When the trailers started dropping for Greedfall, I think most of us saw the indigenous people heralded as the “crazy animist natives are just as bad as the colonizers” and backed all the way off.
I avoided the game for that reason, but it was eventually dropped in my lap. I figured as long as I wasn’t giving money to an organization that promoted racist ideologies, I could at least see how bad the damage was.
The game was… not at all what I was expecting.
While there are still issues with some of the characters and choices in the game, I found those issues were more indicative of the culture of video game media rather than a blatantly racist take on colonization.
To better explain my thoughts, I’m going to dig into the different aspects of the game that I found most people avoiding it for.
Greedfall’s Trailer
Let’s jump right in to the issues of Indigenous representation from the trailers.
The first trailer showed some fantastically-colored, leather-and-feather adorned woman running through the woods, pursued by a colonist as he readies and aims his gun. He’s moving slow and methodically against her frantic escape. He shoots her and advances, pulling her back as she tries to crawl away and aims a pistol at her.
She smiles and laughs maniacally, despite being in mortal danger.
The leaves rise around them and a giant, antlered monstrosity charges at the colonist from behind, throwing him into the air with little effort. The woman’s smile widens at the sight.
The man tumbles to his feet and he and the monster face off.
A figure dressed more like the colonist than the woman enters the meadow and watches the combatants.
Later, other trailers would expound upon the colonial efforts against the indigenous people, painting the conflict as warranted on the side of the colonists and the Yecht Fradí (the people native to the island of Tír Fradí) were religious zealots bent on conversion.
That’s not at all what the game was like.
I don’t know if they purposefully misconstrued the trailers or what, but the story and setting of Greedfall is not at all a righteous colonizer just trying to make a life while “savage” natives wage war.
In my opinion, the game was probably the most accurate portrayal of colonization I’ve seen in fantasy media.
Colonization
You are, nearly from the introduction of the colonial powers, shown that they are both bastards. The only country that doesn’t have a negative side in the tutorial is the Congregation of Merchants (your country), but their prince more than makes up for it later on.
Thélème and the Bridge Alliance are both tearing up the new “continent” in different ways, and neither are shown positively in that regard. The Coin Guard and the Nauts aren’t free from their issues either, to varying extents.
Each have their own fucked up “underbelly” in need of exorcising. The leaders are mostly unaware of the real atrocities committed against the Yecht Fradí, and my biggest gripe with this is that’s not at all how that usually goes. Cruelty bleeds from the top down.
I would have preferred to cut the heads off the metaphorical snakes and replace them with people among their community advocating for the Yecht Fradí and/or had built a relationship with them against the grain of their respective leaderships.
You know, kind of like what we did for the Yecht Fradí and their High King?
Throughout the story you can fix everything except the developmental colonization (i.e. the areas that are being built up in Tír Fradí), but the “good” ending sort of implies that everyone on the mainland starts to learn how to care for the world around them.
Thélème
The worst group in the entire game. Religious extremists that convert or kill, burning people at the stake, committing sexual abuse on a systematic level, and are all around hypocrites.
Like Catholicism if their aesthetics were absolutely fucking swagless.
In the tutorial, their ambassador even admits that the nation wants the Congregation of Merchants, the last neutral power on the continent, to convert to their religion and join them in the fight against the Bridge Alliance. I did not come away from that conversation with a positive feel for Thélème, and it only got worse as the game went on.
In the tutorial area, the ambassador wants you to find some dangerous heretics and turn them in to him.
Given how I already didn’t like him, I was going to just let them go and lie or not turn in the quest, but it got worse.
The “heretics” are actually faithful scholars that are being persecuted for finding information about the religion—from their own holy texts—that the leadership didn’t like. They even tried to recant what they found, but they were still going to burn at the stake for it.
Other than leaving them to their fate, you can also have the Bridge Alliance offer them sanctuary, which, despite it’s failings, was probably a better option than having the scholars chased by Thélème for the rest of their lives.
On Tír Fradí, you realize that was barely scratching the surface of their crimes.
In Wenshaganaw, a missionary outpost has the men abusing young girls of a nearby Yecht Fradí village. When the leader finds out, it’s all covered up and no action is taken against the abusers.
Before you even reach their capital, you pass through one of their settlements where a Yecht Fradí village used to be. All but the leader have been converted, not that they seem to have had much choice in the matter. They are treated like free labor for the colonists who use them to build up the settlement.
In the same area, a witch hunter is hell-bent on driving a non-existent demon from another Yecht Fradí village.
In their capital of San-Matheus, a zealot strangles a non-violent Yecht Fradí in front of you while a Nádaig (which is also, technically, a Yecht Fradí) burns at the stake behind them. There is no way to save either the guardian or the man, and the inquisitor turns on you and your party the second the man is beyond saving.
The governor sets up debauched parties, fixes gambling matches for money, and is an all around greasy and cutthroat politician while putting on airs of religious grace. While I didn’t like her personally, you can at least convince her to release evidence of a major religious upheaval that I can’t see most Thélème leadership cool with. This changes the religion into that of the Yecht Fradí, which you hope stops the missionary and conversion efforts.
While the potential dogmatic shift is unrealistic to true religious colonization, the rest of Thélème’s crimes were on par. Conversion through force, rampant sexual abuse of indigenous women and children, and taking of occupied land through dubious means were all committed by the English and Spanish settlers.
The Bridge Alliance
The Bridge Alliance is a pseudo-middle eastern intellectual society based around scientific discovery. Sort of golden-age-of-Islam, minus the religious aspect (which was certainly a choice, but I think the developers were going with a science vs. religion conflict).
The ambassador informs you that they were once multiple cultures that warred among themselves until they came together in peace and combined their knowledge for the betterment of their people.
Pretty cool right?
Yeah, you find out they experiment on prisoners of war in the tutorial and silence anyone that questions their methods. Not great. Especially given the game was made in France, a country already notorious for Islamophobia.
It was a really cool concept, and before I got to that part, I thought I would be siding with them over the fanatics in Thélème, no question. While I don’t consider there issues as corrupt from the foundation as Thélème’s, they definitely had their issues too.
In Tír Fradí, the Bridge Alliance is at war with the Yecht Fradí, though we aren’t sure why. The Governor of Hikmet uses some pretty foul language against them and characterizes them as fighting the Alliance for no reason beyond “barbarity.”
If you ever read any of the conflict narratives of early colonial Americas, that’s basically how the indigenous are portrayed—the colonists ignore the human, technological, cultural, any worth of the people already living there, and instead manufacture “heathen” primitiveness to justify genocide and colonization.
In both realities, the colonization efforts are instigating a resistance among the indigenous population.
A highly respected scientist of the Bridge Alliance, unbeknownst to the governor, has been systematically kidnapping and experimenting on Yecht Fradí (as well as other groups like the Nauts).
Through this process, he is harming them both mentally and physically, attempting to infect them with a disease native to the mainland.
The only point of difference here is that A.) the disease didn’t “take,” and B.) the diseases that ravaged the America’s were (mostly) transmitted naturally, with exceptions like the small-pox infected blankets knowingly given to multiple tribes.
I can’t speak for colonization outside of North (and to a lesser extent, South) America, but that’s how the U.S. was founded. All that’s really missing is the broken contracts, purposeful starvation, and forced relocation.
Once you uncover the scientist’s crimes, the burden of proof falls to you, and the testimonies of the imprisoned Yecht Fradí are far from enough to convince the judge and the people.
The dismissal in indigenous voices is unfortunately still quite common even today.
Once he is tried, however, the hostilities between the Bridge Alliance and Yecht Fradí can end.
The Coin Guard
The mercenary group of the bunch, the Coin Guard act as the hired military might of all three continental powers. How this effects open warfare is never really explained.
Though the first abuses of this group are discovered against their own, you soon find the leadership engaging in selling kidnapped Yecht Fradí into sexual slavery.
The history of slavery in America is undisputed, and many captured indigenous people were sold into slavery in the colonies, both on the mainland and in the Caribbean. Sexual abuse of the enslaved is just as well documented.
The Nauts
Though I don’t remember any direct violence against the Yecht Fradí by the Nauts, they are, at minimum within the story, complacent in everything that happens to them.
As there is no way to travel to or from Tír Fradí without the Nauts, they are carrying the enslaved Yecht Fradí and their guardians back to the mainland. They are also responsible for allowing the colonization of Tír Fradí twice.
Congregation of Merchants
Your own people have a very complicated place in the game. Yes, Constantin tries to kill the Yecht Fradí god and take over the island, but the Congregation is also the original attempted colonizers of Tír Fradí. You start out as an almost neutral party on the island, but you quickly find that your people aren’t free from fault, and Constantin’s actions (and potentially your own) can act as a terrible agent of colonization as well. This is treated as a positive thing at any point.
Depiction of Indigenous Culture
The Yecht Fradí are a varied, complicated people with varied, complicated reactions to the colonization of their land.
Some have chosen to go to war against the forces threatening them and their way of life, while others try to form alliances with them to better their precarious standing. Still others take a middle ground approach, wishing to educate rather than fight or submit to exploitation.
These are all reactions the different tribes of the America’s took when faced with the colonists of various European countries, but more on that in the specific character analysis.
They are, as far as I can tell, vaguely based on viking and Celtic-like cultures, and like the other groups, diverse in racial makeup.
While they do have a sort of animist, nature-based religion centered on a god-figure tied to the land and are shown to have a deeper knowledge of their environment than the colonists (thereby falling into the Noble Savage trope).
So, some good representation, some not so good.
Acts Within the Game
There are some issues that you can’t avoid within the game, or don’t have a satisfactory option for the resolution.
One of those is that you have to kill the High King, no matter what you do. He’s aggressive toward you and kills another Yecht Fradí, but not having any option except to kill him (especially when there are almost always different ways to complete quests) feels . . . like you’re participating in the genocide (most players) have been trying to stop the entire game.
And then, once he’s dead, you’re tasked with influencing the choice of the next High King. So not only do you kill the king, you replace him with a colonial asset as well. Sure, there is an option that is hostile to the colonists, but show me an installed dictator that didn’t bite the hand that fed him.
There is an argument to be made that, because your character is technically of Yecht Fradí descent, that it is more permissible to influence the choice of ruler.
Frankly, that doesn’t hold water.
If I’m Irish, but born and raised in the states, I’m American, not Irish. If I leave the states for Ireland, fuck around for a month, decide I don’t like their leader, and install someone else, I don’t think the Irish would like that very much, do you? Kinda fucked up regardless of background, right?
That’s what happens in Greedfall.
Now, that’s not saying that people divorced from their heritage—for whatever reason—can’t reconnect, especially indigenous people where that separation is purposeful and forceful, but that’s not at all what happens in game.
I know players need agency over the changes that happen in game, but I think a better option might have been installing new colonial leader for the reasons above, and whether that person was helpful, harmful, or neutral to the Yecht Fradí could have decided which High King the Yecht Fradí decided they needed.
If you kept a war-minded Bridge Alliance leader, then the Yecht Fradí would choose someone equally hostile. Choose a overly-religious zealot in Thélème, and you get a High King intent on salvaging their own religion. Choose leaders that advocate for the Yecht Fradí, and maybe they don’t feel like their back is up against a wall and can choose their own diplomat.
Anything that doesn’t have you directly interfere with their elections.
Specific Characters
As I said above, there are many Yecht Fradí and each has a different view of the colonists. While there are many characters I could look at, I’m going to focus on the three you can choose for High King, as they’re the main issue with representation in the game.
The game assumes “good” and “bad” choices for the High King, and given the endings, definitely prescribes right and wrong to them as well.
Ullan is the leader of a clan that was nearly wiped out before the colonists arrive. I believe this is a direct result of the Congregation’s raids post-colonization failure. He’s doing everything he can to secure alliances and trade with as many colonial powers as he can to strengthen his village—including making efforts to enact peace with currently warring factions.
He also betrays the trust of another Yecht Fradí leader to kill most of his warriors to benefit the colonists. He’s portrayed as a sell out more concerned with his standing and materialism than his people. That’s a harsh summary but I feel it’s accurate to how the game wants you to see him.
If you choose him for High King, I believe the Malichor spreads to the island and it is assumed to consume both landmasses.
Derdre is a warrior of the resistance that is (rightfully) standoffish to you and occasionally openly hostile. She’s the violent option that condemns a continent if you choose her for High Queen. The colonists are driven out and the Malichor consumes what’s left of the continent.
Dunncas is the leader of a clan of environmental healers, a wise man that is slow to anger, even when given ample reason to. He’s your middle of the line, moderate option, and the “best” option considering endings.
He is the only one that will see both landmasses saved and living in harmony.
I like him as a character. I do. But that doesn’t change the fact that you are “supposed” to choose the moderate or you essentially kill off one continent or two.
It feels like the game is saying that resistance to the colonists, despite all they’ve done, is bad somehow, but also so is trying to make peace with them? It gives judgement over forms of survival that benefited real indigenous people.
Not every tribe had the distance and option of being the high-minded teacher to the colonizers. Some had to fight to survive, others had to negotiate and benefited from it (as much as was possible when the other party regularly broke contracts).
Demonizing these options isn’t fair to the real world tribes that used them.
Conclusions
Is the game perfect? Absolutely not.
Does it still have its representational issues? Definitely.
Is it the pro-colonization and demonization of indigenous cultures monster of the trailers? Surprisingly, no.
There were frankly unexpected levels of nuance among the varied representations of the Yecht Fradí, and the horrors of colonization were accurate if simplified for the medium. I’d also add that while they included elements of sexual violence in the game, it’s never graphic or “shown,” only discussed second-hand which I found made those parts easier to play through while not downplaying the severity in the slightest.
There are still plenty of problems in Greedfall, but I find they come from the video game aspects that, by definition, have to be there, but maybe could have been implemented with a little more creativity to combat it.
I’m not saying anyone should have to play the game, or do so against their better judgement, but it’s by no means the racist garbage the trailers made it out to be.