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Has Spiders ever made an RPG game that was good?

Which one of their games was the best?

  • Of Orcs and Men

    Votes: 1 1.8%
  • Mars: War Logs

    Votes: 2 3.6%
  • Bound By Flame

    Votes: 3 5.4%
  • The Technomancer

    Votes: 1 1.8%
  • Greedfall

    Votes: 36 64.3%
  • Steelrising

    Votes: 6 10.7%
  • Never heard about any of those

    Votes: 7 12.5%

  • Total voters
    56

Drizzlehell

Banned
In case you don't know who they are, it's a development studio that's mostly known for putting out mid-shelf or budget role-playing games. You might have heard about at least one of them:

OfOrcsAndMen.jpg
MarsWarLogsCover.jpg
Bound_by_Flame_cover.jpg

i-the-technomancer-digital.jpg
8126808-greedfall-windows-apps-front-cover.jpg
EGS_Steelrising_Spiders_S2_1200x1600-709b7807cdf4267c7bbb1b5c4f3f2be8


What typically characterizes their games (at least of those that I've played) is:
  • somewhat interesting and unique premise
  • decent graphics and visual design
  • unique setting
  • serviceable voice acting with a couple of standout actors here and there
However, the things that usually let those games down are:
  • really boring stories and dialogue
  • repetitive combat
  • absolutely dreadful, uncanny valley character models and wooden animations
  • uninspired quests
So far I've only played Mars War Logs and Technomancer all the way through, and after playing GreedFall for about 20 hours it seems to be pretty much more of the same, i.e. cool setting and premise, but with everything else being so incredibly dull that I keep forgetting what the in-game conversations were about before they're even over.

At this point I think I'm kinda done giving those games a try. GreedFall was supposed to be their most successful and arguably their best game, but honestly, I can hardly feel any improvement over The Technomancer, which was an arduous experience to play through. I do kinda wonder if any of their older games are any good, though. Bound By Flame was supposed to have good characters, so did Of Orcs and Men, and with Steelrising they apparently switched to a souls-like genre? And that it's supposed to be pretty decent?

Anyone ever gave those other games a go and could tell us anything about them?
 
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Zephir

Member
Of Orcs and Men was nice, too bad they decided to keep Styx for future spin-offs, 'cause Orcs will always be better.
I liked Greedfall
Constantin did nothing wrong
, will check the sequel

I HATED Bound by Flame so much that I swore to never play or buy a Spider game ever again...I gave up when I saw that I had Greedfall on my PSPlus. Still mad at them, but less than before.

Overall, they're "ok": they satisfy the RPG itch that people may have in between AAA games. It's clear that nobody will ever give up a Dragon Age or a Dark Souls over their games, but it's also clear that they don't have the budget or the work force to be a direct competitor to them.
 

Drizzlehell

Banned
I HATED Bound by Flame so much that I swore to never play or buy a Spider game ever again...I gave up when I saw that I had Greedfall on my PSPlus. Still mad at them, but less than before.
Damn, that's pretty harsh, lol. What was it about that game that was so terrible, though?

Techmomancer was kinda decent. Greedfall is actually pretty good. It had an amazing artsyle which brings the lesser parts of it up.
Yeah, the setting is what mostly carries it for me, which was a similar deal with Technomancer. Although I absolutely hate these parts too:
the sheer distance you had to travel on foot back and forth over and over again
Every time I'm stuck in that part of the game where I have to run back and forth to converse with a number of different characters, I can't wait until I'm allowed to go back to exploring and killing monsters.

Which, again, was a similar experience for me in Technomancer, lol.

I guess they're kinda slow to iterate on their own formula.
 
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R6Rider

Gold Member
Greedfall is pretty good.

I've heard good things about Steelrising, but haven't played it yet.
 

TwinB242

Member
Greedfall had its highs and lows but it was a pretty solid game overall, and I was actually impressed by many of its ideas.

Steelrising is decent but definitely more inconsistent quality wise.
 

Zephir

Member
Damn, that's pretty harsh, lol. What was it about that game that was so terrible, though?

The game forgets it was supposed to have a middle, instead of skipping immediately to the end, giving you all the major plot points all of a sudden.
And all the story build-up? The lore? It doesn't matter. You were supposed to fight the seven bad guys of whatever, but you fight only one and then, apparently, they all die.
The story by itself is also very plain with no twists: the bad guy is the bad guy, the characters that act like dicks are dicks...

It's obvious there were heavy budget cuts, but that's too much.

Also the game is heavily broken: just dodge/use the daggers and you're invincible
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
Steelrising, Greedfall, Of Orcs and Men, and even Technomancer were all fun times. They make genuine 7/10 games. They aren't great, but they are very solid and have a lot of charm to them.

Except Bound by Flame. Fuck Bound by FLame. 0/10 game. Absolute trash.
 

T4keD0wN

Member
Ive enjoyed Steelrising a lot. The level design was nowhere near up to par with other fromsoft games for example, but otherwise it was one of the few good souls inspired games. It surprisingly has a story, that felt like a pretty fresh thing in a soulslike.

Ive though i was going to enjoy Greedfall a lot, the tutorial was amazing, unfortunately it was by far the best part of the game and it falls off hard after that, each quest essentialy devolves into you being a message delivery man who walks back and forth between 3 different places just to pass 20 messages from npc A to npc B and sometimes to npc C. Otherwise the game had a lot of great ideas and systems, but not fully or well realized. I see a lot of potential in the sequel.
 
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jm89

Member
Enjoyed the shit out of greedfall.

You can defintley tell they had a small budget. But i can honestly say i found the main quest and nearly every side quest interesting.

That's where alot of RPG makers fall for me.

Gameplay was super basic, but then again i played as a warrior and maybe mage would have been more fun.

And the budget issue, flipping heck using the same damn interiors over and over is a bit too much. Hopefuly they are being given a bigger budget to develop the world a bit more in the next game.
 

cash_longfellow

Gold Member
Damn, that's pretty harsh, lol. What was it about that game that was so terrible, though?


Yeah, the setting is what mostly carries it for me, which was a similar deal with Technomancer. Although I absolutely hate these parts too:

Every time I'm stuck in that part of the game where I have to run back and forth to converse with a number of different characters, I can't wait until I'm allowed to go back to exploring and killing monsters.

Which, again, was a similar experience for me in Technomancer, lol.

I guess they're kinda slow to iterate on their own formula.
Fully 110% agree…if they would have done better with this aspect of the game, I legitimately could have given it a solid 8.5-8.75 personally. As it stands, I still believe it’s a good 8/10 at worst.
 

Kadve

Member
Was gonna make a joke here until i realised they are actually called "Spiders". Always called them "Spider" for some reason.

Anyway all of them are pretty much Eurojank with all that comes with that term. So you either hate them or love them.
 

Killer8

Member
I really thought they had the potential to be the next BioWare. They occupied that middle market Western RPG space which was reminiscent of BioWare before they hit it big. It's a shame that it feels like they kind of threw that away chasing the Souls-like trend with even more mediocre results.
 
I bought the PS5 gold edition of Greedfall a few weeks back and I think I'll give it a shot after I'm done with TOTK. Will return to this thread with an opinion later down the road. :messenger_grinning_sweat:
 
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Drizzlehell

Banned
I really thought they had the potential to be the next BioWare. They occupied that middle market Western RPG space which was reminiscent of BioWare before they hit it big. It's a shame that it feels like they kind of threw that away chasing the Souls-like trend with even more mediocre results.
They're probably just experimenting with different things. Greedfall 2 is in development at the moment.
 

Drizzlehell

Banned
By the way, I got throught the "Treason!" quest line last night and that one was actually pretty decent. The choices and possible outcomes seem to be way more weighty than in any of their previous games, which helped that particular quest to be more engaging.
 

Shut0wen

Member
Seriously spiders is going to be the next cdpr, always supported there games since orcs, under rated af eurojank though greedfall is definitely there best game, steelrising was there best combat just ashame the game was incredibly short
 

ClosBSAS

Member
no....greedfall was average and i was very very disappointed with steelrising. i bought it day one and played for 4 hours and unisntalled. too much jank.
 

SmokedMeat

Gamer™
I really thought they had the potential to be the next BioWare. They occupied that middle market Western RPG space which was reminiscent of BioWare before they hit it big. It's a shame that it feels like they kind of threw that away chasing the Souls-like trend with even more mediocre results.

They didn’t throw anything away, and one game isn’t chasing a trend. Trying something different with a new ip isn’t a bad thing.
 

RagnarokIV

Member
I own Mars and Technomancer, never even booted them up once. So long as they aren't ubisoft open world games, I'll give them a try in the coming weeks.
 

Lunarorbit

Member
Tried greedfall. Spiders hyped it like mass effect with the choice to be good or bad. I knew it wouldn't be close in execution but I liked the idea of a double A studio making a go at a good premise.

Decided to be bad and be a dick and abusive to the people natively from the island. Be a righteous asshole colonizer. But the game made it clear almost immediately that you couldn't really be a bad guy. None of my choices had weight and I had to accept a local person into my party. Trying to be a bad person in the game was impossible in what I played so I dropped it.
 

Nautilus

Banned
How's Steelrising? The gameplay videos got me really interested in it, but I have way too many games on my backlog to get it, and I'm commited on at least not increasing it any further.
 
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