Greedfall

You are part of the Congregation of Merchants.  But you can build up faction with the other five groups (it's kinda your job as you are essentially the head diplomat)

So today I tried to lockpick a lock that was a level 3. I have 1 in the lockpicking ability, +1 lockpicking on my chest piece, Siora has +1 on hers and Aphra has +1 on hers but I couldn't open it.

Do only the actual characters +1's for lockpicking in their individual skills count not any on their armour?

Vasco is Intuition. There is no companion with lockpicking. You need to take two points in it.

Kurt is Crafting
Siora is Vigor
Vasco is Intuition
Afra is Science
Petrus is Charisma

Alright. I spent some time playing the game via. a friend's steam account, I completed it and did so on extreme.

As expected I had massive gripes with it throughout the entire endeavor.

The game is a mess, plain and simple. The story is mediocore and it is the overall setting which is really it's saving grace, despite what Kotaku wants to claim but screw Kotaku they have absolutely no idea what quality is anyway, garbage games media.

The gameplay is a huge weak point, and while I recognize it may be far superior to Spider's past games, which I personally would not know as I have not played past games but it is what I hear, it is still a huge mess compared to every other game out there.

As mentioned, I played the game on extreme difficulty, I do so most often to make a better judgement of the game's mechanics... and it sucks... bad.

The increased difficulty does not only come in enemies with greater health and more armour, but also in greater numbers. Enemies do not get an additional skillset, sadly, it would have been preferred like they did it with Dragon Age's Nightmare difficulty but nevermind that. It does not really up the difficulty too much, all you have to do is remember to keep your gear upgraded and you can deal with anything just as if the game was on easy difficulty.

The companions are absolutely garbage and you are forced to take them with you. With the greater amount on enemies on extreme you would prefer to crowd-control the enemies, obviously, but would you look at that, the game does NOT allow you to micromanage your companions (Screw you guys who do not like micromanaging companions) this is to me an essential part of any RPG adopting similar gameplay to GreedFall's, and if the developers insists on taking the ability to micromanage companions away from you, they should at the very least make the AI a lot smarter... yeah, you see the pitfall here developers? Allow us to control our companions for heaven's sake, too many times are my "CC's" being disrupted because the AI just wants to smash everything.

I can not get proper positioning in combat, companions can not use potions so they die every 5 seconds, I can not decide that should use their abilities when it'd be most effective, absolutely horrible.

It may make for a good time on easy difficulty, where it'll feel like less of a GAME and more like a MOVIE, where you can just passively sit by and watch the story unfold, but approaching the game as a... well... game, it is an unholy mess.

They did have a good thing going with the whole reactive dodging and parrying though, you know when you messed up, you have to look at enemy pattern and learn them to effectively parry as well as dodge.

Despite what I have said earlier though in this same thread I believe, the story and setting actually was enough to keep me going through and finish the game... but I could only do so by taking long breaks every now and again because I quickly grew bored. This also speaks to the shortness of the game, the story itself is short, I do not know how many side quests I have ended up skipping, I suddenly figured out close to the end that I have ended up skipping a lot of quests with the Coin guard, well fantastic, why was I not informed that there were quests to be done there? One way or the other! Not even the game's quest-marker popped up on the map as it have done with some others.

The armour variation is small, especially if you choose not to go higher in endurance, which you probably do not if you play as a technical or as a mage, because you'd rather put points into agility, marksman, magic, and/or willpower.

There is a good thing about the companions though, they can add some points to your abilities, Kurt adding a craftmanship point, Aphra a science point, and all that jazz, atleast they can be useful in one way I guess

I would not recommend buying this game at it's full price, better to wait for a sale.

The game does not have replay value, sadly. Once you know one ending you already know the other, as you will probably have figured out the ending sliders (yes it ends with sliders, lazy) will just tell you the exact opposite of what was told already.

TL:DR
-Mediocore combat
-Terrible skillset
-Terrible companion AI
-No micromanage of companions
-Would make a decent movie, makes a terrible game though.
-The studios' reputation precedes them

New patch incoming:

I miss games like that too, but most modern games don't really give you control over your companions. Even DAI dialed it back a lot and made it so that your companions were auto-bots as much as possible. They wanted you used to playing just with our own character due to MP probably.

You could control them all if you stayed in tactical mode. In regular action mode you could switch but the one you switch from will ignore what you just told it to do and do whatever.

Anyway, I’m nearly finished Greedfall. I’m enjoying it for what it is. It certainly isn’t perfect.

I clearly liked the game a lot more than you did.  But the review is fair enough.

Though as far as stereotypes go, I found it rather refreshing that there were "noble savages" that were every bit as racist or venal as the colonists.  No faction was really pure.

Not sure what you mean by that.  The natives weren't all painted with the same brush.  Some are friendly, some are suspicious, some are greedy, some are downright hostile.

This has probably been posted here before but I just saw it for the first time and wanted to share this classic.