Hello everyone!
Today we have some “bitter-sweet” news for you. On the one hand, we have decided to delay the launch of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon in Early Access. BUT! This means that our team will have much more time to put a lot of extra work into the game and it should result in a much better experience in almost every aspect.
So, the most important piece of news: Early Access will be published in March of 2023.
But today we will also talk about:
- General vision for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
- What to expect from Early Access
- Some very-Work-in-progress things ;)
But, before we will go into those points, we have a small trailer (cut from some pre-alpha gameplay footage) for you!
And even BEFORE THAT I have to say that I was just notified by a member of the development team that I will be in deep trouble if I don’t tell you that this footage is “old, already outdated, and the game is in much better state than it was when this footage was recorded”, so, yeah – that was the disclaimer.
You can also watch said pre-alpha gameplay here (please note it is still very much work in progress)
General vision for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
First, let's talk a bit about what kind of game we want to create. For us, a great PRG is first and foremost about Adventure. The adventure we aim to create will rely heavily on discovering a grim world filled with fallen Arthurian legends, following on big secrets of this world and learning more about the Age of Conquest and untold tales of Arthur himself.
This means, we want to put emphasis on the following aspects of the game:
- A compelling, complex, morally grey storyline with tough choices that will have consequences – from small personal effects, up to big changes for whole zones of the game.
- NPCs full of life, stories, and character.
- Huge sense of discovery in the open world
- Rewarding progression system
- Fluid combat / magic systems
- Non-cliche quests
These are our focus points and while we are super proud of what our team has accomplished - remember, we’re NOT a huge studio and we don’t have AAA ambitions. We’re not competing with games that have daily marketing spend bigger than our entire development budget.
However, we want to create a game that will take you to a heart of re-imagined Avalon and offer you a journey full of memorable stories, adventures, and discoveries.
What to expect from Early Access
Now that we got this out of the way – why, exactly, do we want to launch in Early Access and how will it look like (more or less)?
The reason is pretty simple – even though we are “pretty big” as a Board Game publisher, we are very, very much “Indie” when it comes to video games. Early Access is a great way to share our work faster with the community, gather some extra funds for development, but – most importantly – create this ambitious game together with you.
Working hand in hand with the community is at the heart of Awaken Realms, it’s one of the most important values we cherish as a company. We are doing it every time with our board games, but also followed this – for example – with our over 1 year long Early Access of Tainted Grail: Conquest.
We deeply believe that creating great board games requires input from gamers and we always treat their feedback very seriously.
What benefits can people taking part in Early Access expect?
- Much better price compared to full release
- Well… Early Access to the game :D
- Taking active part in the process of shaping up the game. It can be quite a fun journey!
For Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s Early Access we are aiming to create a following experience:
- Deliver the first full game zone, called The Horns of South
- Around 15-20 hours of story-related content (split between the “main” storyline and sidequests but please remember that this is just a blind estimate for now, it’s absolutely impossible to count hours of gameplay in an open world RPG and we’ll be able to give better estimates early next year)
- Full voice over (English only)
- Most of major gameplay systems (there will be some we’d like to add later and some we’d like to work on together with you)
- Good optimization
- No serious bugs
…but here are other aspects of EA:
- You can expect issues with your save games, mostly because of compatibility issues with story-related progression between various patches. We’ll do what we can to avoid forcing you to delete saves but we just can’t promise it will never happen (or we’ll heavily encourage you to start over once more content is added to the game)
- There will be general lack of polish here and there
- Balance might be off
- (A lot of) small bugs (and probably some major, too)
- Obviously: it’s nto a full game so your adventure will not be complete
Some very-Work-in-progress things ;)
Now, with all that out of the way, let us share with you some things our team is working on right now!
One super important note here, though! Everything you see is heavily Work in Progress – so definitely don’t take it as a final quality, it's not even near!
Day and night cycle:
We will have quite a solid day and night cycle that will create a dark and gloomy atmosphere on Avalon, you can see our latest experiments below. Coming soon: weather. You can’t have dark fantasy without rain, right?
We have A LOT of work in front of us when it comes to our combat systems – but they’re getting better and better every single week.
One of the most important systems in the game is, obviously, combat and we will be putting A LOT of work into it, so that the general “feeling” of it will be great. We have a lot of extra things planned, such us:
- Special perks and talent trees
- Variety of weapons
- More and better animations for the player (combos etc.) and enemies
- Special effects on visual and audio side
Here are some general current tests, but again - you can expect much more!
First steps at UI and UX
Managing your character will be crucial - we will have A LOT of different options when it comes to equipment, talents, skill combinations, and so on.
So, obviously, we need a great UI for all of that and we are making some first steps in that direction ;)
… and obviously we are creating TONS of assets that later will be fully featured inside the game. Here are just a few out of many, many examples!
OK! This is it for today – we REALLY cannot wait to fully invite you to discover Tainted Grail and while it is a bit sad to move the Early Access premiere, we feel this is a very good decision that will result in a better game.
From now on, you can expect more frequent updates (about once a month) with deeper dives into different parts of the game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466060/Tainted_Grail_The_Fall_of_Avalon/