Derik Badman's Journal

Still coding, still playing Greedfall as my week of vacation comes to an end. I was thinking to myself about the nice absence of lots of fetch quests, when of course I ended up taking on this quest that involved a lot of running back and forth to get an object and then talk to a person somewhere, none of which involved going anywhere new or facing any sort of challenge, so in the end it was just a lot of stupid busy work.

Like many of these sorts of games it also suffers from the constant inventory/equipment management both to keep encumbrance below max (so you can run) and to keep upgrading so you can face the challenges of the game. You keep having to swap around equipment or upgrade it, and so even if you find something you like visually, you can't end up using it for long without falling behind. One thing Assassin's Creed Odyssey ended up doing well was when they added a way to change the look your armor/clothes to match any set you had previously discovered. That way you could keep upgrading in different ways, but you could also choose what your character looked like. Greedfall does have the extra element of faction clothing, so that you can put on the armor/clothes of a faction as a disguise and then be able to more freely walk around specific areas. Of course that does then end up meaning you have to carry a bunch of extra armor around for when you need it.

Narratively, I am enjoying the slowly unfolding mysteries and the handling of the colonizer/native dynamic, though I'm finding it hard to be sympathetic at all to the colonizers, which may be a failing of the game (it makes a lot of the choices easy) or maybe just an indication of my sympathies. I also think they have, so far as I've gotten, missed an opportunity in regard to the protagonist. And some spoilers here... You learn that your character is actually a native, born on a ship back to what they have thought is their home. I don't feel like the cut scenes and dialog are adequately representing what should be a fairly major questioning of the character's position in regards to the colonizer/native dynamic. Perhaps that is partially a limitation of the order one does quests and the game just not accounting in various side quests for changes wrought by the main quest discoveries. Curious to see how it plays out further along the main quest lines.