Tainted Grail – Patch v0.95 Preview

While the developers over at Awaken Realms Digital are still working on regular balancing and content updates for the early access version of their Arthurian RPG Tainted Grail, they also have plans for a larger update that’s going to introduce some new functionality to the game.

Outlined in this Steam announcement, that update is expected to go live sometime around September, introducing a new tutorial, UI, systems, map-generation algorithms, and more. Here’s an excerpt:

Hey everyone!

Time for our weekly update! First of all, let us start by saying that there is no patch coming this week for a few reasons. Many people from our crew took some time off (and we feel that they really deserve it!). Secondly, we have a lot of things that are in the middle of work, and they would not feel complete.

BUT! This is a perfect opportunity to take that time and talk about the roadmap of what’s coming soon!

As you may know, we are reading almost everything you leave us – all the feedback, good and bad. We deeply believe that this is the only way of making awesome games – work on them with the community. Past weeks since our premiere, we have internalized A LOT of this feedback, processed it, and planned the most important features that we want to add to make the experience better.

A lot has been added already, but even more is in front of us, and that brings us to…

PATCH 0.95 – a HUGE upcoming update

Patch 0.95* is our response to the majority of your feedback and will be designed to address the following major issues:

• Learning curve
• Structure of the game
• Content
• Visual enhancements and UX

Here is the full list of features that are already in the middle of implementation or will be in the near future 😉

1. Tutorial

Probably not as important to most of you, since you already manage to get through the game (and are quite good at it, considering how unforgiving the learning curve is!). But this is something that many people point out: the current learning curve starts way to high with the amount of different mechanics and little explanation.

This is why we are creating a special starting zone, that will not only walk you step by step through the core mechanics of the game, but also create a proper story setting for Conquest! A small visual spoiler for the game’s storyline below! Can you guess what’s happening here? 😉

2. Corruption

Currently, Corruption is implemented quite poorly and in a non-interesting way. New Corruption will be a story-driven experience that will take you through 10 levels of increasing difficulty.

But the difficulty will increase in a quality way, not lazy “+20% DMG to all enemies”. With every new stage of Corruption, you will face new enemies, new encounters, new bosses, and old ones might learn new moves. Wyrdness will also get more deadly!

You will also build your village in-between runs with better-balanced buildings.

3. Journal

We will bring you a journal that will summarize all your in-game achievements.

You will know exactly how many cards and passives you have unlocked for every rune from the ones available. You’ll know how many enemies you’ve seen and how many story events you’ve participated in.

All of this will be kept in one place, and you will be able to easily see how much content you’ve seen and how much is left to be discovered!

4. Weekly events

We will also be introducing weekly events. Right now, we are not sure whether it will be every week or every 2 weeks.

There will be some special rules regarding that play, usually including a special boss for that event too. We will also create a leaderboard for those events and achievements for everyone who will finish them!

[…]

And that’s not all!

As you can see, there is A LOT on our plate, and most of those systems are interconnected. This is why we will introduce only small part of those features in our weekly updates and bring, hopefully, all of the above with the HUGE patch 0.95.

We hope that with it, this will elevate your gameplay experience on the new level!

When will it happen? We are aiming at the second half of September and feel pretty well with this prediction 😉

As always, thanks so much for your encouraging feedback and for helping us with the game’s development! We feel that this is a full beauty of Early Access, where you can actually play an active role in the game development and be a part of a community.

Have a great week, and we will see you in a bit with a new update 😉