With the fall from grace of former Western RPG masters like Bioware and Bethesda, who is there to pick up the torch from where they left behind? Along came Spiders to help bring life back to a genre once populated by the Mass Effects, Dragon Ages, and The Elder Scrolls of old, with their most ambitious effort yet, GreedFall.

In GreedFall, players assume the role of a Legate De Sardet, a diplomat or ambassador with all the political power and benefits that come with it. It is your job to broker peace or flame the fans of war between the various factions in the game, most of which are modelled after real-world counterparts like the Roman Catholic Church, any country or culture enslaved by colonial forces and more.

The choices that you make in the game actually matter, as they affect the people and everything around you in the game. The side quests are not merely fetch quests, as Spiders has incorporated the best parts of CD Projekt Red’s narrative complexity from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. GreedFall may not be as good as that masterpiece, but not for lack of trying.

GreedFall may suffer from bugs, glitches, and janky combat, but all of that is circumvented by other elements like the great narrative, choice-driven dialogue options, and more. It’s not perfect, but developer Spiders can only grow better from here on out, and their next game might just be the equal of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Mass Effect 2.