We may have lost Piranha Bytes, but at least Eurojank RPG Greedfall 2 is still on the way, announcing early access will begin in September

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Piranha Bytes, creators of the Gothic, Risen, and Elex series, was recently closed by parent company Embracer. That's a shame, but there's still one studio out there carrying the torch for ambitiously janky mid-budget European RPGs, and that's Spiders.

Greedfall 2 is actually a prequel, beginning three years before the original game. This time, rather than playing a diplomat who stands apart from the setting's factions, you'll be playing a native of Teer Fradee who is torn from their home and transplanted to the war-torn and plague-ravaged lands of Gacane.

One complaint about Greedfall was that its quest design involved a lot of backtracking and fetching across areas that looked and felt quite samey, so hopefully the sequel can improve on that. And hopefully early access can help cut down on some of the bugginess, though frankly if it wasn't at least a little rough around the edges I suspect it would lose some of its hardscrabble appeal.

Greedfall 2: The Dying Worlds will be available on Steam. A gameplay video is due in August, and a community livestream, including an updated roadmap, before its September 24 early access release.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.