I’m Suddenly Interested In Steelrising

thegamer.com:

I’ve been less than convinced by Steelrising for a while now. The trailers looked okay, but I think my bad experience with Greedfall was putting me off. I tried to forgive the bugs and experience the heart and soul of Spiders’ classical RPG, but ultimately the jank proved too much. This is an unpopular opinion, I understand, but my first and only experience of Spiders’ RPG wasn’t great. Maybe I’ll give it another go now I’ve upgraded my PC, but first impressions and all that.

As such, I was eyeing Steelrising with caution. The designs, the clockpunk 18th century aesthetic, and the world all look fantastic. But how would it play, and how janky would it be? Would the pitfalls of Greedfall spell doom for Spiders’ successor?

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Everything changed for me at Bigben Week in Paris, where I saw a hands-off demo of the game. Obviously the section I watched was a curated section of the game, and it was the developer playing rather than me, but it ran smoothly and was completely bug-free. The polished experience sold me on Steelrising more than any of the clockwork tigers or mechanical fan-shields, but that alone would not be enough to write an entire article now, would it?

I will write another paragraph on Steelrising’s performance, however. It didn’t just seem smooth, it felt seamless. It’s hard to explain exactly how a game felt so good when I didn’t even play it myself, but there wasn’t a single bump or wrinkle as I watched – a rarity even for hands-off previews at media events. My biggest problem with Greedfall looks to have been addressed, and I was immediately twice as interested in Steelrising as I had been before the preview.

The movement of