Tainted Grail Splits Into Conquest and The Fall of Avalon

Tainted Grail, Awaken Realms’ Arthurian board game-turned-RPG, launched into Steam Early Access earlier this year. And according to this Steam announcement, it will soon be splitting into Tainted Grail: Conquest, a hybrid between an RPG and a deck-building roguelike, and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, a more narrative-driven, deckbuilding, open-world RPG.

If you purchase the currently available early access version before November 27, 2020, you’ll get both games, and afterwards, you’ll have to buy them separately. Here’s more on that, along with a general early access update:

Hello everyone!

We have a pretty important update for you today! So, without further ado…

TWO SEPARATE GAMES

You could’ve noticed that some things have changed on our store page. Yes, thanks to your support and positive feedback we’ve decided to split Tainted Grail into two separate products – Conquest and The Fall of Avalon.

It will be easier for us during development, it will be easier for new players to understand what they’re getting, and it will be easier to prevent confusion of players who thought they’re playing an RPG and ended up playing a roguelike.

Two important things, though:

1. If you already bought Tainted Grail or received it as a Kickstarter reward you will get both games.

2. If you still want to get both games for the price of one – you can do it until the next Friday, the 27th of November.

Any purchases made after that date will be only for Conquest.

The game’s price will be reduced but after 27th you’d have to buy these games separately (and the campaign mode isn’t yet available).

[…]

NEWS

So, as promised last week, we have a couple of gameplay-related things to share about the future of Conquest.

Improved Visuals

We’re still in the process of moving the entire game to a new rendering pipeline. This caused A LOT of issues and we’re still fighting with them and figuring out how to approach certain challenges. But every single day we’re seeing insane improvements to the way the game looks and feels.

Here’s a quick comparison of the same area from before and after the change[…]

This level of details, of lightning, graphical fidelity is something we’ve been aiming for since… well, for a long time. Finally, we’re able to let our assets shine! This means that we’re able to have more fun with visual details in general.

We really hope we’ll be able to share this with you next week but – well – it’s a very complicated process and our artists are doing all they can to make this transition happen… but we’re constantly hitting unexpected roadblocks. Fingers crossed!

CORRUPTIONS

We aren’t happy with how Corruption works in our game. They’re scaling infinitely, yes, but they’re scaling in a very unpleasant way – boosting the most irritating stats of enemies, making the game a really slow, not that exciting, experience.

Currently, we’re testing a new approach: that the game should become harder because the situations you find yourself in are tougher, not because it’s just artificially rising in difficulty.

So, currently, new Corruption levels (up to a certain threshold) will spawn new enemy groups and give enemies new attack patterns. The stat scaling will kick in later and will be less punishing – but we’re going to add debuffs to the Player so that the game’s harder because you have more challenges to overcome.

We’re testing this and we hope to get the first iteration of this feature working and ready to share with y’all around the next week!

NECROMANCER

We’re making progress with implementation and testing – there’s still a lot left to do (mainly because this class requires some additional visual aids and in this case we’re dependent on the progress of #1, HDRP transition) but we hope we’ll be able to share our progress next week… on a private beta branch of the game available for members of our Discord channel.

EXPLORATION & VILLAGE

And here’s the last of major changes we’ll be making to the game. We’re not happy with how NPCs, exploration in general, and the village feel in the game and because of that, they’re going to get a major boost. We’ll start cleaning this whole thing next week and within the next two or three weeks, you should be able to see some initial results.

The major idea here is that we’re going to introduce a new progression system – the things you find and unlock aren’t going to be dependent on Corruption anymore. We don’t want to force players to play on harder difficulties in order to unlock content and have more fun – we want them to unlock content just by playing the game.

The main storyline will still be dependent on Corruption levels, though. But with the way we’re approaching the difficulty now (see #2) we’re pretty certain that, given enough time, most players should be able to reach the necessary levels to see the entire storyline.

Another thing is that, since most of the game is finally in place, we’re ready to start redesigning NPC interactions and the Village. We don’t want to spoil too much, but expect the interactions to feel a bit different – and better.

So… as we said last week: this was a text update for today, let’s hope that we’ll be able to patch the game with some cool stuff next week!