Conclusion

While GreedFall might not be a AAA title from a huge game studio, it's still an extremely well-designed RPG. If you liked Skyrim, Dragon Age or the first Mass Effect, you'll feel right at home. You get to control one main character who can team up with five more NPCs to form a typical RPG party (romance options are available). While combat is real-time by default, it's not dissimilar to Assassin's Creed with plenty of move options, and you can instantly pause combat with the space key for a more tactical approach, or to access various potions or special skills in peace.

There are plenty of character development options—a complex skill tree that's split into sections for "skills", "attributes" and "talents". Each of those sections is in turn split once more. Overall, the skill choices remind of Pillars of Eternity, but with a less overwhelming amount of variables to consider. What I really like is that despite choosing a certain archetype for your character at the start, you are not limited to any class. It is possible to pick skills from other sections, allowing for hybrids. Weapons are varied enough, too, with item level using the established "green", "blue", and "purple" system. Most weapons can be enchanted to boost their stats. GreedFall also includes a crafting system that's sufficiently complex without overburdening the user. I'm very happy to report that there is no limit to the inventory (I'm a hoarder), but beyond a certain weight, sprinting will no longer be available.

Not everything is rosy, though. The game does lack a bunch of quality of life improvements, like a mini-map or fast travel that's available most of the time (a fast-travel system does exist at specific locations). Facial animations are extremely poor and the characters' lips are not properly synchronized with the dialogue, which I suspect is due to the limited budget. The same goes for some character animations and NPC models. While the map is huge, and there's plenty of space to explore, some city areas feel like they were copy and pasted from other parts of the world, re-using the same house models over and over.

Overall, the shortcomings don't hurt the game as much as you would think. This is probably because of the rich and well-written story paired with a good amount of side quests. Many quests can be solved in several ways; for example, you can stealth and lockpick your way in or bash down the front door, killing everyone in sight. Alternative approaches include sneaking over a fence, disguising yourself, or using a "charisma" skill check. Stealth isn't as in-depth as in other titles, but it's still a nice option to have.

Graphics are alright, but nothing to write home about—we have seen better in The Witcher 3. If you take a closer look at our screenshots, you can spot some scenes where graphics looks great, which is mostly due to the prebaked lighting. This method renders light effects on to textures during development, so that they no longer have to be generated in real-time during gameplay, which of course helps with performance. GreedFall has the basic graphics settings options covered, but I would have wished for more. FPS rates are acceptable across the board, for both AMD and NVIDIA users. For example, to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, a Radeon RX 590 or GTX 1060 6 GB will do. For 1440p at 60 FPS, RX Vega 64 or GTX 1070 Ti is sufficient, and 4K60 is only achievable by the mighty RTX 2080 Ti.

Taking a closer look at the benchmark results we see that AMD has a slight performance deficit over NVIDIA of a few percentage points, nothing dramatic. There's still hope for users because neither AMD nor NVIDIA have provided a GameReady driver for GreedFall yet, so additional performance improvements could be had in the future.

Overall, GreedFall is a very solid RPG title that seems to have been released with slightly bad timing: WOW Classic, Gears 5, and Borderlands 3 are taking all the spotlight at the moment. Priced at $49.99, it matches other AAA titles, yet does lack some of the polish we're expecting from full-price games. On the other hand, there's no annoying launchers, Denuvo, game logins or microtransactions—you can just enjoy your game.