Mind you, this is Spiders. Writing about Spiders is fun because you can scare people for a moment before they realize you’re talking about game development studio Spiders. They’ve just released GreedFall 2: The Dying Land into early access. For those who don’t remember the first GreedFall, it was a colonial RPG about landing on the magical shores of another continent and battling monsters and borderlands. This time around, the story advances the fantasy Colombian exchange by casting you in the role of a native who’s been displaced against his will and taken to the “old world.” The game’s release came against a backdrop of discontent within the studio. However, employees managed to secure some concessions in negotiations.
Watch on YouTube
Spiders notes that this release includes “the beginnings of the main quest,” with further expansions to that story to be dropped in future updates. Beyond that, the release includes three regions to explore, six companion characters to party up with, and six skill trees to climb. Future updates are slated for unspecified times in “fall” and “winter,” bringing side quests involving sword-wielding buddies, new regions, and more companions, along with a crafting system.
Behind the scenes, there have been rumblings of discontent from workers at the studio. At the beginning of the month, about half the studio signed a letter calling for a strike. This was to address frustrations over working conditions within the company, including “global mismanagement, turnover and hiring issues, unacceptable delays in achieving gender equality and parity, significant lack of transparency, denial of the issues… and obstructed negotiations.”
Studio management stated that these allegations were unfounded, adding, “These in no way reflect the daily working lives of the company's employees and are an attack on the reputation of the studio, whose teams are fully mobilized to produce quality games.”
Since then, the French union representing workers, the Syndicat des Travailleurs/ses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV), said that talks between the union and the company at Xitter had yielded promises from management, including “supervision” of working conditions and a “bonus based on performance on GreedFall 2 Early Access.” (Comments translated by Google.) You know what, as if collective action works. Hah!
Regardless of the studio's infighting, GreedFall 2 will have to improve on the team's previous games if it wants to impress some players. The first GreedFall didn't really impress Astrid in her review“The first three hours in GreedFall make you want to astrally exit your body and literally fly away to do or see something else,” they said, “and then you get to the island of Teer Fradee and you're like, 'Oh! This is actually mediocre!'”
Spiders have a history of making good-looking games, with plenty of flashiness and a promising hook, but when played they reveal themselves to be so-so. Steelrising was a steampunk soulslike with a French Revolution angle that would have made Alice B shrug. They also made The Technomancer and Mars: War Logs, neither of which were particularly brilliant. Richard Cobbett summed up this general trend in his review of Bound By Flame as “it dreams of being epic, but ends up feeling just insubstantial – an action RPG that longs to be in the same company as The Witcher and Dragon Age, but instead has to contend with the likes of Game of Thrones: The Game.” Perhaps this sequel will bring them one step closer to the aspirations of BioWare's heyday.