The golden age of the BioWare RPG may be past, but there are still developers willing to go the distance with a genre that begs for good fantasy worldbuilding, good game mechanics, and interesting well-written stories all in one. Spiders is one of them, and Greedfall 2: The Dying World is their sequel to the colonial fantasy RPG that was a very welcome and pleasant surprise back in 2022. That said, there are a few big changes to how it plays that might put some people off the trail—but after a few hours with advanced portions of the game’s storyline I saw the makings of another success.
Kicking it Old School
Greedfall 2 takes cues from the early-2000s era of roleplaying games. It’s more like Dragon Age: Origins or Knights of the Old Republic than anything released recently, for better and for worse. I distinctly got the feeling that Greedfall 2 is specifically harkening back to this era of games for a reason: This is a style of game that the developers at Spiders want to emulate and keep alive because they prefer it—at least for their own games.
Whether or not you enjoy that style of real-time-with-pause combat and emphasis on character arcs, dialogues, and analyzing the environments for plot options will probably determine whether or not Greedfall 2 is interesting to you. At least based on what I played.
Fantasy Island
As with the first Greedfall game, the fantasy world is the real selling point here. Based on the ideas of the European Age of Discovery, or the Spanish golden age, with a dash of the 18th century, and delving into the fascinating clash between cultures in a world that is approaching what we’d consider modern. Except, you know, with the backdrop of magic, monsters, gods, and other fantastical things. Technically a prequel to the first game, I really got the feeling it’s narratively designed so that you can pick it up and play only knowing the most basic premise—which is helped along by the part where you’re a native of far-flung island Teer Fradee with little knowledge of the continent at the other edge of the ocean.
What’s cool is that whereas the first game took place entirely on the island, in Greedfall 2 you get to travel to the continental cities only loosely described in Greedfall. They’re delightful culture shock and a welcome change of pace: Winding streets of crowded buildings, huge port complexes of tall ships, including your own ship as a base of operations, and sprawling palatial estates for the wealthiest.
It also continues Greedfall’s tradition of including some absurd, wonderful, and downright dapper riffs on early modern clothing. Including an array of some absolutely wonderful hats. Seriously, someone’s going to play this just for the silly hats and helmets. Like I’m ready to do a second preview, right now, just talking to the Spiders art department about some of these hats.
On the Nose
Your character is Vridan Gerr, which means “Short Roots” in your own language, an up-and-coming initiate of your tribe’s combined magical tradition and religion. The character creation was pretty robust, introduced in the first scene with a cute little dialogue involving a foreign artist making depictions of the natives to send home. It had all the features you’d expect, and more besides—seven different sliders for the nose alone, for example. I’m sure some people will be able to make art with it, while others will make monsters.
There were a good amount of classes to play with. Across the three segments I explored I tried out a tank-focused Protector, a greatsword-and-magic-wielding Living Blade, and a stylish swashbuckling rapier-and-pistol-wielding class with a sideline in party buffing skills. Because, to be clear, when a game offers you an opportunity to arm yourself and behave like one of The Three Musketeers, well, you take it.
KOTOR Combat
Combat is much-changed from the first game, focusing on a real-time-with-pause combat where you control or automate your entire party rather than just your main character. It’s a pretty big tonal shift if what you loved from the first game was the action style, but it’s a familiar form if you grew up on Knights of the Old Republic or Dragon Age Origins.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t completely sold on the combat. Real-time-with-pause does sometimes feel like a dated way to play games, a halfway compromise between simultaneous resolution and turn-based combat. You’re often just using your best abilities in the order that it seems good to use them, or setting up and executing the same combo on enemies content to stand there and take it rather than react in unexpected ways or use surprising abilities. That said, it’s combat that’s playable in three forms.
There’s Tactical Mode that has a free-moving camera, has you control your entire team, and do lots of pausing to queue up moves. There’s a Hybrid mode that has more automated options for your companion team and fewer pauses. There’s also Focused mode, which defaults to your character’s point of view and has you really only controlling their moves in detail, with very limited pausing. I tried all three modes and found myself only really loving the Tactical mode, but even though I’m a tactics junkie I saw the genuine appeal of the Focused mode if what you really care for is the story and want to turn the difficulty down so the combat is there as flavorful excitement for the narrative.
Story Time
Greedfall 2’s story looks like it’s shaping up to be just as much epic fantasy as the first game’s. The stakes are high, the heroes are heroic, and the villains are properly awful. That said, I got the impression that more characters in Greedfall 2 were just stuck in the middle—morally grey, stuck between two worlds, powerless, or just playing politics. That really plays out in the opening, which sees your character and their friends abducted as the introduction to a rollicking adventure… the goal of which seems like to get back home. But the things you discover along the way mean that you’ll need to return to the mainland and play hero to ensure your peoples’ survival—whether you like it or not.
Along for the ride on your adventure are some really choice companions across an array of cool archetypes—at least from what I saw. Each of the companions has their own preferred fighting style and unique skill tree, as does the main character, which really helped to sell me on these being different people and not just a possible player character class palette-swapped to a new body.
In true RPG style, these companions will also inject themselves into conversations you have during your travels. The veteran warrior Till, for example, busted out his sergeant’s bluster and pulled rank on some harbor guards when they confronted the party about permits for travel. The best example I saw, however, was older explorer Safia, whose years of wisdom and maternal character showed as she’d often admonish others for behaving in dishonorable ways, or ways that reflected poorly on their shared nationality.
I also quite liked Fausta, an exiled religious wizard from a theocratic state whose loyalties to the hero’s party were conflicted at best. Not only was her light-based magic interesting in combat, but her stance as yet another fish out of water alongside the player character made for interesting conversations.
Final Thoughts
It’s good that the companions are at least interesting from the about three hours of preview I played, but it’s better that those slices of storyline from different parts of the game all seemed pretty immediately compelling. There’s clear stakes, plots, and interesting things to do at every point I played, and all of it was written well enough that I stayed interested even when I was tossed into a situation and hadn’t fully played the few dozen hours of story that came before it—something that’s just not always true for RPG previews.
That said, there was a sense that the story was big and epic just for the sake of it, because the more compelling parts of the plot were the places where characters were interacting with each other amid the larger historical forces they had no power over. Upon finally returning to your home island, for example, you might find your village destroyed and your people missing. What of your loved ones? Your mother? Those stories were really compelling and could have carried the game on their own, to be honest—but I think that epic fantasy fans want something big and magical to happen and they’ll be pretty interested in what Greedfall 2 has cooking. It’s a twist on the exciting big reveals from the possible endings of Greedfall, and an obvious outgrowth of setting this game on the continent rather than entirely in the new lands.
Either way, this is definitely looking to be Spiders at the top of their game. I hope that bears out when it releases in 2026.
