With the news that the latest Dragon Age game, The Veilguard, is moving away from the tactical combat system first introduced in Origins towards a more action-focused formula, you might be pining for something a little closer to Bioware's 2009 classic. Enter Greedfall 2: The Dying World.
Developed Spiders and published by Nacon, this tactical Greedfall 2. I was pleasantly surprised by the flexibility of its combat system and the amount of control and creativity it offers. I was able to pause combat to rethink my approach, reposition my party, and consider my tactics without feeling rushed, but I'm told there is even more customization on the way.
I spoke to Spiders CEO and co-founder Jehanne Rousseau, and she detailed just how much control players will have over the fights in the game. "We realized that part of our players just don't like combat in general, so we've got a system that is the regular way to play the game, but we're also working on adding a difficulty system with different sliders so you can do more damage [or] have more health points to the point that you're nearly invincible. You can play with these sliders for your group or your own character. You can also make the monsters more vulnerable," she tells me. With this level of customization, you can opt to fly through the combat to focus instead on the characters and story, or you can ramp up the challenge if you really want to master its systems.
If you're not a combat-lover, Rousseau tells me that Greedfall 2 will include more pacifistic ways to complete quests. "You can still sneak and lockpick doors, or you can try to use diplomacy to convince guys to let you go." She also details a possible scenario where you give an injured man a healing potion, then, hours later, he returns the favor by convincing an initially antagonistic group that they needn't attack you. "We tried really hard to add hidden ways to solve things to make the experience more unique," she explains.
Rousseau mentions that combat against humans can often be avoided, though she concedes that monsters may be ever so slightly harder to talk down, which is where those sliders come into play. Spiders is focused on catering to its players' needs, and Rousseau tells me that she learned an important lesson from the development of the original Greedfall. "Let's allow players to choose their difficulty level exactly," she says. "Who cares? If they want to experience the thing as it was designed, they won't touch the sliders. If the player wants to just adjust things for them, they can do it."
She references the debate around soulslike games where select players insist there should be no difficulty options – a viewpoint she disagrees with. "I can certainly understand the idea of being hurt – you like it, it's fine. But people are already hurt by life, so maybe we should be able to listen to them too," she tells me. "In a game like Greedfall, where there's a story, there are so many other elements, it's not a problem to open the door to different people. I've created a world I want them to be able to enjoy."
Greedfall 2 will enter Steam early access this summer for "around a year" while Spiders works on its roap. If you can't wait for the game to release, we've got the games to get excited about in the meantime.