17th-century-inspired aesthetic layered over fantasy creature encounters and Malichor plague lore. Side quests range from busywork to genuinely flavourful, though not with the consistency that made the original so easy to marathon. Performance and bugs were a documented problem at early access launch in September 2024, and while the November 2025 update overhauled combat and added new content, reviews at the March 2026 full release still flagged technical issues severe enough to interrupt progress. This is the last game Spiders will ever ship. The studio closed in 2026 after Nacon failed to find a buyer. That context makes The Dying World feel bittersweet regardless of its flaws. There is a good RPG buried inside it, patient enough to reward players who click with the tactical combat setting, genuinely interesting in its themes, and impressive in its constructed-language worldbuilding. It just asks you to do more excavation than a polished game should require. If you loved the first GreedFall and can tolerate rough edges, the world is still worth visiting. If you never played the original, start there.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on GreedFall II: The Dying World.