After 2 years in early access, Greedfall: The Dying World still feels unfinished

Having spent the last week playing the final version of Greedfall: The Dying World I'm faced with a conundrum. I admire its quiet ambition and some elements of its world, but it's a humdrum slog to play. It's the latest from Spiders, French purveyors of eurojank. The term is shorthand for an RPG that's big on ambition but low on budget, relative to the big blockbuster studios. Think Piranha Bytes, early Larian and CD Projekt, and the Stalker series. The Dying World has been in early access for two years and this week gets its 1.0 release. It's an approach to RPG development that worked wonders for Baldur's Gate 3, but I'm afraid the results here are nowhere near as favorable.The Dying World is a prequel to the modestly successful 2019 outing set in a fantasy-daubed approximation of 17th century Europe. Controversially, it ditches the live third-person combat of its predecessor in favour of a rugged real-time with pause system that seems to answer to a new public relaxedness with ageworn approaches to combat. For those who love a rough around the edges western RPG it may sate that hunger, but this prequel doesn't seem designed to bring Greedfall to a wider audience, which is weird because Greedfall seemed like a rare minor hit for a AA studio.

The Dying World flips the script on its predecessor: in the first you're a colonising noble, but in this one you're the colonised. I play as the fully customisable Vriden Gerr, who belongs to a relentlessly exploited island nation where the colonising Renaigse are mining and poisoning, as is a brutal coloniser's wont. Vriden Gerr is eventually kidnapped by shadowy figures belonging to the Alliance who—we gradually learn—are using the native inhabitants of Teer Fradee for chemical warfare experiments. Vriden Gerr escapes the Alliance's clutches alive, but not without determination to foil whatever plot is brewing. She gradually builds an eight-strong crew cherrypicked from all the various races and factions of Gacane, none of whom I managed to take a liking to across this 35-40 hour adventure. She eventually gets her own sailing ship in the form of the Constanzia to help on her quest, which serves as a base from which you can cross oceans and romance companions.The most obvious and major change is the new real-time with pause system. It's not great. And this is coming from someone who doesn't hate RTWP like many of my colleagues. Greedfall's combat is far too easy, and usually doesn't require deep thought given to positioning or careful lining up of skills. It's usually a practice of making all of my characters use their best abilities against the closest foe whenever their cooldowns finish and their action points replenish. About half the time I blindly queued up attacks and buffs—effectively button mashing, I guess—and wasn't punished for it. It's a mushy mess, in other words, with most fights looking like this:

I'm sure on higher difficulties The Dying World's combat requires a modicum of thought, but I played on the normal recommended setting and dreaded it. RTWP makes even frivolous encounters overlong, meaning I opted for stealth wherever possible, especially as enemies tend to respawn on the maps after a while, making backtracking for the sake of sidequests a real time consuming pain. Stealth comes with problems of its own: by the halfway mark I realised I could stealth past basically any enemy so long as I paused every couple of steps to wait for their alertness meter to go back down. It's not even that I invested heavily into the stealth talent: I only put three of a possible eight points into it.

The Dying World is buggy too. Sprinting around the gorgeous cobblestone streets of Peren from one objective to another, I noticed that enemies kept abruptly spawning into the world. Wow, I thought: these Merchant Congregation cops sure do have some thematically inappropriate magical teleporting tech! But after a few hours I realised it wasn't magic: it was just the game failing to load character models in quickly enough. Voices and sound effects often just ceased to play, forcing a restart, and the game crashed every couple of hours, especially—weirdly—whenever I tried to access the world map. Sometimes, during one of the game's very many investigation sequences, exhausting all investigable objects wouldn't progress the story resulting in a soft lock.I have a huge tolerance for buggy but ambitious RPGs; if all studios opted for polish over ideas we'd have a world full of Dragon Age Veilguard, with no Elex 2, or Gothic, or Stalker, or even Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Unfortunately, Greedfall 2 lacks the systemic complexity to justify its wooliness. Its conversation trees are labyrinthine and consequential, but the world is otherwise weirdly, stoically unreactive. You can rob everyone blind and they won't bat an eyelid. You're not allowed to kill randoms, nor preemptively strike actual enemies. The world looks gorgeous, but exploring it isn't much fun because there's usually not much to find except more interminable RTWP scraps.

It all sounds pretty bleak for Greedfall 2 on paper but there are some aspects I loved. The soundtrack by Olivier Deriviere is often brilliant, especially the recurring boss music. The world is often beautiful in a modest way: thanks to its experience on the last Greedfall and Steelrising, Spiders has a knack for sprawling old European towns that feel very lifelike, and while they're not exactly a joy to navigate—they're basically mazes that forbid travelling as the bird flies—they're richly evocative of the era Spiders is channelling. I also think that if the story connects with you—and it really didn't, for me—there's fun to be had with its branching paths and moral dilemmas.The Dying World is an apt name: Spiders' latest really does feel like a last hurrah for a certain style of "eurojank" RPG that doesn't seem to exist anymore. Piranha Bytes closed in 2024. Larian and CD Projekt are now both immensely wealthy blockbuster studios. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was our 2025 GOTY. Nowadays, quietly ambitious, low-budget RPGs—think the Atom RPG series, but also more recently Banquet For Fools—are happy to dabble in old CRPG presentations. Even though I didn't love The Dying World, I'm still super curious to see what Spiders does next: the studio tends to never tread water. You can check it out on Steam.