Tainted Grail Early Access Update

Awaken Realms Digital, the team behind Tainted Grail, is getting ready to roll out some big early access update for their Arthurian RPG. But in the meantime, we get what they’re calling a “transitory patch” that introduces a teaser for the game's single-player campaign, overhauls its boss fights, adds the Scenarios feature, and more.

Here are the patch notes:

Hello everyone! It’s Friday the 13th... but we hope everything’s going to work well with our newest patch! :D

So, as promised, we’re updating the game today – and we treat this update as a “transitory patch” because we have some really huge things planned for the next patch (hopefully in the next two weeks). This means that we’re introducing some changes and features NOW... but expect the next update to be bigger, meatier, and more interesting!

tl;dr - these are the big things in today’s patch:
  • We’ve finally resuscitated the campaign teaser. It’s playable. It has some issues and bugs but it’s finally live!
  • We’ve changed most of the game’s bossfights into more interesting, more challenging fights.
  • You’re going to get an option to pick a Quest Card as a reward after every bossfight.
  • We’ve added a new feature – “Scenarios” – to the game’s menu. When we're done with proper implementation of this thing you’ll be able to find our past events (and other special maps/modes/gameplay variants) there so that if you’ve missed an event, nothing’s lost (except for leaderboards and rewards).
Fixes, Changes

Additionally, we’ve fixed a lot of errors and introduced some changes to the Village:
  • Transmutation at the Blacksmith should properly let you pick the runestones you actually want.
  • Exchanging runestones at the Blacksmith got fixed so he won't exchange your cracked runes for Tier2/Tier3 runes anymore.
  • Restored the curse removal service at the Seamstress.
  • All buildings in the village have proper rotation now.
  • All buildings in the village have proper "rebuilt" states, meaning: they should transform into their "active" states when you've recruited their owners. Hopefully, this change will reflect on your normal playthroughs - there might be some issues, though, because refreshing building states and placements is quite hard. It should work well on clean saves, though.
  • You can now "buy" every NPC in the village instead of trying to find them during exploration, in case you've had trouble with finding them.
  • You can't exchange gold for wyrdstone at the Lost Soul anymore.
  • NPCs are hidden in the fog/wyrdness by default now, you can reveal them by paying 100WS at the Candlemaker.
  • Candlemaker should properly reset the counter of available candles with every run.
Same with encounters happening on the map:
  • Fixed prices at the Provider's shop.
  • You shouldn't be able to recruit the Master At Arms again in the Cursed Broch (after receiving him as a reward for clearing C1).
  • Removed HP cost from Milestones.
  • Removed the option to "Leave" the interaction with the Scientist.
  • Treasures and chests should be easier to pick up.
As to bossfights:
  • Golem was revamped - now it's an entirely different fight.
  • Derenheim fight was slightly altered across all Corruptions - now slightly harder, and Winterbane has more moves in his arsenal.
  • Lord of Serpents fight slightly altered, now noticeably harder and the Wyrm has more moves in his arsenal.
Small quality of life fixes:
  • Collect & Continue added to item rewards screen after combat.
  • Added the ability to re-roll cards you're given after level up.
  • Stalker's card debuff slightly nerfed AND all Filler-type cards are now Special-type cards (the filler cards you're “given” by Stalkers and Bounty-hunters) and can be played for 1 Energy to remove them from your deck.
In terms of balancing you can expect A LOT of changes in our next patch - currently, in general, we've made Tier 1 fights mostly easier and Tier 3 fights harder.

As to our next patch... Let's say that we're going to post a bigger update next week with details and spoilers about what we're working on right now! As I've said before - we're in "transition mode" and won't be able to release a big patch next week so we'll share an update with details and some pretty pictures :)