GreedFall's Flexible Combat Feels Fantastic to Play

GreedFall has quietly flown under my radar since it’s announcement back in 2017, but finally caught my eye by chance when I saw a giant, tree-like monster fighting the main character on one of our displays at the office after E3 this year Magic, swords, and monsters are up-my-alley–so I was excited to play a hands-on demo with developer Spiders at Gamescom 2019. I went in a bit skeptical, but left with GreedFall as one of my most anticipated games this year.

GreedFall is a big historical-fantasy RPG with plenty of systems to dive into and things to get side-tracked by while exploring. You can read a great overview of what GreedFall is here, and watch this developer interview with gameplay below to learn more. Here’s a quick rundown before we get into how it feels to play, which is, spoiler: fun.

Some quick GreedFall Facts:

• “Core RPG,” as described by developer Spiders

• Historical fantasy heavily inspired by journals from explorers’ and scholars’

• Visually inspired by Baroque art from 17th Century Europe

• Multiple party-members to recruit

• Deep character interactions

• Multiple, flexible skill trees that don’t pigeonhole you into one archetype

• Includes traps and guns (think old-school pistols) that can be wielded simultaneously with your main means of attacking, whether it’s magic or melee, which can be swapped at will, without penalty

With all of this in mind, GreedFall has plenty of narrative and dialogue to observe, things to collect and places to explore, but I was especially interested in how the combat felt. It’s easy for a deep combat system with so much freedom and so many options to end up feeling bogged down to me, but GreedFall’s combat felt polished, intuitive, and facilitating. Controls are responsive and fast, attacks felt weighty, dodges and parries carried out as I felt they should. To put it bluntly, combat in GreedFall simply felt fun, and I don’t see it becoming a chore like in some RPGs I’ve played.

This feeling is reinforced by the incredible amount of freedom you have with customizing your character. Your starting class doesn’t dictate what you become, just your starting active skills, like Stasis (which enables you to temporarily immobilize an enemy) with the Magic class, Set an Elemental Trap with the Technical class. Plus, active skills (Skills), passive skills (Attributes), and Talents (like Craftmanship, which lets you craft basic armor and weapons), all use entirely different resources to purchase, which would allow you to mix and match to your heart’s content. You can finally make that beefy, armor-clad two-handed sword user who is also good at something like potion-making like you’ve always wanted.

During my demo, I wielded a mainly magic-using character, with the ability to perform a second, fast dodge and a flaming one-handed sword. Magic, like in most games, uses MP, but switching to the sword to compensate when I ran out could be done freely, was just as powerful, and didn’t feel cumbersome at all. To add even more variety, I could also lay down traps and fire guns, and you can become more proficient with all of these items as you progress as you choose.

Most enemies also have their own strengths or weaknesses against certain types of damage, requiring you to focus on different attack patterns depending on the enemy. I also fought one of those magical tree-like beasts known as a Guardian, and it constantly unleashed poison on me. Knowing this going in, I could have simply mapped the Antidote to the d-pad to use it quickly, but the tactical pause menu was fine to use in its place. Of course, I also had a healer in my party whose specialty was curing disease, so I didn’t really need to worry about it much.

There is stealth, for those of you who might be wondering, but GreedFall’s sneak attacks didn’t really embolden me to try to stealth kill my way entirely through a group of enemies — a poor trope I’d unfortunately fall back to continuously in games that allowed it (looking at you, Assassin’s Creed).

GreedFall Screenshots Gamescom

During my mission, I could either sneak past a group of bear-like creatures called Ulg, or fight them. I chose to mix it up, and pulled off a stealth-attack against one, initiating combat against the group with a one-shot kill. Basically, exactly what a rogue assassin in Dungeons and Dragons can do for your party.

I especially appreciate this classic RPG mechanic after playing so much Assassin’s Creed, because, in GreedFall, you don’t have to spec towards stealth and then get destroyed if a Sneak Attack doesn’t go exactly your way.

Unfortunately, I was plenty busy learning the ropes of melee- and magic-combat, so I barely utilized the gun and traps at my disposable. When I did use them though, they fluidly weaved into my attacks with a simple tap of the assigned d-pad button. The gun seemed to auto-aim for me, similar to my long-range magic attacks, and the trap laid down in front of me, which didn’t feel disruptive.

With so many diverse, fantastical enemies to fight and attack-strategies to choose from, I see combat to remain engaging for the entirety of the campaign.

The creative producer Tom Butler said it should take 35 to 40 hours for an average playthrough, but he also mentioned some early players had spent nearly six hours in just the starting town.

There are four difficulty settings, and Butler said the two harder choices are for players who like min-maxing. Min-max is like a special key word to me. There are hundreds of pieces of equipment to craft and customize, and this isn’t just for fashion–dressing in the garb of the right faction can prove as a covert way to blend in.

The story of GreedFall seems just as flexible as the gameplay. On top of a branching narrative, there are four or five factions to side with, and creative producer Tom Butler said it’s not quite so black and white.

“It’s not like where you choose one and then you’re just doing stuff with them,” said Butler. “The idea is you’re kind of a neutral party. As the story progresses, you are more funneled into these more extreme decisions.”

GreedFall Gamescom 2019 Trailer Screenshots

There are many aspects to GreedFall’s story, but according to Butler it’s largely a story about European colonialism and its ramifications.

“It’s quite a touchy topic… the concept of these native islands, that are pretty much untouched by civilization, getting pretty much destroyed by these modern civilizations,” Butler explained. “It just kind of asks the question like what is the price of a future in humanity? What’s the cost of real people?

Butler also explained that it’s pretty clear the message in GreedFall is that colonialism is bad, but “it’s an RPG, so you can play as a dick,” he added.

Ultimately, you’ll have to decide how to handle these complex issues yourself, but your character will have help along the way. GreedFall features a recruitable, interchangeable party that’s reminiscent of Bioware’s Dragon Age series. Though I’m quite intrigued to learn more about the characters (and various romance options), I was entirely side-tracked by killing random enemies along the way during the side-quest I completed. One cool feature though is that when fast-traveling, instead of waiting in a loading screen, I was thrown into a campsite, which, which is where you go for party-management.

I did not get nearly enough time to fully evaluate GreedFall’s potential, but it clearly has my attention. I’m looking forward to sinking some hours into Spiders’ newest, clearly ambitious game.

Looking for more Gamescom 2019 news, previews, gameplay, and more? Check out GreedFall: Diplomacy, Companions, and an Unknown World Shine Through in This New Action-RPG for a breakdown of exactly what GreedFall is about, and IGN’s Gamescom 2019 hub page for everything we published!

Casey DeFreitas is an Editor at IGN who loves monster hunting, slaying, and catching. Catch her on Twitter @ShinyCaseyD.