Tainted Grail Early Access Updates

This week’s early access update for Awaken Realms Digital’s Arthurian narrative-driven open-world RPG Tainted Grail starts by pointing us in the direction of this extensive community guide for the game. The update then shares a preview of the game’s Druid class and its two runes (subclasses) – Blood Mage and Summoner. And afterwards, we get a quick overview of the team’s future plans.

Let’s start with the video preview:

And here are the text parts of the update:

Hello! Before we get to the update, we’d like to make a shout-out to our Discord community – and in this case especially lMaltel, Disiesel, and titan.bevel – because they’ve created something amazing.

They wrote a beginner’s guide to Avalon – from their perspective as players – in order to help out everyone who feels lost. And it’s incredible to read these kinds of things as a developer. To see that people care about your game and are willing to help out others in enjoying it? One of the best feelings!

Check out the guide HERE.

Back to the update!

This Week in Tainted Grail

So last week we’ve been hard at work, trying to add a new rune for the Druid. However, after sharing it in its prototype state to our players at Discord, we realized that it might be a bit premature to update the game with this character yet.

This week, though, we’re pretty confident that we’ve got it. After reading all feedbacks we got, rethinking what we want to achieve, and implementing a lot of new features, we’ve reached something that feels really good to play!

(I personally always played as a Brawler, now I’m playing the Blood Mage!)

There’s still a lot of work in front of us, a lot to do, but we just can’t wait to share the Blood Mage and Summoner with you. Just hop into the game WITHOUT expectations because both of these runes were changed a lot!

Please note that this is an Early Access – things change and shift as we are listening to your feedback and updating things on a weekly basis. There were and will be builds that will not be balanced, but you might be sure we will change it into the best experience we have. That is why your feedback is so important. Your support too! Thanks to your positive reviews and general kind words we are MUCH more motivated to keep on going and giving our 100% into the game!

Here’s an overview of what you can expect by our One & Only Marcin 🙂

[…]

Just remember that since the class was pretty much done from scratch in terms of its design, it is unbalanced – but by playing it, you can really help us out in seeing what needs a nerf. We’re collecting stats of most/least used cards and other things like that, so we’ll be able to see how you’re doing 😉

(Expect changes to the Warrior class next week – based on these analytics!)

So, what else is happening in this patch?

Some of you will probably be happy that two quality of life improvements you’ve asked for are live 😉

• You can now hold the left mouse button to make the character go where you want (no more click-spamming!)
• The first iteration of the key-rebinding system is live, too. You can’t rebind everything but… it’s a start! 🙂

We’ve also fixed a couple of bugs and issues, but the important thing is that there are several things we’re still working on…

Plans for the Future

But we decided not to share them/make them public just yet. There are two reasons for that.

Some are unfinished, and that’s the case with – for example – new and better combat animations. Here’s a work-in-progress sample of what we’re working on[…]

It takes a while because adding these things means that we constantly need to improve our tools with new features. And I mean things like “I need to have the possibility to add a visual effect to a weapon” or “I need to be able to spawn a projectile or plenty of projectiles and make them go in proper directions.” We’re getting there, though, and the game should be much, much prettier, and – more importantly – should feel much better to play.

(Yes, we’re sad every time we look at that blue Barrier-spawning effect, too!)

The second reason is that plenty of things we’re improving are connected to other features and systems so we can’t just add “parts” of these redesigns – but I’ll just tell you that we’re planning a huge update, a significant improvement to plenty of things, for the end of August 😉

This update should contain a revamped progression system throughout the entire game, a better implementation of corruption, proper reward-related systems, and… some things that I’ll tell you about in the future! 🙂

On top of that, you might also be interested in last week’s update that shows off some new tattoos and lists a good number of recent fixes and changes.