Playing Greedfall: An Unadventurous Spirit

the reception of grateful has been odd to me I received comments telling me that spiders had finally done it they had hit the mark and made a genuinely good if not great RPG and I had to cover it these comments fell away quick and obviously the reception wasn't isolated people telling me to play it if it was it would not have shifted quite so many copies there were also shallow reductive headlines stating that spiders had finally taken Bioware's place or were at the very least filling the void left behind with spiders CEO themselves stating this was part of their hopes with their new title I may be presumptuous to argue with the company head they know their business far better than I do but I disagree of the comparison even though I do understand it the two of them have always focused on RPGs that emphasized presentation over nuanced decision making but Bioware always had something spiders did not an absurd excess of cash and manpower which allowed that presentation to dazzle spiders well I'm not saying they shouldn't pick a fight like this just that it's a fight that had to be fought not on Bioware's turf and despite his credit they were at least clever about it they focused their tails around settings and themes by always epic scope and mainstream appeal wouldn't in my experience a low-key dirty post-apocalyptic story on a mad max-style Mars I can't imagine Bioware tackling this spiders can't fight Bioware on scale so they went a more subversive route with unique settings and small-scale tiles using that tie of focus to their advantage but that isn't quite right now is it despite their smaller scope they still had issues with their worlds lacking in definition worlds which are internally contradictory and downright ill explained always dark and cynical and outlook but always half-heartedly so despite this my relationship with spiders has up until now been one of half charmed fascination I have a fondness for their sloppy storytelling oddball worlds and janky mechanics it made spiders into an underdog that I enjoy rooting for and now they are aiming so much higher greed fall is their most ambitious project to date their most straightforward Lee Bioware project to date following three countries as they make inroads into the new world how they butt heads with both each other and the natives it has a large cast with plentiful potential conflicts a large setting bursting with apparent history in ancient mysteries which ripple into the current day and you are placed at the center of all this it's your job to fight explore and play games of politics for your nation there is so much room here to excite so much room here to intrigue and so much room for questioning and it's by far the dullest experience I've had with a game this year I didn't want spiders to be the next Bioware I want them to be the first and most fascinating spiders and well despite my disagreement with the intent and the reception I cannot knock it on numbers it has been a good seller for them and it clearly has its fans I'm not amongst them grateful is a game that's trying to punch far above its weight bill on a shoddy foundation that it wants to ignore while managing to definitely dodge every bit of promise that arises and it does so while killing itself with conveniences and contrivances both for itself and for the player we've a long journey ahead of us there will be spoilers fairly early on I'll be jumping around in the plot a lot having played grateful yourself will help by hopes provide enough context for those who weren't planning on it for those who can't watch this video in one go there are timestamps in the description for each topic I have a lot of points to make about mechanics and storytelling both and YouTube affords me the time to make them I hope with this video I'll take you on an adventure for a game that struggles to have any also Merry Christmas it is December after all I can't deny however the greed for makes a good first impression the opening hours marked the height of the storytelling and decision-making on display we open having our portrait done by the most powerful character in the saying a man will never see again the artist sir - core tone his portraits can shape your face set your skills and turn you from man to woman yeah I saw that that was a bloke moments ago core tone could we please move am i over the Sun is getting in the way of character creation I had intended multiple runs for this video when I was more optimistic I thought I'd do free one for each of the three classes which is pretty meaningless since you can build as you like for a slew of reasons I wound up only doing two runs and honestly I'm surprised we have that many I still did tackle all free classes mind grade fall is using the same skeleton is technomancers handle stack growth but the minor details have been switched around and there are a couple of minor additions to the game play along with features reintroduced from war logs albeit with some refinement my first player who saw me based my appearance off an old tabletop character of mine a quasi Italian yet named after a Gaul Crixus I had wanted to roleplay as the celebrity gladiator but well that wasn't on the cards there is frankly little role playing to be done and a few hours in I realized he looked like Prince Charming from Shrek which improved my experience were grateful a good deal this run was played on hard my second playthrough was done with the intent of doing everything wrong I had another RPG character I was going to play a fantasy Irish gunslinger named Devon yeah but I didn't want to sell one of my own characters down the river like that so evil Anya here is only named that by coincidence this was played on Xtreme the toughest difficulty I've away we're playing as de sade the leg of the congregation a fairly hefty position especially so given our young age we were given the job due to our possible competency and close relation to the d'Orsay family but d'Orsay are the rulers of the congregation of merchants what does the Leggett do however well we're basically a combat diplomat with an indeterminate amount of agency today we're supposed to be departing with our cousin constant into the new world the island of tear Freddy with him acting as governor of our seemingly fledgling settlement of new Suri but there is a problem your cousin is nowhere to be found well the good news is we'll find him or get promoted I am sorry sir truly I must be going Thank You cousin for getting me out of that okay but first NPC I can talk to sire I'm sorry I'm afraid that I won't make for good company on the way to our important business a tutorial is logged as a company by their most loyal and tenacious master of arms as loyal as your goal enough with the cold mercenary and they like us just gonna say cut that was in my inventory how'd you get Kurt has been sawed and Constantine's master arm since they were kids and he's tagging along for the journey I say he should take his own advice and stay out of our pockets let's think about that advice for a moment he's been teaching us how to fight since we were kids honour has historically not being what wins battles so I disregard it and beat him earning the right to skip the tutorial and with that we're left with one final farewell to make before we head out what is this have you not been taught to knock I've asked a thousand times oh it's you my dear child Sade's mother has fallen victim to the Malik or a deadly plague ravaging the continent Sade doesn't want to leave her side but with rumors abound of a cure in the new world she encourages Sade to go she's happy her child might be saving their people even if it's unlikely she'll live to see it she's probably going to pass away before we even make landfall on tier forty having been completely in the dark about the plague plot before actually picking the game up having dodged all spoilers and discussion of it pre-release this was a strong reveal for me and a good heroic drive for Sergei's future actions but it does also make me realize something about Sade in retrospect totally unique to them it's a price paid by many cinematic RPG protagonists but they have to half exist as a player owned avatar espousing their choices while simultaneously acting as their own character who has to justify them yet we've just enough flexibility to not be a total walking contradiction that flexibility is often done by making them not have any character at all there is an element to Sade I do truly enjoy we'll see it later on in the prologue but as their own person they so rarely get seems to a moat in any way with small exceptions such as this side a is perhaps the flattest entity imaginable for 95% of the runtime all my blessings go with you my child now be off the opening does a really good job of being entertaining in its own right while really selling tear 4d and making me want to get there following that scene with our mother we head out into the city of serene I guess I'll call it old serene because you know we got new serene as well our surroundings are sickly the streets claustrophobic dirty and dilapidated with alleys and roads cut off by crumbling infrastructure the dying lay on bed rolls behind the barracks and all that waste them is a pyre in the town centre many people you speak to are in the early stages of the malloc or the mood is dire all around with the only bright spot being a barman saying that the Malek or is somehow not communicable person-to-person which at least means people are going outside again yet whenever people talk about tier 4d they brighten up it's a land of mystery and Wonder and hope it's untainted it is a magnificent place mines for now I can't wait to get there and fix that oh and that's Vasco he's the one captaining the vessel to take us over if all is in order we will soon be embarking on your boat [ __ ] apologies but we need Constantine before we can do that and to check off a few chores besides we gotta tell the ambassador's of our neighboring countries to lay May in the bridge Alliance of our departure and Co asks if we can help with an inventory dispute he's being put in charge off that's optional mine but I'll probably do it now I know this is an RPG but there is frankly something hilarious about us of all people acting like an RPG character oh look there goes the young noble gutting bandits in a back alley like a common fish old serene hosts for side quests which are used to sell the continental powers all of whom have already set up shop on tier 4d every nation is basically a nation of hats there's the ultra-religious thule may with a focus on magic and the alchemical ultra scientific bridge alliance despite magic potions requiring alchemy the two groups are tragically at war which is portrayed in typical spiders fashion to my knowledge no one has yet seen any serious fighting we're part of the congregation of merchants so I'll give you three guesses what we're all about and we sit in the middle as a neutral party then we have the coin God and the noughts now I might be missing some historical context but a coin guard but they are a mercenary guild and by far and away the largest military presence in the game as in kur is a coin guard the man who was guarding and training the son of the d'Orsay family is a mercenary there are state militaries for each of the free nations even if ours is only alluded to an incidental dialogue but every nation even the two warring ones make heavy use of coin guard services now I know against this by itself properly set up and used as a narrative tool there is plenty that could be said and done with the coin God being as widespread as they are I could buy us using it no pun intended that we are so into trading and privatization that we use a wholly private military for day-to-day operations that could be fascinating but well we clearly don't it's just that our national military is never important to the story so don't think about it you may say snake you did think about it just then but well this world is so lacking in detail and contradictory though I really am just fear rising on the game's behalf this detail of the coin God being technically independent could be used for so much more conflict than it ever truly will be there will be conflict it will just be a kind of crap the noughts are more believable if only because the story makes a point of how they've acquired their position they're the only seafaring force in the world they utilize magic to ride the waves a feat no of a faction can replicate they're the only ships you will see in the water giving them immense way that they will never actually use for anything what humble sailors they are there goes our aspiring legen wearing the robes of that man he killed both the Tulane a and bridge ambassador's need us for a job both of them follow the exact same beats in both cases we're pointed to a person or persons that ambassador once brought to justice these persons are using the congregation's more lacks religious or trading laws as a safe haven it turns out in both cases that the Ambassador hid information about the cult and we ultimately must decide their fate with the delay mates a couple of heretics who turn out to be historians staunch believers at that who interpreted sacred tablets from one of their Saints in a way the censor did not like the tablet stating that a disciple of their prophet st. Matthias Saint Lucius in his later years on tier 4 D started hearing voices to the illuminated this sounded like an accusation of one of their Saints falling to madness or worse demonic possession despite knowing their interpretation to be correct the historians are ready and willing to toss out their work and never speak of it again but that wasn't enough for the censor the bridge meanwhile wants us to arrest a charlatan selling snake oil in our city I'll confess in a world where healing potions are real I kind of have to respect that hustle well he turns out to be a disgraced professor who fled the Al Saud University he held the controversial opinion of being against cruel tests performed on live humans what small nuance there is to this is that the fake medicines he is selling on the road are experimental remedies in his hope to crack the Malick or he's aware of his own hypocrisy but claims to have only harmed people's wallets in his pursuits well call me a softie or a contrarian but I let everyone go what are you saying yeah we're the new kid and we've just upset the guests I get ready for Sade to apologize on my behalf like so many protagonists past as if I didn't know what I was doing I'll take the reputation here and be told to do better next time and you too a leggett of the congregation of merchants that you treat like an imbecile this man is indeed an alchemist at the bridge and he told me much about your disagreement of opinion and of course you sided with him me not I have no part to play in your quarrels I just chased him from our city now if you're still intent on placing him in irons you need to catch him on your own lands - or not yes are they don't [ __ ] play he froze the book at the bastards yeah we get saw him to apologize meanwhile I'm Tony it just gets condescending in defeat I'm still getting a rep here but I'm gladly taking it after that they expected to be able to run circles around the young Sade but they were not ready for the diplomatic monster that just walked door that's sad day why is he taking bullies out of their books it's at the least an interesting decision we're dealing with here well framed and with a few avenues to weigh up what we're doing since we can also see turning them in as a part of our job we're trying to stay neutral here we could allow these ambassador's to get what they wanted to appease them that might dodge further fall out while I clearly don't agree with going that route it's justifiable for trying to keep tensions down the north's and congregations share a quest it concerns a missing cabin boy he's been kidnapped by a congregation noble Sade learns that the north take more than coin is acceptable payment and it used to be Congregation tradition to hand over a bunch of noble family kids in return for nought services now that's no longer required it's something individual families can opt into doing of their own discretion to make trade deals and so on I do love that Vasco doesn't give much of a [ __ ] about the cabin boy until he learns it was a noble reneging on a deal so I go and get him back from his heartbroken dad the coin guard quest is just a ton of bureaucracy it's not terribly interesting but it does introduce stealth mechanics which you can totally ignore by wearing the right shirt oh look it's you stealth is no longer an upgradable stat a small handful of quests ask you to engage with stealth to avoid reputation loss in this case we need to get a bunch of coin guide cargo on our ship by adding them to the manifest so they'll be loaded on we basically just have to you know bypass bureaucracy which I'm fine with grateful touts the existence of faction restricted zones where you'll be attacked on sight again if you're not wearing the right shirt but throughout the game I only recall these belonging to noughts and only a rising two or three times I think it's because the nods have so little impact on the story after the first five hours that they can be sacrificed I might be getting ahead of myself but this reluctant feature is kind of revealing of how the game treats factions and the story why have it if you don't want to use it and don't want the players interacting with it so yes they are one of the few factions I was able to turn hostile and I don't think the game accounted for that because they were no more hostile than when they were me they suspicious so these are the best side quests on display they're doing a good few things at once mechanically our narrative Lee introducing the core conflict of each group a little bit of how they slot into the world giving us a morality play and letting the player kick off their relationship with each group individually if you think I'm sitting a very low bar well we'll get there that's five of the six factions the six obviously being the tier 4d natives that we've yet to meet everyone else has already made it over to the new world and we're going to be rubbing shoulders with these folks for hours to come that too lame a gleeful II spoke of how the natives are being converted and well we know the bridge were over there and they're not against human experimentation and we know they're trying to cure that molecule now these are site quests and as such you can skip right past each of them and you'll lose a lot of this context but well it's fascinating the prologue is seeing you going out of your way to learn that absolutely everyone including us are bastards so here's to many more hours alongside them finding Constantine was nifty you can track the bucket down by asking after him at the bar finding a poly-rayon ransom note in town wonder what that's all about or in my case just walking past the building in which his kidnappers have imprisoned him well you did a bang-up job didn't you cut I'm sure he's honored to be in that cell I was side questing at the time so I came back for constant in an hour later but it's fine he's not going anywhere with the right talents I can make a sneaky back entrance or I can head up the front or meet the band is to pay the ransom or profit from the kidnapping Constantine's up for some payback if we hadn't already granted it we may go and grant it let's hop over to the alternate reality mr. Saur day gunned it for Constantine pop by to say goodbye to the ambassador's and show off within about 20 minutes time and tide wait for no one after all mr. de Sade took about two hours most side quests really do bulk out the runtime I'm going to give the game some more credit since my positivity is about to nose die from this already fairly lukewarm position I fully expected that with a city this detailed we would be brought back here somehow but no the journey to tear 4d is said to be a months long one and it's a one-way trip it's one of those things I only noticed in retrospect it goes a long way in making the old continent and tier 4d feel sipar as the game goes on the fumes of the old city become a hazy memory somewhere to which you can never return so let's get going we've got a game to talk about proper I wouldn't be so excited your cousin's enthusiasm is most impressive this journey is his long-awaited chance to prove his worth he has a demanding father more likely he's just happy to be free of this on its list I definitely know I am that's certain stations [Music] there is a definitive moment where I have my first big doubt about grateful and it's right here seeing the fairly built up settlement of new serene when I was expecting something small something to build well I know how petty this sounds it will reverberate through more justifiable problems I have as we go into tier 4 D proper but this was a bit of remedy to swallow I may have misunderstood the South the way characters spoke is sounded like tier 4 D was relatively untouched with Constantine being given the job of raising up a modest steding instead he's taking over from Lady Mirage the former governess and this is the very impressive result of five years on the island we will not be seeing new serene develop or change Tiferet e itself was related to us as a place of discovery in wonder but looking at this I can't help but feel like we've rolled up too late for any of it Vasco's captaincy is taken out from under him and he's grounded a higher-ranking naught has taken vasco ship and crew and vasco has been ordered to adventure with us for a bit we're never given a reason why but well he doesn't question it you're in a case here I am at your service for a while off we go we go and catch up with Constantine at the palace and outside we're joined by the natives cieaura do I see Ensenada del Quint she's a daughter of her clients chief and is acting as their emissary and has urgent business with Constantine I am daughter of Latinate daughter of meb my mother is de mal the chief of our clan I am honored to make your acquaintance Cioran this is incredible you look so much alike you could be related now I haven't mentioned the birthmark and I hardly need to explain it now as well the reveal is pretty obvious but we get so many people knowing how we look like we're from here despite the fact that you know we're a creator character and well look at me I hardly look like a native I don't have their skin tone or hair coloration but [ __ ] it I look like one I went and forced these lines to make sense my other play for beauty - mud why are you wearing the same clothes as a nice sec I just can't [ __ ] win if you're adding moss to a game don't take them off during cutscenes just let me ruin them regardless we've got two jobs cieaura needs our help with a war between her clan in the bridge alliance with Sade proposing going over to negotiate a ceasefire and that goes hand-in-hand with her other job checking in with the governors of san matias and hikmet the Tali Mei and bridge cities respectively cieaura joins our party so let's get on the case we must have a long journey ahead oh we're here grateful manages to make tier 4 D feel incredibly small and artificial and this led to any and all adventure being undercut by the convenience is given to the player one side quests lit in your journal by course illion tasked you to head out and brave the wilderness so that you can litter it with quick travel camps well this is a nice take choice I'm knocking it does frame what we're doing all of the camps are designated by burnt-out campfires you're not uncovering anything new for the non-natives or laying down a route for others to follow even as you make it further into the heart of the Isle than most any foreigner ever has those camp sites and other conveniences await you all you're doing is walking in really lighting a fire and plopping down a warp crate with everything you've stored anywhere a crafting bench and a point you never need actually walk to again here you go you're lazy till they make bastards I set up the camp in your camp you learned of new zones from quests it's only the first time heading to a new area you need to go to a connecting exit on another map eventually you'll cut down all travel to warping and then sprinting for a minute or two now I will say this is a negative for its artificiality and you could say that if I'm going to complain about this just ignore the camp's just don't put them down well there is another reason I will eventually get to why this is a two wrongs not making a right kind of deal within an hour of arriving on tier 4 d you can skip from one end of the island to the other the game asks if you're sure about this while saying how long it will take which is sort of curious as the game never actually has a time-sensitive situation where I would need to measure that travel time there's one countdown throughout and it's for healing a bunch of natives in a scene I'm spoiling on screen right now they are all on the same map and you have so long to succeed this bonus objective I would need to decide to go and make an hours-long track back to the shops in town to run the risk of failure every other time where I can recall is a waiting timer wait for a man to he'll wait for a meeting to come up in every case this meant I had to sprint to a camp wait there and come back which is about as enthralling a piece of gameplay as that sounds there is potential in this mechanic for challenges where you need to actually plot a course since I believe the paths are not totally linear distance equal time affairs between maps with geography and different exits I believe making some difference it's hard to gauge since I never needed bother paying attention to it it's likely a holdover from Technomancer where it was also unimportant the point of all this rambling is I never needed a layup can I take this journey do I have the time do I have the resources am i prepared fret and uncertainty give an adventure adventure and grateful has none perhaps the biggest example and one of the strangest most ill-fitting mechanics for purpose I've seen in a good while is the travel pause between each zone transition you are deposited here to mask a load time that you'll still see it's a small clearing in the path it has all of the amenities of camps at an incredibly well-stocked merchants boot barring the tip-top of certain weapon types this easily accessed out in the middle of nowhere salesman is the proprietor of the best shop in the game and he is absolutely everywhere you go this results in every nook and cranny feeling like it's already been discovered and prepared for our arrival a theme-park version of exploration where danger is but an illusion where a gift shop is never out of sight you can pull an emergency chord anywhere if the ride is too bumpy I can't feel like I'm taming the wilds if I'm never modern a minute from civilization outside of each of the cities sits a caravan for ten coin you can quit travel to one of the other cities for ten coins all you're doing is skipping the travel pause replacing it with the load screen it replaces these caravans are useful for all of the first 20 minutes you're on tier 4 D you skip over a couple of zones but seeing as you're want to put down those camps all you're doing is paying to put off content for later you'll want those camps come quest time and there are some smaller issues raising or in this case failing to raise their headset the fact you can barely look up at all kill some possible standout moments late in the game when you're headed up a mountain pass towards the volcano sad the center of the island you just get an eyeful of ugly rock texture I should be able to gaze up see the scale of this thing that up until now has been at the background of many zones dominating the skyline well sometimes it varies stage to stage but that volcano often makes me think the island is actually quite unimpressive it looks like a model from some angles and imposing from others and speaking of the island itself the wildlife every single animal the GAMEOVER shares the exact same loot table each drops the same crafting ingredients and vendor trash while their designs and attacks are somewhat distinct from one another there's never any reason to hunt a specific one you won't have to hunt anyway trust me they're not hiding that plenty everywhere every few feet another mob of angry tear Freddy and Wildlife I know it's a stocked rope the natives who live in peace with nature but in this game it's impressive because [ __ ] me they're everywhere and they are all up for a scrap I realized after killing roughly 1000 bears that I'm a walking kuntum ecological disaster oh yeah speaking of the natives I did resolve Sierra's request we're a bit too late to stop a battle from occurring wait you should go left here it's a more difficult path but it's much shorter well we'll be late either way but you'll like me less if I take the long path Sierra's mother has been taken by the bridge and cieaura is none too happy about it the facts you'll never do that in game is why I refuse to upgrade anyone's equipment a short ways away from the site of the battle are some ruins and they are clearly not of native construction you certainly seem to know the place this site is sacred and taboo everyone knows where it is but no one ever comes here all these colors are so beautiful we'll have to check in light or with constant in about this I do like a lot about the natives they are perhaps the most nuanced faction in that they actually have a mix of bastards and good people that are actual characters there are clan politics with some back and forth but they are still guilty of this whole undercutting of adventure deal my issue is pay but consistently annoying start to finish no matter how deep in the island we go the language barrier has been totally breached the writing just gives them a truly grating speaking pattern where they speak in full I come from serene a grand city on the continent of cacain for Japanese sentences obeying grammatical structure better than I do but they supplant some nouns of tier Freudian here and there please rot with such obvious context that every word has a complete one-to-one gakuen EES equivalent natives rarely even speak their own language amongst each other where erinite say wise men and women are donated soldiers abroad irony so on and so forth they even utilize complex imagery and symbolism I understand not wanting to write them to sound simple regardless of intent that would have likely ruffled some people's feathers for very little gain it's easier to make them poetic instead but it does hurt the illusion for me that every single person we meet is fluent in our language no matter how isolated their village from our influence want to know how long we've been on the island I mean this time 15 years that's when the bridge started building hikmet a few years later the Tali Mei found it's an Mateus and new Serena's construction began five years ago in that time every native has essentially mastered our tongue to Freddie Gibbs do you strike deeply expect I kind of doubt the North's stuck around before then to give everyone lessons not to mention because of how we act the natives don't like dealing with us if they don't have to there's a word that befuddles me when it comes to the natives because it befuddles the natives they can get every guy Cooney's word right except the word daemon which seems to continually stump them they struggle to comprehend this singular concept of an evil spirit it's meant to illustrate that their concept of spirituality is so separate from ours that an evil spirit seems inconceivable but they've been dealing with Tolima inquisitors for 10 years now and they seem fond of seeing the devil in everything unlike lions the natives shouldn't be unfamiliar with this concept by now but rather incredulous or annoyed by our presumptions they should flinch or laugh at the word demon not hit the one brick wall of understanding that's been erected the Lions have powerful weapons and very effective potions and that's another detail Lions refers to bridge Alliance soldiers as they have lion insignias but lions don't exist on tier 4d they have androids old dull same tats ten ones whoa whoa whoa whoa and the were reminded of something Lou Dolan said about spiders right in priorities and it remains true here this is because spider has a fundamental problem that is that it's worst in the Technomancer this studio likes ideas but not details spiders has cool ideas and at times good imagery but doesn't really think anything through it doesn't lay down a foundation and doesn't care if things wind up hollow or worse contradictory spiders raises a ton of questions and not good questions good questions are matters of intrigue or curiosity where you know is setting ads up but it doesn't need to tell you everything it makes you want to seek answers to enrich a saying or invent your own spiders instead makes a surface level character of reality assumes its setting to be self-evident and has me questioning how the setting even functions with questions such as why are the coin guard powerful why has it the continent of war reached here Freddie when both factions are there why do the natives refer to the just lions when they have their own fauna and this is because spiders favor simplicity in striking imagery not just over but often not the cost of verisimilitude and nerds like me care about that especially when I'm playing a tens of hours long RPG that asks me to be invested in the stakes of the world I kind of have to believe in the world to care about it it's for reasons like this but I won't not too many holes in say vanquishes setting I'll be a picky [ __ ] here and in all of this complaining the Codex is back an auto emission from techno monster has returned and I'm somewhat glad for it this codex catalogues people places animals and ingredients a handy reminder in my case due to taking week-long breaks in playing this I do have a gripe regarding ingredients and that their entries only detail roughly where to find them and in what vague category of crafting they're used with one point in intuition highlighting ingredient pickups one half of this codex becomes useless especially since like animals most ingredients are everywhere we've only blood SAP having a map where I could notice it being particularly abundant my real issue is there's no flavour to give depth to the world or meaning to the ingredients no historical notes old wives tales superstitions jokes even just a cut-and-dried description of where and what for take whole and berries for instance used in healing potions the berries make one feel they're being watched and must perform better I'll admit that joke is a little cliche and feels a bit out step for grateful but I can't say what wouldn't be out of step for greed for simple things like that can add any amount of personality or character to a setting but the writing is also perfunctory the section on characters groups them by faction which is handy but you know give me a rundown of the factions themselves on the tabs look the factions are incredibly shallow but for the love of God makes some effort to alleviate that each faction lacks any real history or culture surface level reads of them proves to be immediately correct and don't develop from there we got science gone too far religion gone too far greed gone a bit over the line on a bad day the codex even if it's just text on a page could be used to start planting seeds of for in a player's head an affectation of depth that lets a play a start character rising for themselves but everyone is a flat shade of cruel if not evil science evolve religious evil business evil the congregation gets so little exploration and I believe it goes hand in hand with solid a being a non character like the whole trading kids thing being an old practice not done anymore so we used to be worse but now we're just kind of dully evil the congregation can't really have much flavor because it can't contradict Sade Sade who has very little going beyond possible compassion but there is a quest that relates to the congregation it says a bit here and there about us and is despite being rather run-of-the-mill four grateful one of the most tedious quests I've ever played through to really talk about a lot of issues I have we're grateful I need to spoil something now something I myself was spoiled on and hopefully I won't annoy you with this because a lot of points I'm going to make from here on out refer back to or are born of this fact and it will bear reiteration grateful has a best ending I'm no against best endings but spiders RPG structure and the things done to accommodate the existence of this ending have her grateful considerably you may argue it's not the destination but the journey but you know this destination changes the journey working backwards turning the journey into eight dollar slog whether you're headed there or not to get the best ending you need to have every faction at their best possible relation with you bar wine you have no control over which means resolving all of their side quest plot lines previous spiders entries used faction reputation systems and karma but made them take a backseat to big choice moments far from perfect often contrived silly and still undercooked but more fun to go through and much better for replayability it makes all the morality stuff spicy journey you have much clearer and larger effects on with better and worse outcomes but very few definitive bests much less everyone being better off to win some had to lose greed for cuts karma from the mix leaving only faction relations but these only come into play with decisive status checks nearing the final stretch with actual choice moments being incredibly minor getting at best a handful of acknowledgments and callback if you change the signs by a railway that doesn't change where the tracks go grateful in deciding to have a best ending curtails the variety of choices that you can make me caps their possible impact and the method to achieve the best ending doubles its length and regardless of anything it all culminates of a choice that's so black and white good and evil that I'm thrown by how absurd it is if you've done the side quests to pick evil at the ending is to decide to spunk away 20 hours of busy work I will say the side quest content is of comparable quality to the main path but don't mistake that for a compliment more an indictment of how lacking I find grateful to be from a certain angle the best ending means that the side content is just main extra quest during a 20-hour game that already feels hours too long into a glacial 40 hour monster the fact is all but one side quest arc is handed off to you in the course of the plot a little bit of oh and while you're here handed to you while you head for the door this leaves even less incentive than we already lacked to go exploring I explored a lot and all I turned up with some skill totems and I lit a bunch of fires I found two quests in the process of doing this my second run might mess everything up run saw me cut the game in half by only doing two side quests one to get this mask and another because my arm was twisted by the story this run was filled with slow realizations that were mostly me realizing hang on certain scenes aren't playing and being surprised by them not being there in doing only the main quest you cull a majority of interactions with the other two colonial powers rendering them little more than set-dressing speaking relatively of course the site content has some of the biggest reveals and strongest emotional beats while a lot of the main quest repeatedly drags its feet and the arcs of order factional side quests exist to reiterate the problems we were shown in the prologue back in old serene not to develop modify or put spins on them but to just redo them in slow motion perhaps giving us a closer look at least every faction is a one-note problem that just keeps repeating the same problem until it stops and each of these quests dance around key figures of each nation you never see the perspective of citizens or pee who don't hold a ton of sway which holds every faction from ever affecting debt for believability so it feels like in doing all of this I'm changing the lives of about five people yet this is still more interesting than the bloody main quest so I realized how hard tying game playing story together is for grateful due to the repetitive nature of both so I'm going to put a big plot catch up on the other side of the room for now I instead want to talk about a video mr. Beaton made a few years back about his hopes for the yet to be released Mass Effect Andromeda at the time he made the video the story as we knew it was that the old alien races having made it to the Andromeda galaxy were cut off from their old governments and were now totally left to their own devices everyone has to lay down new rules for themselves they need to deal with the races of Andromeda who in turn have to deal with them now that's a simple summary but there is a ton of possibility in there loads of moral and political choices however Bataan was worried because there were also rumblings of an ancient evil in the galaxy and the worry was that this ancient evil would override the more interesting possibilities of the seemingly more mundane plot with what I just said I think you already know where both I and the game are going I am interested in the ancient evil or in this case the Malik or but I am NOT interested in the mechanics of curing it as much as I am the conflicts the Malik or could present for those trying to cure it naturally this story is going to focus on the mechanics of curing it with political maneuvering and morality plays not even really taking a backseat but sat back at home waiting on a taxi to turn up [Music] I'm now going to walk you through one quest beat by beat it will take ages but hey that's part of the problem it concerns a dispute between the village of Vigi Godot is chief donkus an old man and a congregation logging camp after some natives were denied entry to a Glade to replant the felled trees several loggers working there died due to poisoning first we talked to an elder who explains the situation he sends us to the logging camp where we find some of the planters and loggers in a tense standoff with neither side standing down Sade offers to examine the deceased several feet away as a doctor it may be disease not poisoning so by Sade using his x-ray vision on all three of the covered corpses he determines that it was indeed poison we need not memorize anything he says here luckily several feet away is the doctor so we talked to her again yep poison after asking a couple of questions it doesn't matter which we're told of some hunters on the edge of the woods we kill a trash mob and they deny poisoning the loggers luckily I'm wearing a cape so I can convince them to spill the old man gave them tainted meat to trade with the camp the intent as far as they knew wasn't to kill well we're out of our depth so we're going to have to head back to new serene will need course silly ons guidance on the way through I run into a cutscene with constant n happy to see you my dear you really don't look well ya corny how I'm already sick of this to God I can only wonder what he's coming down with going to course illion requires running through the entire palace this is what that looks like fun fact every manor every office and every tavern the island over and back on home serene are exactly the same not to mention every tavern the island over connects to the same fighting pit man I felt the island was small but this is ridiculous a lot of quests concerning governors and a lot of quest concern governor's will see you making repeat trips into and out of the manor but this is worse we're here for cause silly on scan your Oh professor steel proved himself useful yeah install a lift course Ileana advises us to go get the deed agreements put down between the congregation and donkus so we go to a highlighted key to access the highlighted documents in a low light basement we're not keyed into trade deals like this so let's head to Lady morangias house turns out the natives lack a formal written language or even really the concept of owning land so we followed them pretty heavily on a few deals mehran's must have had a big change of heart along the way because she's only happy for Sade to set this right its lucky for us I suppose but then again this sort of narrative convenience will turn out to be dime-a-dozen what isn't is this bit of mechanical convenience we're warped right back to core silly on greed fall is very very inconsistent about warping you between people when there's no challenge and getting from one city other except for time so I appreciate when it rears its head Moran has had the brilliant realization that if they let the natives replant trees we can cut down more trees now this sounds silly and obvious but there are reasons it might actually be a stunning intellectual moment for the people of the congregation which should hopefully click for you watching later it is diegetic stupidity that we're only now just realizing this course illion says he'll draft a more fair deed if the natives hand over the killer so time to travel back up north to meet with donkus the old guy basically serves himself up on a platter it is only natural that they should ask for justice tanka swooned up being my guy he's chill despite this he's about to do something very annoying with about halfway there folks donkus wants us to go and shut down a mine we're operating it risks collapsing a mountain which could potentially kill thousands also the owner has been imprisoning and using natives as slaves in secret well Vasko we did it clearly we're a model congregation citizen because we're always so bloody busy we're not allowed in the mind so we scale a nearby hillock and by seeing some shady [ __ ] it's time to go and seek or silly on again and I hope by now you realize why I'm of two minds about the abundance of quick travel points I'll [ __ ] about them bye be dead without so the mines were sold to a bloke called meillard and course illion believes it was meant to be shuttered he can't remember so hey back to the basement sad day my young student what can I do for you I'll settle for a dumbwaiter just install something Sade isn't wonderful legal jargon but guess what morangias so congratulations grateful you've made me do a sidequest where I have to go in a [ __ ] lap Mirage points us to mayor who hangs out at the docks his attempt of bride Sade fails so he just brushes off our accusations and leaves naturally it's time to go a score silly on what all of this could mean and guess what we haven't be our feet enough so the game thinks we're not worth warping back prove himself useful yeah open your window I'm just gonna stand outside and [ __ ] show up from now on so the mining camp is being operated illegally and with him enslaving natives we got permission to go kick [ __ ] out of them free the natives and after that donkus is ready to hand over the killer and that's where this quest ends so to reiterate with respect for your time this time elder gods dr. corpse corpse corpse doctor hunter course illion key paper Miranshah coselli on donkus mine cliff course silly on paper Mirage Moy yardcore silly on camp slaves donkus that may sound a meaty side quest until I tell you the bulk of my interaction with it was holding down a to sprint between NPCs and pressing a to hear dialogue I take my finger off a to tap a I sit and listen finger at their ready to press and hold a once more many many times I'm not making choices because doing this is not a choice I make a grand total of one skill check which avoids a fight or reputation loss or possibly nothing I have two mandatory battles one against creatures that as stated I've been killing by the hundreds this is not meaningful gameplay this is minutes at a time running through the exact same environments repeatedly the only thing being tested is my patience while this quest is admittedly egregious this sort of structure is common across the board for both side and main content it spreads conversation and details out between many NPCs while spreading interaction paper-thin it could be argued it makes seedings a bit more sensible no one person will have all the details so sarde is going between everyone but due to these quests being totally linear with no way to intuit past and fuss skip steps it leads to absolutely die up a Seng where information all seems muddled and unimportant the abundance of NPCs dilutes how valuable every individual interaction seems so much of this game could be crammed together and all it would have is the time not the detail for instance in this quest we could just merge everything about the doctor and the corpses into one dialogue where she tells Sade they were poisoned he asks a check fade to black fade back into Sade agree with her diagnosis bang sorted we lose nothing just have cool silly on hand as the documents and perhaps understand them rather than us running to the basement twice cut may odd from the docs just pop him and his bribe attempt at the camp entrance I'm sure much more could be done just cram more information into less NPCs it makes the information more memorable more important and gets the player to the part where they get to do things faster when I said the quests in the prologue were the best I hope now you're getting an image as to why we've only one map to work with it just didn't have the space to do things like this - to the same extent and that restraint wound up to its benefit now you may still think this was just a bad one of the bunch I mean after all all you were doing was following a doe-eyed line this is an RPG tell us about making choices okay let's talk talents I have so many issues with the talent system and I lack a singular unifying point so this will just be a laundry list of grievances now this system is the same one from Technomancer and I don't think I fully grasped it back then and I suspect spiders didn't either now we've both arrived at an understanding with it but to recap way is it's fairly simple it's one of your free upgrade screens skills grant new combat moves and - stat boosts attributes determine what you can equip and grant - stat boosts and talents unlock contextual options and grant - stat boosts there are six talents with free tiers each you get a point to put into one tier every several levels free level ups alone you are quite limited in the number get there are however workarounds to supplement your natural talents these existed in Technomancer as well but were harder to come by in all but charisma these checks are binary if you have the required tier you may pass if not you are incapable I can't do that charisma meanwhile was a dice roll with higher tiers granting better odds they sit in a middle ground between a choice and a skill check but wind up with the benefits of neither now this sounds simple but it does lead to a question which is how do you handle failure if not an outright inability to succeed the talent system is a limited and binary affair stymied in how it can be applied and I think in Technomancer spiders either weren't aware or just didn't mind how strict it was there were some scenarios you would outright fail but seeing as the best ending was not a concern sod it all it did was create scenarios you would muck up because you didn't have the foresight to be a bloody Renaissance man but scenarios were written with this failure in mind and since the ending is more down to big choices rather than success in all areas I can move on it's poor design but amusingly so which is enough for me to overlook a lot of things I'll take the piss but I won't really big grudge yet so spiders realizes that with a best ending this system is unbelievably punitive you would suffer for the choices you made in character creation hours beforehand if every talent was to be valuable in spite of a player's inability to have every talent then we hit an impasse since it would make a best ending totally arbitrary if not downright impossible now I don't believe it's impossible to make the talent system as it is right now engaging and consequential yet fair after all it's just a different take on the skill check and we've had skill checks and dice rolls in RPGs for decades this is the way [ __ ] was when RPGs came in books and people liked it then and they liked it now the thing is making the talent system work requires budget imagination considered quest design and more tools at the player's disposal than they have spiders was lacking in more than one of these things instead the solution was to try and sidestep their own system as much as humanly possible the reason why that last quest was just hearing people talk to us with only one talent check well yes it was because it was awfully written but it's because the failure state spiders have to use against the player are not very good and they want to contend with them as little as possible the talent system is a big illusory waste of time that mostly serves to save time yes they know what I just said there is an adage in game mastering it's hobbyist advice from another medium but it does apply to quest design if you don't have a consequence don't ask for a role if there are no possible stakes for failure present in a scene don't waste a player's time with false challenge allow them to proceed so you can move the story to where states actually exist and this brings me to the fact that I haven't actually answered the question of what talents are doing what are you checking against to avoid you can probably see it coming but the answer is nothing late in the game we need to investigate a person's shadier affairs we can threaten the guard or roll some dice to sway him with charisma if you sway him he tells you of this person's hours locked away in their office and hands you a key if you threaten him he tells you of this person's hours locked away in their office and the key was so scared it jumped upstairs and we must go fetch it I mentioned a players limited toolset our methods of interaction are stealth combat talking and contextual button presses we are in our own Palace in new serene so we can't lose faction status can't incur a battle there's no need to sneak around the only consequence is that we have to head up and down a flight of stairs I don't share feeling with Sade's legs but unlike him I do age so that's a trade-off the thing is this category of punishment for failure is disgustingly commonplace even outside of new Surrey bloke on the docks doesn't want us investigating a suspicious chest well I can make a charisma check to have an open it or I can walk several metres away to where the key is sat on a box with an orange glow highlighting it if I have lot picking I can just go straight for the grate which saves minutes of my life to be wasted elsewhere at some point the animals are sick of my [ __ ] and a sacking the city's throwing themselves at the gates in a relentless tide up so they say I only see a few of them I am between 35 to 40 hours deep into greed for when this example is taking place I need to find a missing scouting party outside of the city walls and to find them I need to talk to a commander but she yells that her fort needs supplies she won't tell me where the scouts went unless I go and get them governor Burhan is five minutes of sprinting away back the way I came not that that turns out to be the objective but what I assumed I would be doing a charisma check to skip this bonus objective pops up and I think to myself that if this fails I'm just gonna quit the game there and then I paid full price for grateful yeah I am so bored of it but I am using my illusory skill system in the hopes of skipping playing it this is what talent checks are they are shortcuts they do not modify content or give you an edge they are tokens handed to you to skip gameplay and that is if they do anything at all a native God won't let me into the home of the tier and a half conductors she is a lead in finding the cure for the Malek or once again trick charisma or a context option that I would have had no matter what well to succeed one keeps you back so you can pick one of the other two none of them alter proceedings I don't suffer reputation loss but one has a chance of non-existent failure on a dice roll due to the binary nature of the system lock-picking vigor and science talents can never be vital and to make sure a player is never lost every instance of a locked door led me to the key beforehand gaps to be jumped and walls to be destroyed acting as nothing more than small shortcuts since if the player lacks the talent they would be left stuck with no way for us to continue but to grind or start furiously missing prayer beads so they can believe they will make the jump out in the wild our locks chests or unlocked chests locked by the need to jump something however since skills and attributes are determine weapon viability and not the talents needed to access them these chests can't have their loot tailored for anyone they mostly contain a middling mix of restoratives ingredients and a halfway decent weapon that was always weaker than what I was using at the time there's never any reason to upgrade any of these stats to level free each companion when they hit max relation with you grants a boost to one of the six talents all capes grant +1 to charisma meaning there is never a reason not to wear them I never took this hat off since no amount of head armor was as valuable as +1 intuition at level 1 crafting you can a fix a talent booster for science vigor or lock-picking - torso armor so I ran about with a full wardrobe not to mention the game start you with Goldsmith gloves that grant you +1 - crafting we can also use one of the limited memory shards to reset and refund all of our skill points I did at one point use a shard to be a talent check since I had several spare and couldn't be asked to go and get the point another way I never chose my companions based on who I liked or disliked but since companions when speaking to their own faction can act as your charisma check with no chance of failure most quests will concern one or two factions you have a party of two companions it's hardly a brain buster roll up see what faction it is swap your party around especially easy since they can often back out of a conversation to go and fetch them when I see the check pop up and come back sometimes having the correct companion will cause them to jump in automatically to smooth out arguments and do your job for you in a vacuum I do actually like this feature it gives the companions some degree of agency it's an earnest way of rewarding the player for approaching situations diplomatically however my investment in charisma starts feeling a little bit Hollow why did I waste a point here when I can bypass the issue I spent this point for now companions won't always come to bat for you and then we go back to the issue of possible failure last and perhaps least is that grateful is inconsistent in what talents talents cover one side quest sees us investigating a rash of murders at an auto Luminess camp deep in the swamps we go and find the bodies this man's skull is sunken but he doesn't look like he was in a fight could he have fallen that is unlikely look my child the wound is located at the back of the skull I regret to say that in my opinion he was struck from behind with a mace most likely and can have our companions investigate them or if we have the science that ourselves we can say exactly what they just said this man's death was no accident nor is it linked to any predator attack it was caused by a violent strike to the back of the skull with a mace but we said it later on were investigating another corpse and suddenly the art of autopsy is based on intuition should we lack it we have to go and collect Afra Afra is our science-based companion she is a scientist so that she can come along and Intuit what happened for us let me reiterate like a prick the companion who is a scientist who boosts science who we haven't met yet in this video but I'm ignoring that since if grateful doesn't care about consistency neither will I intuition is also used in conversation making a charisma check that's binary you could argue that charisma is swaying people with a silver tongue while intuition is argumentation but grateful never draws that distinction itself instead being fairly arbitrary this does relate back to what I talked about earlier the quest design is linear I can only recall one branching scenario where by doing a bonus objective I could bypass a charisma check there's no doors to unlock or walls to destroy that allow us to circumvent or bypass a scenario there are never two conflicting charisma checks that make you question what the better choice actually is or you know roleplay the right choices are signposted by the fact they have a talent or context check affixed to them you never need think and this all does come back to another reason why I'm against a best ending being here spiders design is antithetical to a best ending it strains under the way of having one spiders has had to water down there already simplistic mechanics to make it doable it also kills the illusion of choice in choices I mentioned the minor nature of actual choice moments I cannot begin to explain how few and far between consequences are and that the biggest of these consequences doesn't come about by way of choices but by inaction by unwillingness to put in another 20 hours to put on a different suit or run back to a camp to equip the right companion and to pass all of those skill checks in every single which way the talent system demonstrates a clear lack play lack of well talent now I know don't worry I've noticed there's something that's been bugging everyone for a while snake why didn't you mention the giant creature that attacked us in the prologue well the true physics slipped my mind there's no real right or wrong places to talk about combat so we'll just cap off mechanics with it it's the gameplay you engage with most but is the least noteworthy the game separates combat into free branches you can mix and merge any way you want these branches are inferior balanced by effective damage versus resource management and range so to bore you of the details warrior is medium damage minimal resource management but with only melee options mages low damage medium resource management with a mix of meli and ranged attacks technical is high damage pure resource management we've only ranged tools since the game can't have you not holding a weapon and since guns are considered an inventory ability the technical class will start with gun and blade proficiencies even using a memory shot you need to take one of the free classes now while this is all true of the combat it's not the important part the classes are actually a question of how much gameplay you want and it's the real difficulty select picking warrior is saying you want to play a video game you want to engage with janky mechanics and creatures with god-awful attacks with awkward wind ups that do a ton of damage but hey fighting humans has some decent eden flow to it random crits have been replaced with a fury mechanic landing blows builds fury which can be spent on highly damaging unavoidable blows fury can also be spent on a cup abilities like getting so mad we materialize a bomb blocking and dodging are now both standard melee abilities with block timing leading to either a parry or a clash major saying you want less of a game but you want to spend way longer playing it the boss is turned into 10 minute plus affairs of button mashing and potion coughing now you actually need to manage manner and I can't lie it's not really a bother I joked in previous spiders entries that money turning into health kind of broke the consumable economy but with the widespread availability of everything on the island the omnipresence of merchants and the lack of anything else I need spend much money on I was lugging hundreds of health and magic potions around before too long but once I hit this boss and I saw the damage I was doing I decided I'll pop a memory shard and take up arms picking tecnico is saying you'll bind your gun to a key to aside a couple of minutes every now and again to procure more bullets and just murder everything in your path this is pure resource management but like potions I could sort out a regiment of redcoats and still have munitions to spare this + overrides whatever difficult you selected and sets the game to easy but it must have been a glitch or something because I still got the achievement for beating the game on extreme this is the same fight a playthrough apart despite being five levels stronger having the best sword in the game and being all lower difficulty on the second run I had a gun and that was the real difference maker the damage has been increased across the board leading to random encounters not being whittling competitions there are new mechanics like quick weapon switching armor armor damage balance old considerations like spacing knockdown positioning and dodging remain but if you wish to ignore all of these additions and refinements and modifications just pick up a gun and shoot everything I respect that I put out a video demonstrating stealth and simply put were available more than a little bit busted but what's more interesting is how broken aggro ranges are perhaps in an attempt to stop kiting enemies are glued to their zone if you exit their range even if you're not out of it for a nanosecond they'll instantly recover all of their health to sprint back to starting position this doesn't quite work out for them while they regain numbers they don't regain numbers so doing hit and runs on singular enemies before beating a retreat is very easy as is leaving a fight should you find it's be going poorly they'll let you go it's like the talent system absurdly exploitable unlike the talent system this was probably an accident so let's sort of return to the story it's time to talk about companions as we know we're still missing one but thankfully they are the dullest so I'm not going to be too upset about it grateful plays host to one of the most forgettable parties I've ever led even as they work very hard to make sure you don't forget them now despite this they should each be proud because they get to represent a shortcoming with the writing this is more in missed opportunities on a game failing to live up to why it appears to promise so vasco joined us as we arrived on you serene a nought from an early age and a promising captain his crew in Superior's both speak of the man as a progeny someone born to command a crew him and Sade have a lot in common both are extraordinary individuals who have earned stations far granted and typical for their age but unlike Sade political maneuvering has set Vasco back and he has his ship and crew taken he's now stuck on tier 4 D perhaps indefinitely it's not hard to put together that side days of native birth but we learn it for a fact fairly early on in the story leading to two scenes of isolated minor upset we were transported from tier four D took a can on an auth ship taken from our native mother and brought into de sade household meanwhile Vasco is of congregation birth but was given over to the Nords Vasco and Sade have fascinating parallels that nonetheless have led to very different lives Sade and Vasco should have so much to say to each other help the game should have so much to say with this cast both the people they were born as and the people they have become the offices they hold or should hold Vasco should be envious that Sade is unlikely to ever suffer a similar setback or put any effort whatsoever into taking back his own [ __ ] for which he shows no motivation whatsoever two scenes after joining you the Companions only truly exist and act within their own tiny spaces starting and ending their development in their own diminutive quest lines which means every potential point of familiarity or friction between the companion and Sade or the companion and the party at large can never be acted upon and never will be nor even be brought up as a matter of fact I'm pretty sure the parallels between Sade and Vasco are pure coincidence for how much the game leverages those similarities for any discussion cieaura has this as well she's got an incredibly respected mother her sister holds far more political power than her but she's the one out in the world acting as emissary for her people she is a young person who is expected to fill very big shoes these free characters are all you people with great expectations placed on their shoulders far from very different cultures not to mention cieaura is working with Petrus who is from thule mate also known as the people kidnapping and brainwashing her people in droves the team is later joined by Afra who is from the bridge also known as the people who are kidnapping and mutilating her people in droves but they never butt heads over anything outside of some contextual back and forth insults flung to no effect Technomancer had the drama between and I'm stabbing it names here Emilia and Scott over a dead son and a dead dad it nearly resulted in one of them shooting the other dead but you could intervene now no one debates no one sways another all companions have drama that is isolated to its own bubble and doesn't interact with anyone else so if everything I've just said vasco's companion quests actually see him trying to track down and meet his biological brother it takes a bit and when we find him the man turns out to be a bumbling idiot Vasko sees him and decides yeah he's happy he's an AW they're his real family uh sure sure okay you seem so excited to be back amongst them with the fact you're not going anywhere I mean this is all so cut and dry it's far too clean far too boring yeah it all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth it gives a knife of Vasco or Sade anything to do as actual characters it says nothing new about the noughts or the congregation that wasn't said in the prologue Vasco just winds up the man who happily got [ __ ] over from both sides now Petrus our native making smooth voiced theologian his quest represents many of the same problems but on a far grander scale and it doesn't really think anything fruit now I promise not to get political on you but this game is severely lacking in politics it's that damn straight jacketed quest design which leads to it but it also means that Sade is mandated by deployed line to do really really stupid things because if you don't do them you can't fully complete the game Petrus comes to us with an intriguing yet treasonous offer he feels that Constantine isn't a seasoned enough politician to handle mother Cardinal Cornelia the governess of San Mateo's so we offer us to give constant in a political wedge the best one around blackmail and as we no doubt love our rambunctious plague-stricken quest giver we're going to go away way above our station and meddle in the secret affairs of a major political figure in a country that we try and maintain neutrality with the quest begins innocently enough with us personally pilfering Cornelia's private chambers and rifling through her letters now in an RPG sense I would consider this an evil action grateful doesn't really have codified good and evil and by good and evil I mean moral alignments such as Paragon versus renegade light versus dark law versus chaos and so on greed fool doesn't have that kind of moral binary obviously since I didn't choose to do this this action I would not have undertaken had I been given an alternative unless that alternative was somehow way worse this is not how I would have handled the situation this is how I'd outside a would have handled the situation but it's part and parcel of the quest sir let's get back to business we find a note speaking of weird stains on the basement floor and for a series of actions that should lead to us getting sacked shipped back to the continent and slipped in the air we discovered that Cornelia takes out loads to host secret parties for those close to her politically parties a lush with alcohol and prostitutes now I have no idea how conservative Tali Mei is regarding sex and alcohol since the entirety of their faith seems to be based around killing those who don't share it and as such I have no idea how much any of this news should hurt and besides anything else while we're cleaning all of this Sade isn't exactly incognito or you're soon into trouble like it oh no Liggett not the anonymity ultimately matters we stand before Cornelia with Petrus while he rubs what we learned in her face because this wasn't about us whatsoever all of this just to make me spill the beans am i right and the way he went about it was unbelievably short sighted on Petra's behalf have you forgotten the abyss into which you plunged because of your ambition last time Petrus what is she talking about Cornelia you don't have the right to use that against me to disclose what I revealed to you that day what the [ __ ] did you expect to happen you brought me here the person you didn't want learning any of this so Petrus knew our native mother back in the day feels guilty about her passing yeah another spoiler but there were secret expeditions here before the big settlements of Rose I mean I shouldn't be a surprise we didn't roll up and pop cities down the instant we made landfall so now there is a tiny bit of friction between Sade and Petrus over our mother naturally it's isolated into a couple of scenes it turns out that Sade was conceived at the shore of tall bones and really weren't we all but uh more importantly are we going to face any blowback now our job as lega is never explicitly laid out but what I've understood my actions seem abhorrent if not downright contradictory to what that role is well we get a light shining from Cornelia and that's because and stick with me here because the words I'm about to say will sound strange getting that door on Cornelia wasn't something that actually happened or it happened but it doesn't matter it was merely a narrative tools be used and disposed of on the way to the actual story which is about our mother all it took getting to that plot was thoroughly breaking my suspension of disbelief I can't really reconcile Sade acting that stupid against the slim pickings of a character I was presented with nor can I forgive the events rationale or outcome of this quest against how people even remotely act politics is an extremely subtle game perhaps grateful does have a binary morality but its competence versus incompetence it's just that we're often railroaded to be incompetent anyway one more quest and an example - holy round out the point I'm building towards we're investigating reports of a demonic cult in the native village of ved lu standing outside the village is sister Ephesian who by now the natives refused to even speak to so Sade's talents but not his talents are needed to get to the heart of the matter now all of the natives say that Ephesian a min to the village with her mind made up as to what the truth is with no way to convince her otherwise so what's the point in even talking to her questions have no value when one already claims don't know the answers now I can't argue with that but Sade is mandated by plot to do so answer the euro the questions at least then the answers will place you then we shall be done with your foolishness this guy can afford to be a less of a dick but I can't fault him for it by this point in the story we know that Tali may hates any religion that isn't theirs so this should be a boy who cried wolf scenario but wolves don't exist in this world and as such can't be part of any folk wisdom I understand we need to undertake the investigation but we have to do it agree with Ephesians perspective and enforcing it we can't use dialogue to skew it to force it fruit or we can't leave town and lie to Ephesian who we have been told to check in with regularly we find a suspicious guy he has some weird crap in his house so we decide to tail him that night which Ephesian failed to do so anyway we follow him if you kill him no worries you're just nowhere to go after some light puzzling we make it into a cave and get this [Applause] well I wouldn't say that's demonic weird certainly well I'm sure if Asia will see it both ways we then go and have to talk to the Mao Durga chief of vet Luke with Sade lying that they assisted in the ritual which is a stupid lie that would be out it before long if the game cared to do so but we want to know how to converse with one of those spirits and to get out of Durga we can as per usual sway her with words or threaten her of spilling what we saw to the inquisitors naturally both lead to the same outcome but swaying skips a fight against semi unique opponents and either way we don't say a word to Ephesian I need to go back to the Technomancer once more I keep using it as a positive comparison and I'm not really sure I ever saw myself doing that I complained back then the techno monster put all the factions in bubbles to never really interact grateful is worse and it's worse because it pretends even more there isn't the case when it's actually more true than ever once the quest is complete we leave town and sister Ephesian be interacted with nor does she hail or hold us to ask questions that she would be very likely to have now let's not forget when we last spoke with her yesterday we were getting answers to her investigation that night she knew what we were up to she will now stand there silently for how long I don't know seeing as I would always quick travel into bed Luke and skip over her once again Ephesian and her investigation was nothing more than a tool to be used and thrown away what she really needed from us was unimportant what was important was learning about a spirit down the road remember I mentioned regarding the beat on video that the conflicts involved with finding a cure are more interesting than the cure itself this quest is an awful consequence of the writing putting the cure over the conflict but it wants to pretend it has conflict or giving it no weight no substance no faction actually touching another and so this really clumsy contrived self has a giant hole in it the moment you remember that Ephesian exists you walk into the quest with one state goal and leave it with a different one because grateful has a check it can't cash the phret was hollow and so is Ephesian this is because grateful is a mealy-mouthed coward that can't follow through on any promise or threat it delivers leaving a bunch of scared contrivances in its wake it forgets npcs willy-nilly and hopes the player won't notice the massive series of reasonable consequences they won't deliver on as it pulls you along a much more boring but far easier to write plot of Mystic crab fixing a magical plate by talking to an all-knowing tree God spoilers each and every quest leaves me feeling that I've made the situation far Messier but grateful is ready to sweep everything that it doesn't like that it caused under the rug so not only is the game totally Alinea with forks immediately rejoining the main path not even diverting for longer than a couple of minutes but even with what is an incredibly tight degree of narrative control it can't even keep itself straight or consider consequences at all in all of these instances the player is led by the nose unable to decide how they present themselves the faction relation screen is just a 100 percent completion checklist disguised as something more dynamic since it isn't decisions that affect anything but time investment and it's a hefty one for the quality of content and capacity for role-playing on display I'm going to reiterate something for the sake of emphasis we are the leg of the merchants congregation in the new world the prologue sets up side a is someone not only good at their job but wise beyond their years they can go toe to toe with diplomats far their senior and run circles around them in a new world we have two warring factions and the natives with our country sitting as a neutral ground between the free we're encouraged to maintain that neutrality because a plague is killing everyone save for the immune natives and the north's as well but never mind that there are also two large private guilt one military one nautical both of them wield massive power and influence now I'm salivating at the prospects of what a skilled imaginative RPG writer can do with this foundation there are so many possibilities for alliances Wars pacts intrigue traitors spies instead there is no interaction and much less nuance the game gets my hopes up then works hard to tell me not to actually get too excited and on tier 4 d2 my knowledge no one has yet seen any serious fighting every faction quest is a straight line and the talent system is an awful middle ground between skill check and choice which also tells you what the correct choice is so you never need way up or think about a scenario if you just follow the breadcrumbs then eventually every single faction will love you greed fall doesn't have an illusion of choice but an illusion of an illusion of choice when a micro and macro scale greed fall often as the building blocks for conflict but it sneezes or anything that would be complicated and scatters them for a moment I'm going to self indulge and imagine a greed fool it wasn't six straight lines with one of them being the main plot but a set of strings to intertwine and tug on over to stir the pole because we need to actually work and think to maintain that neutrality if we even want to imagine agreed for whether monks of distance from the mainland and new discoveries led to the governors acting with newfound freedom whether because of vainglorious pursuits or a misguided belief that they are acting as their nation should that neutrality we were sent off with is now an option especially as Constantine's terminal illness develops and our need for a cure grows more urgent for his sake pushing us to make hard choices and compromise that neutral standing to get what we need in this alternate reality let's pretend there are actual multiple routes to fixing the problem rather than the one agreed 'full where our investigation of cornelia could be done with actual subterfuge where we got that blackmail and then decide what we do of it we could tell Petrus to hold his tongue go ahead and blab or maybe go under his nose and warn Cornelia of Petrus his plans before they come to fruition throwing our companion under the bus for political favor a grateful where we could follow through on our threat of telling a fever and bringing down the auto luminous on Durga for presenting a possible threat or one where we could actually negotiate with the village and then go and lie to Ephesian sending Tali Mei on a wild goose chase perhaps even bringing them down on a rival village agreed for where once vasco and the north quests are complete and vasco ship is unoccupied vasco comes and asks if you're okay with him returning to his duties and you can either keep him around to keep a companion or let him go to gain a powerful ally within the naut Technomancer did that with Phobos that's an interesting way to get a better ending for the faction I didn't know that at the time I was playing it but if you give up Phobos you get a better end that's fascinating that's a cool decision a quickly forgotten know about Constantine's backstory is that even his own father hated him Sade's upbringing is notable since their mother treated them with love and affection most noble households in the congregation are cold and pragmatic and constant in in particular had it bad he's pretty sure he got the governorship of new Serene partly to be rid of him Sade could be confronting the possibility of upsetting their own country in trying to save Constantine at the cost of a long-standing hard held neutrality because Sade for how little character they have does clearly care deeply for Constantine what is so frustrating about grateful is not the avoids being interesting but they sits at the very edge of being interesting while seemingly purposefully avoiding ever actually becoming so semi-related side note the best thing about grateful is hikmet music it captures the atmosphere and spirit of a better game it's a track grand and sweeping a track that more than anything else sells me on the idea that we are wandering a city of great learning and great progress the magnificence and scope of which is daunting but then the track slows down displaying uncertainty in the midst of all this perhaps there's a cost being paid for all this progress the track plays this way for a while but more hopeful notes starts slowly getting reintroduced getting louder and louder until it eventually drowns out that uncertainty but it will resurface now that you know it's there you can't forget it agreed for where this conflict genuinely exists in all areas may preclude a best ending and frankly I'd be fine with that and an example of how this could be done exists in greed 'full we've seen it those [ __ ] prologue quests yeah again they had choices not dedicated by talent pics but more hazy and uncertain back then it seemed like my job as a player was going to be tackling the question of whether doing my job is appeasing the other nations or upholding the laws of my own in spite of others where did that tiny spark go that was genuine decision-making politics the curse of our society I suppose it was because you know it's an isolated area where those details can never resurface and now it's been replaced with this which means the prologue is priming the player for decisions they are not going to make now there is a big glowing neon sign floor in this flight of fancy what do till they may believe do they have any beliefs I can leverage why is the coin God trusted enough to protect world leaders instead of state militaries could that trust be abused does the bridge Alliance care for anything besides science do they have any arts sports foods is there anything I can give to them to gain any favor my ideal grateful can't function I know my ideas ran away from what most companies could implement but spiders especially as their worlds are too flat to make choices like this meaningful not just do I kill this nameless soldier I met for no reason to make real choices you need real information you need signal to separate from noise perhaps most disappointingly each of the faction quests and so insultingly cleanly the Tali may subjugating beating and converting the natives at the front of death oh that's just the order luminous they were working this way without Cornelia's knowledge it's fine the moment she learns how bad it is she strips them of their power it was that easy the coin guide quests are a never-ending parade of corruption higher-ups abusing the fact they are an absurdly powerful mercenary guild they're using that power to coerce shopkeepers runs secret training camps where weak recruits die in droves and commit more crimes than even Sade but it's fine all of the bad apples belong to a single conspiratorial alliance the bridge alliance carrying out horrific human experiments on the natives who have a mass grave putting their body count possibly in the hundreds if not thousands oh it was a rogue scientist given resources autonomy and little to no oversight he even poisoned Constantine and well we ran a if so Bottoms Up Sarge a but it's fine suffice to say bhajan knew nothing of the plot so it's water under the bridge off with his head okay I need to add this regarding Burhan no Kurt he's a muppet and absolutely witless [ __ ] who would not know what was happening under his nose were mirror to his face and tongs to his lips every single interaction with him in the bridge questline his Sade storming into the palace on the verge of an aneurysm just flabbergasted how without [ __ ] knowing powerful figures in the bridge have attempted to kill Sade several times Lord de Sade what enough with the formalities excellency you owe me an explanation did you order your troops to attack while I was negotiating under a white flag I assure you that I have no idea what you are talking about bhajan ironically doing the assassins job for bear fruit share power of frustrating obliviousness bhajan is hands down the dumbest leader going and I'm sad we have no power to use that fact that's the kind of information I'm talking about so no actual character ever winds up with any dirt on them it always winds up being an autonomous third party working in secret and easily shrugged off [ __ ] off with that let one of these people have any amount of grit or dirt to them we know from the intro that these factions are actually bastards don't use the same reveal every bloody time to shake that off at least techno months I had to follow through to make the vory [ __ ] at least in Technomancer getting one faction too light you could come up the cost of another even [ __ ] Mars had the balls to end with ROI unsure if he had done right not totally content that his survival may have made the situation murkier and you know what they really talk about Petrus did I I used him like grateful used to Fiza a vehicle to get where I really wants it obviously there is another issue of everything I've just said it's just one perspective on how great fall is plotted I'm going to step back and explain what the main plot is versus what the side quests are so your own current the pacing of grateful and how consequences are not born of choice but in action side content is not main content plus it's time-sensitive main content do it as soon as you can since you stand to lose these two what is amusing about cieaura is that if we follow her side quest go and collect him of his body she then just lets the body sit for ages until quite late in the game at some arbitrary point she decides it's time to bury her it is on this don't alter that we will place the body of my mother we must place a sensor where her head will be and another near her feet and then you will have done everything you could to help me do you understand there everything is in place I feel sort of condescended towards but you know what that is questing if you let her mother's body sit something she can hardly judge you on she'll eventually decide it's time to go and get herself it's not the fact I've been killing natives in droves in this run it's my lack of urgency about the one that's already dead the main quest of greed fall is a race against time to find a cure for Constantine uncover the source of the malla core and reverse it naturally Constantine is dying at the speed of plot but as a story must it treats it with urgency for the sake of tension Constantine comes across as though he will keel over any day now his sickness is crippling painful he worries that his ability to reason will die from the agony before his body follows and it's the best performance in a game with some really bad ones I know the captain of that outpost a pessimistic man who would never order an attack without being absolutely certain of total victory without losses my beloved wait i romanced her the site content meanwhile of fixing the underlying problems of each faction that takes time away from saving constant in this is where the clock is actually taking all of my complaints made so far have been ignoring the apparent urgency presented by Constantine sickness but funnily enough it's this side of the game where you're punished for putting things off you will fail quests and you will lose companions and cut well he's an odd one you'll want to get his side quests out of the way lickety-split this happened shortly after learning of our native heritage then as far as I'm concerned this changes nothing I will keep watching over yeah cheers cut Kurt what is what's going on is there something wrong coin guards the time has come what is this ready arms cut what are you doing aim stop that soldiers lower your weapons now sorry green blood fight with honor Unger I said draw sadly Kurt never learned I never ever fight with honor commander figured out that we could easily take control of this island you rely so heavily on our protection imagine if Trump's body got shot him in the back of the head and said I'm president now that's what this plan is you daft fun you take over the island and then what oh [ __ ] we're not making money we killed our clients now that's optional sadly that is the best pre boss fight cutscene and grateful if you've done his quests he comes running to warn you of the incoming coin guard coup and fights alongside us to stop it the coin guard coup is one of the more absurdly constructed set pieces in the story what else was there to expect from employing coin fed mercenaries as the penny finally dropped for you there saw day that this was always a bit off now it's innocent enough on first blush a big upheaval in the plot but the underlying mechanics are strange and contradictory after moving the sickly constant him and some staff to a basement we head out into the pretty peaceful streets of new serene to save mirage then we're too captured ahead conspirator commander Torsten before he escapes we're given side objectives to capture three major co-conspirators and send emissaries to Hikmat and san matias to warn them in my first run despite the urgency presented in the situation I did all of those secondary objectives first incapacitating to Austin's allies and sending word to the other two cities of the plot despite my companions warnings of the sound of battle alerting Torsten to flee and that we should take a different route I fought my way in through the fiercely defended front door cutting my way to his office to learn that should his plot fail he has an escape planned on an auth ship luckily we happen upon him outside out the door came in from about to flee but seeing we caught up with him somehow he decides to stand and fight of the game they're going to have to pay for their crimes I cannot remember if the traitors are hung before being courted or if it is the contrary now while I was intending to mess things up on my second run stress-testing failure and so on grateful hardly needed my help on this one I made a dead sprint for Torsten ignoring his allies or sending help I dodged the front door and used the scaffolding to enter via decide it took one scuffle to enter his office and find out about his escape plan so I run out the front door excuse us lads and I make a beeline for the docks just in time to see his ship reaching the horizon and one of our companions figures this you will need to make a choice between the two we've no time left somehow we must choose which one of the two cities we will go and save personally that weird reverse urgency rears its head again this is such a hard choice I mean I hate them both I ultimately sacrifice to lay May and now we need to go and save hikmet I kept this talent check in my back pocket since it boggles the mind I love it outside the palace is a confused handmaid we explained the situation and our need to enter the palace we need a charisma check for the key and I fail it so she says she doesn't trust us and can't open the door to let us in instead informing us of a secret entrance which doesn't need a key well that's a bright spark from someone who's not a bright spark my mood plummets soon after that since the fight to save burr hunt is the hardest in the game unlike some of these encounters the hunt is not invincible he is weak his death is a game over and he is very aggressive and there's a man in here who can one-shot me so I have to put the effort in to save these [ __ ] and it takes a while but for sheer luck behind manages to not die Tali may fell that town is now ran by the coin guard and this doesn't alter anything whatsoever I'm not kidding this game is so consequence averse the collapse of an entire city's leadership can't make anything budge Nach really I shot over two salame right away I was greeted with one difference and that was that Torsten stood in Cornelius place with people praying towards him and he looks so unbelievably mad commander - all day - what do I owe this visit yeah of course why should I expect anything more I will leave you to your business good what were you planning to go of this in this reality Constantine has a fitting punishment for the rebels we shall have to pledge allegiance to the congregation of merchants well Petrus I'm pretty sure that blackmail you were lying about wouldn't have helped this headcase I mean it's not like we can do that quest now right how can she be a threat to him she no longer controls son Matthias that is true but her status as a refugee of the court gives her ample opportunities to manipulate your cousin's opinions oh yeah just you can't waste any content Kenya so by now I've jumped back and forth in time to different events at leisure as they're mostly a meandering mush I'm now just going to slide through some events making fun and minor points along the way to the next actual topic remember the ruins can't blame you if you didn't well it turns out there are a few more up on a hill above a mine no one has been able to get out there yet due to a terminal lack of ladders but by fixing a gate with instructions for fixing it in an adjacent box and killing animals who somehow survive in here we're up wow a congregation seal it was us just like that whole point I made ages ago it's the undermining of adventure no pun intended the game treats this is a grand adventure no one has been able to breach this hilltop but it's so insultingly easy to do that I feel a little bit patronized anyway the noughts may know what's up here ah [ __ ] and after getting sent on a missing-persons investigation for them it turns out the inquisitors are getting a bit peeved that they need to depend on masters of the sea to travel by sea we also break into a warehouse and learn the north's aren't magic turns out they're just sailors I crack jokes but I do actually like this reveal it doesn't go anywhere even if you spilled the beans No objects of any ritual nor even anything magical you don't like it Vasco leave the pie oh you won't will ya whatever did you want to accomplish the north's are not believers we should not be dependent on heretics have you gone completely mad domitius we are on an island how could we not be dependent on the north's I want them arrested him and every member of his order listening to Cornelia chew out the Inquisitor here over this conspiracy makes me wonder how the hell this house of cards hasn't already collapsed we learned the congregation attempted to settle ter for the ages ago but were run off they kept making small-scale expeditions to the Isle here and there over the years and turns out we're a native the coin god coup occurs but you know how that is Tulane they has us investigate the demon cult village we learn of the island spirits in questioned Audra she tells us of a place we can commune with one of them but it turns out to be a swamp guarded by a nut dike this was actually an attempt on our lives a place expeditions had come and being killed before naturally Doran never faces any backlash for attempting to killed a lega and Sade never brings it up as noted elsewhere doing something like that would inconvenience the boring plot we're on so it doesn't really warrant attention so what do we learn during all of this well we get some details on a non mill Frick two men or God as I'm just going to call them to save time God is the island itself sarday supposes the Malek or is a curse placed on our ancestors for having a crack at tier four D in the past nut Ike's those nth things are done a God who bombs in the island becoming a part of it they gradually turn into giant tree people they're formed based on the bio and they bond to which gives grateful a small pool of bosses it can recycle over and over again oh and we save an expedition of bridge scientists from the clutches of Darren Afra then joins us during all of this constant him grows sicker and sicker so he self to go and find a healer to give him some relief from his symptoms we're given free options only one of them progresses the game while the other two characters I [ __ ] you not stop existing after we get cats ACK the native healer I shall leave immediately for new serene I mean maybe a lowland got her yeah I can't actually say that word one of our holy men once lived at san matias his healing abilities were celebrated across the land I heard rumors that he died in the attack well that saves time meanwhile the bridge points us to t earner who may have a lead on the cure so we track her down we have her talk from some of your people of a cure that is so powerful that it can heal almost anything you would be you must share with us the formula too many lives are at stake you come here to my home and you command me to help you arrogance you're annoyed see I replayed this scene with a bunch of different companions no matter which combo of people you bring to this scene one of your companions will [ __ ] it you would be my daughter it is clear that this woman has no intention of helping us as for this little oculus remedy allow me to cast doubt on its very existence the only true miracles come from the Enlightenment what the [ __ ] man the only one who keeps their mouth shut no matter what is vasco the wisest one of us all sadly whoever does mess it up does it the exact same moment Sade has a brain fart they come here to rape our lands as did those who came before them long ago this miraculous cure that we've heard talk of could you share the formula with us you are either completely crazed or foul liars none of this makes sense but I enough I have lost enough time with your lies and your foolish thoughts so we chased he owner for a cave and find a bridger assassin trying to take her life after killing the end the assassin who just got his ass kicked stumbles over to the free of us and reveals his master stroke of a murder plot apologies excellency but you are going to die tragically from a stray bullet intended for the monster I respect the gusto if not the approach saw day angered to no end says he'll have to go and talk to burr on about this which is the one time the game trust you to remember to go and do something by yourself because that's a side quest anyway Constantine has been kidnapped I would like to have a discussion with this man alone yes milady could you leave these fine people into the hallway if you would be so kind certainly are you people [ __ ] serious in a last-ditch effort to save him cat sack took him out of the city to go and do something but their convoy was attacked cat sack was killed and Constantine taken by communing with cats axe corpse we learned the attack was led by vim bar the native High King because the natives don't understand the word princess but do understand the word High King but they don't have the word chief they have the word mole and he's a man who's been missing for months at this point we need to ask one of the three important moles for information the warlord Deirdre the environmentally minded donkus or the business like : in one run this was easy because I've done all the side quests in another one I needed to do one side quest I was making a point of avoiding them but duty calls we work really hard to be told don't know mate go ask his fam luckily the isolated mountain villagers speak perfect congregational I asked within Baris and I'm told his wife Sarah should know I asked where Sarah is and they don't know after saving Sarah from some bridges through wise words or wildfire she leads us to a cave by studying the frescoes and finding a seed given how well hidden the seed was it must open an important passage all we have to do is find out which we realized that VIN bar is headed off to become a bird tree man and he's taken Constantine up the mountain who is Constantine so Sarah gets suspect and locks us in a cave with a massive back entrance she also lays some mines down that don't actually kill you they just do marginal damage scholars have been slaughtered it must have been Sarah taking her revenge I'm sure the history books will see it that way Sade so we kill Sarah and by going for a cave deeper into the clutches of the island than any renege say has ever bit never mind he beat us here we find Constantine at VIN bars mercy we try and talk him down but VIN bar is turned into a bird and he wants to show that off and he was pretty assured of our cousin being evil so we need to off him okay that might sound like a lot but trust me I left out a ton mostly my new show you have to carry out to achieve any of that that was between fifteen to thirty hours in length depending on if you tackle the other main content we're now in the endgame or at least on the cusp of it three days following our rescue of Constantine we go and check on him he just escaped a deathly sleep and here he is ready to conquer the world oh you're the villain now gotcha I gotcha cassock had a hail-mary idea and it saved your life I'm gonna guess he screwed the pooch on this one we still need to meet God we can't just bond everyone who's sick and we have a problem if we're to get into the sanctuary to meet God we need the blessing of the High King the bad news is I just killed the High King the good news is we're going to rig the election we go and meet with Glendon who organizes these things they'll need to select a new High King it's going to be between those three miles we met earlier Sade sets off with news of in bars death in the upcoming election I don't think grateful expected players to weigh up the choice present it to them here all three conversations follow the exact same format the breaking of the news what they will do is hi King then they all mention an ancient crown in a cave they're going to go and get the act of getting the crown will ensure their election is hiking sade inquires what the crown is and ends grateful just give me the full dialog for the first one of these free I talk to because I'm going to go and ask all three of them I need to know what I'm doing to make an informed decision I know you haven't really thought about that in about 30 hours but you know just just trust me on this one I know what I'm doing I've played a role-playing game before just cut the latter two conversations down to what they will do and maybe speed up the VIN bar bit because I understand we gotta break that news to him anyway dudes were promises you'll chase the renege say from tier 4d while the other two are focused on peace Bolin strikes me as young and impassioned but he deceived me once before to screw over a rival clan so my man donkus is the horse I'm betting on on my [ __ ] shut up run you better believe I gave it to Durga she promises will be kept around and can pick some things she won't destroy now Sade comes up with a plan I find amazingly moronic to ensure their pick wins they decide they're going to go in fetch the crown themselves and hand it off to them when the way everyone was speaking about it it seems pretty clear that the point of getting the crown isn't the crown itself but the act of getting it full-on lives less than a mile from the [ __ ] cave it's in he has no excuse unlike him don't returns up and gets rightfully upset with us you came looking for a crown of the High King hoping to choose the one who will lead us isn't that what you were looking for as well yes but I am NOT a renege Singh see we can't leave the election to chance and not interfere or attempt to influence the result through diplomacy or threat and force we could push for dirt for pretty well by playing up how dangerous we see making a wartime leader desirable or insinuate we're going to open more logging camps so donkus is experienced reforesting the island is a necessity or at least seems like one god I said I'd drop the flight of fancy stop thinking snake just rigged the election I accept my defeat so here you go donkus have the crown you didn't earn it by think you're the best shot piece of all around so whoever the new king is they loves pop in and have a chat with their garden-variety God stay on the right-hand part and do not turn back the malla core is no curse it's an affliction we brought on ourselves by poisoning the earth I actually thought it was a curse even well into my second draft because of how the malla core is presented but hey the big perch here is saying otherwise there's a more pressing issue however God tells us our cousin has gone rotten and he's going to destroy the world which makes our day go not sure about that then someone sneaks in and we got a shoot off we report back to Constantine and well look at him an intruder had managed to sneak into the sanctuary and we had to flee to evade the wrath of its guardians and intruder you say then I guess this sanctuary isn't that heavily protected mmm he's also acting strange now we get a choice whether or not to tell him God himself has a bounty on his head and well you either tell him and give him pretty good reason to be the villain or you hide it and he makes that call for himself Constantine also blows off the other two cities when they come asking for help both are being assaulted by an endless wave of animals let me introduce you to the emissaries of the bridge Alliance and the coin girl quite brazen isn't it that they would send us an emissary after having tried to assassinate me the commander must have a solid reason the commander was hoping that in the face of such a threat you would forget our past differences oh how sensitive of him no I really don't see how I could be of assistance to you Constantine B cannot remain deaf to the call of our allies yeah of course why should I expect anything less I hope that you realize how grateful you should be to her does anyone hear her it sounds like ghostly sassing and of course you also have the gratitude of the guard oh hey I found ker he isn't dead he was just hiding in the coin arena I mean maybe this is where guards go when they die we fight off the creatures and well look at them they have black haze coming off of them they appear sickly and off we can't pretend it's anything but constant in doing this somehow the Nagas going nuts as well so Constantine was saved by being bonded it turns out he's running all over the place bonding himself everywhere don't a god are only meant to do this once but by doing this over and over Constantine is killing God and becoming too powerful it's Constantine with some friends despite the [ __ ] camera we catch Constantine in the act of bonding he tells her not to keep us here in buggers off we kick the SH out of it so God pipes up to say told you so before we hit the finale proper let me divert one final time to talk about the story but this time totally in macro the pacing of all of this changes radically depending on whether or not you tackle side quests but it's damned if you do and damned if you don't it's the spongy aspasie I've seen in a long while if you do the side quests the pacing is glacial many hours are given over to uneventful thumb twiddling it can be confusing recalling what is important to know difficult to remember what is part of the actual narrative versus what happened in the extras only now checking notes after every bloody sentence can I say with confidence what was what if you don't do side quests the game goes woops all natives I was often confused by the things that didn't happen constant in sickness progresses at Lightspeed and it's boring yet breakneck a lot of characters that only truly act inside content get awkwardly shuffled into the main quest treat it as though you should know them and then you're off at a side quest as a means to get what you need it really tries to twist your arm on that in most RPGs side quests are truly off to the side the side quests are a means to explore the larger setting flesh out well details and tell micro stories with their own little beginnings and ends but here they exist as part of a larger narrative means to an end egg it's difficult to dip in play what you want and when you've had your fill go back to the main narrative since they are designed as part of a set one leading into another and encouraged to be resolved before returning to the actual story and a train of thought does develop in all of this if you follow side quests most of the early ones concerned to lay mate with the middle and approaching the end focusing more on the bridge alliance with the native main quest sitting as a free line from the early game until the conclusion with the evil turn of Constantine and God revealing that the plate continues because we poison the earth it starts as a diatribe about how absolute faith in faith won't save us and demonstrates the cruel tease that can come about from religion free of actual morality or oversight before it cops out then it turns into a diatribe about how absolute faith in science won't save us and demonstrates the cruel tease that can come about from science free from actual morality or oversight before it cops out cop out might be unfair so to be clearer it's more that grade fall over plays its hand it demonstrates incredible cruelty raises its stakes too high and goes to dark but when it comes time to resolve these issues it can't stick the landing because it was never actually going anywhere with it when I was explaining my ideal grateful and asked for all of these methods to be manipulative it's not because I don't think greed fool is cruel enough and I wants our day to be a sociopath it's that if you're presenting this cutthroat universe full of scheming and brutality and in the intro Sade demonstrates great diplomatic savvy that allows him to fight this or benefit from it let me actually inhabit that world and manipulate that savvy I mean I generally play goodie-two-shoes in these games but I like to cut loose and be a bastard for these videos but you see spiders is the edgy 12 year old of the middleware market it thinks itself deep because it knows human cruelty x' exists but it hasn't actually internalized or came to anything but the most basic conclusions about these cruelties yet and so it can't say anything about them really it can just present them and then at the 11th 1939 Fowler it pivots to an environmentalist tale all that can save us is caring for the earth though our worries are brought on by us poisoning the ground beneath our feet it's not a clean train of thought but it makes its attestation with a few missing doors and most of the cargo missing I am left with questions run it just for the sake of prodding so curing the world cures the plague should Constantine not have been improving by being in the clean environment of tr4 d or is it all about the land you're bonded to so he's just genetically open to the Malick or the north's our immune but is Vasko we're immune because we're genetically tear Freudian but consider ourselves to be a citizen of cacain meanwhile Vasco is a nought but you know he is of Congregation stock I'm just being a [ __ ] a lot of thieves break if you think about mechanics too much this is just me having fun at his expense what's important is that Constantine is cured but he has genuinely poisoned the land by bonding to it his brush with death scared him shitless and now he's bonding all over the place in the hopes of gaining immortality which will kill the island if not the world if he's not stopped so I'm done being a [ __ ] for the moment unlike the finale which is just [ __ ] with Constantine on the run the party seemingly just knows how a bunch of things are going to shake out yet he has a personal God he's bound to have warned them against us after what happened alone against all of these creatures will be no match for them Constantine will attack the sanctuary with an army of animals to try and overthrow God and we'll need an army of our own to stop him sure why not saadet gives a really weak speech what an absurd project on the continent they would brand us crazy but not here on an island where everything is possible and all folly is accepted let us go we need to put an end to all of this maybes because I don't feel this has been a land of wonder maybe it's because by now I just don't like anyone perhaps it's because I knew this was leading to sex conversations minimum but this speech makes my skin crawl it's so presumptuous and faux grand Sade would be more honest if he just looked right into the camera and said yeah [ __ ] it we all knew this was coming let's go on with it somehow this speech is worse in the runway everyone loved me in the bad run at least had a comedic edge since I had ruined everything not that much was really different Kurt was dead and cieaura was upset but they made roughly as much noise being that way boy hang on while you're here Petrus you're still thinking maybe I think my cousin can [ __ ] handle Cornelia you need new bait for this hook all right so let's go build a bloody army we also need to do other [ __ ] along the way like repeat to boss fights guess what everyone can work together and if you've done all the side quests they will do so without argument thanks for doing your chores Sade we'll help you clean up the rest all right one last trick back to Technomancer for a comparative complain it had a similar objective the payoff was weak as [ __ ] but the process of building an alliance was at least more involved in Technomancer some groups wouldn't work with others you needed to think about the relations set in place by the setting this moment was a culmination of choices in grateful this moment is a culmination of ours here with a somewhat undercooked idea of unification you can get everyone working together and I think I'd be ok with this if they lead into it whatsoever this is the final stage the last hurrah perhaps the last experience we will have in this world ever and with the work / in this should feel like a pivotal turning point and I don't think the mark could have been missed further thanks to that speech by the time we arrived in the sanctuary Constantine has broken through and is facing down God so we give chase it sees us trekking up a hill fighting waves of creatures of which I've killed thousands by this point if not tens of thousands all of companions join us and there are checkpoints along the winding road as we ascend each of these checkpoints are manned by one or two factions no matter how cliche is this is an opportunity to hit us with some cathartic [ __ ] like an Inquisitor yelling I can't believe I'm fighting alongside a native or you know any variation of that instead in one final hurrah not for the world but for the absolute are shattering power of doing nothing of way or impact the checkpoints our coin garden bridge Norton native until a mate all by themselves breed full you can't stick one [ __ ] landing it can't stick a [ __ ] landing when it has people on the runway waving you in people that you have hired to do it you managed to pair up everyone with the group with which they share no [ __ ] beef whatsoever I know that makes sense that's what people would naturally do but that's not what we're here for this should be the moment the common enemy in Constantine has forced bitter enemies to work together has United them and open the doors for ceasefire repaired relations newfound friends and allies who doesn't do any of that meanwhile in the bad run we head up the hill by our lonesome our allies breaking off to fight alone and when we confront constant end I'll hang on a second and when we confront Constantine he asks if we'd like to join him rule as gods together now put forty hours into cleaning this [ __ ] off but I got a laugh out of me and a fuck-off out of me meanwhile in the other run well I like Burton of Bridges Ezell torch the one with mortality well it's [ __ ] dive away and so we get some ending slides remember course silly on by now I've not heard him for 20 hours but he'll see us off some of their Donna Garda were even invited to the continent and with their help it slowly became a land filled with life again I do love how as to include that every companion really liked us and definitely visit it even though they have a cool new job I don't have abandonment issues grateful I'm right never seeing them again she now spends most of her time with them when she isn't with the man she loves of course oh yeah I did romancer meanwhile in another reality called silly on his [ __ ] scared who could have predicted when my two young students left the port of serene that they'd become the gods of tear Freddy thus plunging the world into chaos certainly not me so it seems that I am a poor teacher all our nation's sunk into a state of constant warfare each of choosing the others of being responsible for their terrible defeat the congregation is now on the verge of forming and I have no doubt that the others will follow the lives which haven't been taken by war will be taken by the Malik or the survivors reportedly all ended up acknowledging the power of the two cousins but sadly this is nothing but hearsay since the news we receive is scarce getting even more so and in the third ending war I was evil and killed Constantine Deirdre kept her promise she led all the native clans as they managed to drive the invaders off their island Afra set aside her weapons and went back to her research on the native culture and flora of the island well I guess she wasn't that boring I have no idea how she's doing that in all of this there are hours and hours of grateful I feel a need to talk about to complain and be embittered towards but I would be belaboring one of the many points I have against it so many side quests so many throwaway characters so many setting details that technically exist but don't do anything for the setting or for the player they don't intrigue they don't wander they don't amaze I want to complain but it would be a waste of all of our time it would not be a worthy exercise for me to make and for you to watch anymore greed fall is meticulously engineered tedium it sets up so much that could be interesting so much that could be used to raise an eyebrow or make me think about what I'm really doing but it always seems to forget what it can do while being one of the slowest most meandering experiences I've ever had yet I still feel hurried along hurried past anything that might raise the heartrate and make me feel alive it's a man who peels an orange to toss the fruit and eat the rind and during that you had to uncomfortably watch not allowed to touch the orange sorry I've been going at this for hours and that's the metaphor we're going with I know this video is long this isn't actually the worst game I've ever covered but it's definitely up there for boredom thanks to everyone who's still here because I imagine I'll sound pretty bloody Haggard by this point and like an absolute commotion by now to those who like grateful who told me all that time ago the spiders have finally done it I promise I wasn't looking for negatives here I'm not being a contrarian this was to me the Distilled experience of playing grateful which is experiencing a world that was entirely surface-level experienced via mechanics not fit for the purpose they need to carry out but jury-rigged into place role-playing interfaces that have them Limited and hackneyed methods to allow you to play a role characters helps more interesting than how they are actually used characters that are mere tools and the quest design and plotting is slow awkward and tedious I do still have a soft spot for spiders and I am happy for the success but my word greed fool has to be the most shallow boring thing I have ever played if there is not a serious shake-up with their next title this may be the last spiders related game that I cover because with this video I wanted to break that boredom down into how it's a vote and I hope I've done that so thank you for watching this was the snake rut and that was a conclusion as awkward as the bloody game I'm amending it too if you want to support me please spread this video around if you want to help directly I do have a patreon everyone who donates gets fank like the lovely people scrolling past now and they get access to a patreon exclusive discord everyone at every tickets that at three dollars you get access to my scripts and notes which are big buggers especially right now and at five dollars you get access to bonus after four videos covering any last-second forts and answering questions asked by those in that tier there is a channel on the discord to submit questions but I do also check patreon comments I hope you all had fun I hope 2020 is good I'm probably gonna go and sleep for a week have fun Jesus I was over two hours UKUSA 4 is next [ __ ] you know

Channel: Tehsnakerer

Views: 469,613

Rating: 4.8258219 out of 5

Keywords: Playing Greedfall, Greedfall review, Greedfall analysis, Greedfall RPG, Spiders, Greedfall, TehSnakerer, TehSnakerer Greedfall, Greedfall gameplay, Greedfall story, Greedfall critique, Spiders RPG, greedfall trailer, Greedfall best ending, role-playing game, focus home interactive, Spiders studio, An Unadventurous Spirit, victorian RPG, Colonial RPG, role playing game, greedfall an unadventurous spirit, greedfall game review

Id: Vi7fikwiMDs

Length: 129min 4sec (7744 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/kowubungaitis]

Can't say I agree with a lot of issues the dude seems to have.

He's knee-jerkingly nitpicking things which are clearly decisions made to reduce tedium or otherwise improve the game. It would have been downright unplayable with no fast-travel camps. Having to go to a town to sell loot, craft supplies or buy gear would have introduced really unpleasant timesinks for virtually no gain.

Natives speak our language because they are characters with tons of lines. Imagine having to listen to a language neither you nor your character understands for hours on end, even during important plot-related scenes. Do you just add subtitles? Who's providing the translation then? Have our character learned the native language in such a short time? Or do you have Siora say the same things in our language after the natives are done talking? That would be incredibly redundant and waste even more time. The decision to make natives speak in english with a heavy accent and some native words was a logical one and I can see the merit over other possible choices. I also don't agree with Tir Fradee feeling small. Doing all sidequests and properly exploring all the locations took me dozens of hours. Each new map was like a solid 5-6 hours of content.

[u/Negaflux]

Yum, 2hrs long, this one is meaty, I've been waiting for a proper review of this game. The setting and characters don't grab me at all, and that's a bit of a bummer because I'm a fan of Spiders...

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]