Tainted Grail Early Access Update - Plans for the Future

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Written by ValH on July 14th, 2020

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The latest early access update for Awaken Realms Digital’s Arthurian RPG Tainted Grail, apart from listing all the latest fixes and improvements, outlines the team’s plans for the game’s nearest future. These include a progression overhaul, improved controller support, enhanced village mechanics and visuals, and more.

Here’s what you can expect:

Hello! It's been a really long and very weird week for us! We've been hard at work, and we've been improving the game in plenty of different places - and there's this paradox that even though we've made A LOT of fixes, you're going to see mostly relatively small (but essential) improvements this week.

We're constantly enhancing our back-end and working on things that are going to be ready-for-release within a couple of weeks, but since it's easy to say that and you don't really have a reason to trust us, we decided to share some of the information about what can you expect in the future ;)

So here's a couple of things we'd like to tell you about our upcoming patches and plans!

So –

Plans for the Future

Overhauled Progression

Every run should reward you with something new, and we need a lot of new systems to make that happen - and also to track your achievements. We've already started coming up with ideas for a special journal that will contain information about the things you learned and unlocked in the game (serving both as a bestiary, lore-based journal, and comprehensive collection of statistics). But that’s not all - we’re going to add a lot of new cards, passive skills, and so on, so that there’s a proper reward system waiting for you in the future.

We're going to track your quests from run to run, too, so that it's clearer what's happening - because we're working on an over-arching storyline of Conquest. This will take some time, but, as we've said before, we're treating Conquest as a narrative-driven rogue-lite RPG, and we feel that this is something unique about this game, and we want to make this right.

When we're at this: we want to implement a general "structure" of the game. Right now, it feels like disjointed bits and pieces of various things, and we know that we need to make a proper overhaul of everything related to the overall user experience. From the way our menus work, through general UI, up to how you interact with most of our systems.

Foundations

This will be a significant change - at some point. First, we want to make sure that the game will work properly on gamepads because this will drive some UI changes, and we're sure it will allow us to change the UI for the better (to streamline overcomplicated stuff). But don't worry, most of our devs are from the PC Master Race - we won't make any changes that will make the PC version of Tainted Grail worse.

Moreover, over time, we'll be changing the way the village works. We're not satisfied, like, at all with what we have right now. From the visual side of it (it's not as pretty as we'd like it to be) to general usability - all of this will be improved.

And while we're at it, we will be gradually changing some of our artworks and locations so that they're more Tainted Grail, less fantasy. We've stolen one of the artists from the board game department to help us out with that, and he's already making a lot of changes and suggestions :)

What else?

And More...

We have a massive list of additions and improvements you can expect in the coming months. I won't spoil much (but you can expect, for example, mercenaries for hire), but a couple of topics that CAN be spoiled are:

• We will redesign the way armor works in the game. Like, entirely. It's going to be a different system.
• We will change a couple of OP mechanics.
• We will add more stories and questlines after completing the first run, and a lot of village improvements.
• We will add a version of a crafting system and change the way weapons and armors currently behave. Without going into too much detail, one of the changes you can expect is that runes will have dedicated weapons (no more Druids with swords), and these weapons will have some variations in attributes. Still, their major source of power will lie in special gems/imbuements/tbd you'll be able to enhance them with. More details - soon!
• We're almost ready for constant data-driven balancing. Removing non-playable cards / passsives and adding new ones. Adding more non-game-breaking-combo-potential :)
• More content overall:
  • More variety of passives
  • More cards for each class
  • More enemies
  • More items

We have plenty of other things in store but, well, we'll get back to that in the future :)

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