tAinted gRail: fAll oF aValon

This game fucks. I've been completely captured by it all weekend. There is definitely a difficulty curve at first that was honestly refreshing. Nice to actually run up against a wall and have to level/gear up and come back. I'm getting close to finished with the first major area and I've already sunk 22 hours into it. Really hoping Bethesda takes some notes, but pretty sure they'll see this and go the opposite direction unfortunately.

UI feels fine for me on PC, the bits I’ve dicked around with controller also felt fine though sometimes it would stop letting me navigate left or right with the dpad until I moved up or down for whatever reason.

Inventory is weight limited only, but things aren’t insanely heavy. I think the heaviest weapons and armor I’ve picked up were around 5-6 pounds. Endurance increases raw weight capacity, strength decreases the weight of your armor, so you can double dip on weight management. Arrows, potions, and a lot of ingredients/components have zero weight. Ore, wood, etc are like 0.1 or 0.2 weight most of the time.

There are spears, I found one that inflicts bleed fairly early on, and it has been amazing duel wielding it with a short sword that has a special parrying effect. Dodge feels good and you pretty much have to use it on certain bosses that drain your stamina on parry. Haven’t fucked much with shields. Stealth archer is as potent as ever once you get a feel for archery and get some points in the tree. Archery is slow, stamina heavy, but hits like a truck if you are hitting weak points/headshots. I’ve got a thunder bow now that uses 15 mana on a full draw and hits with a lightning aoe on impact. Pretty much one taps everything from stealth that isn’t an ogre or a boss. Big ass stone guardian, put your weapon away and murder fuck it with your pick axe. Wood dryad, yeah a big chopping axe does way more damage. Little touches like that really making the game sing for me.

The game takes Skyrim and mostly improves upon it in every way. Everything will be familiar if you’ve played an Elder Scrolls game, lock picking is one for one with Skyrim.

The world is gritty and someone definitely likes H.R. Gigers art style. Creatures are refreshing and interesting, albeit the first area is very undead heavy. Some legit horror vibes, bring a torch, it gets dark as hell. The lewd book series they put in the game is hilarious.

As far as I’m aware this is there full 1.0 release, it’s all there unless they decide to do DLC later.

Seananigans said:

Is this game based on the board game(s) of the same name?

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Yeah. They created a game around the same time they created the board game, it was somewhat similar to the board game, you wandered around a map and battled with card combos. Then they said something like “Hey this was our first foray into digital and while it was ok we realized we wanted to make a completely different kind of game.” and stopped developing the first one further, I don’t remember if they fully finished it or not. They also gave everyone who bought the first one this new elder scrolls style game for free. This new one is still set in the tainted grail world but the game mechanics aren’t related to the board game like their first video game tried to do.

So I didn’t realize that armor isn’t strictly light, medium, heavy based on what you are wearing but rather how much total weight it is. So with enough strength and reducing its weight via crafting, you can be wearing full plate and still be in the light armor category and get all the benefits from it. Just feels weird running around in death knight plate mail, but it’s leveling the light armor skill.