Tainted Grail: Conquest - Visual Upgrades

Awaken Realms Digital brings us a new early access update for their Arthurian deck-building RPG Tainted Grail: Conquest. This update fixes a few bugs, deals with some balancing issues, and adds some new content, but more importantly it features the first version of the game’s overhauled combat UI and improves its high-end visuals.

Here’s a quick overview of the new stuff:

Hello everyone!

We have a new patch for you – and it’s addressing a lot of problems you’ve reported over the past few weeks. There’s one important thing about this patch we need to say, though:

We’ve implemented a lot of visual upgrades (most importantly: a new lightning system) so the game is prettier than ever. We’ve also made a lot of improvements in terms of the game’s optimization – HOWEVER – for this patch we’ve been optimizing only the “Ultra” setting.

So the important thing we need you to know is that:
  • If the game ran well on your PC, it should work much better now.
  • If the game ran poorly or you were playing on low, you might experience some issues – our testing machine crashed and we weren’t able to replace the necessary parts in time (COVID-related shortages).
So if you were experiencing issues with the game's performance – we’d like to ask you to wait a couple of days for the next patch in which we’ll add proper “low” settings for the game’s visuals.

This Week in Tainted Grail

Additions
  • We've finally implemented the first version of our new Combat UI. We're not done yet, but we're really happy that after all this time we've managed to fix a lot of issues we've had with this screen.
  • We've fixed the way Energy is displayed, what happens after you run out of it, the placement of your ultimate skill, the placement of items, and so on.
  • We've also decided to get rid of ALL statuses related to Armor and Damage buffs/debuffs. Instead of showing 16 different stats (like: "-5 dmg", "+10 arm", "-5% dmg") all of these buffs and debuffs are now automatically calculated, dynamically changing, and permanently visible under everyone's health bar.
So now the Combat UI should be more intuitive, clearer, and prettier than before. But we're not done yet and next in line we've got, for example, a new system for handling the visual representation of passive skills/runestones that you have working in combat. But that's the next step and we'll show it to you... soon ;)

We've also fixed a lot of visual effects in combat so it should be more "juicy" now. We're not done with this either, but it's a start!

We've reworked the Wyrdness buff/debuff and so we've added 30 new Wyrdcards that are randomly granted to the player based on their wyrdcandle burn level during the fight. Some of them will have positive effects, some of them negative.