Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Si te gustó skyrim y querés jugar más skyrim pero sin jugar skyrim por 10ma vez, este es tu juego. No le pidas más, pero no decepciona para nada. Como un viejo choto de 40 años que se pasó skyrim varias veces a sus 25, y añora eso que tanto le hizo feliz y que hoy no le llena nada por las preocupaciones de la vida adulta, hace años no me desvelaba tanto con un juego (solo me pasó con rdr2).

[h1]I genuinely don't understand where all the positive reviews are coming from.[/h1] [h3]This is an awful, cheap indie project.[/h3] The worst part is the complete lack of optimization, especially considering how outdated the graphics look. Even on the [b]lowest[/b] graphics settings, the game can't maintain a stable 60 FPS at [b]1080p[/b]. That's just unacceptable. The animations are terrible—there are barely any. NPCs just slide across the ground like they're hovering. They magnetize toward you and literally fly through the air when they swing their weapons. Everything looks clunky, unfinished, and incredibly cheap. The main menu and settings UI deserve a special mention because they're an absolute disaster. I honestly haven't seen an interface this bad since around 2005. Whoever designed it either has no idea what a proper game UI looks like or has never actually played a video game. And somehow they don't even know left from right. I'm not exaggerating—they actually swapped the left-hand and right-hand weapon slots. The dialogue is painfully dumb. You also can't simply exit a conversation—you have to keep clicking through all the boring nonsense. Most conversations are heavily scripted, with almost no meaningful choices. Here's a real example from the game: [b]Player:[/b] "I have the Knights of the Round Table badge." *(You're forced to say this.)* [b]NPC:[/b] "Where did you get it?" [b]Player:[/b] "This is my business, it doesn’t concern you!" Seriously? What kind of writing is that? Just compare it to the very first conversation in [b]Gothic 1[/b] about the letter. On top of that, there are plenty of [b]Genshin Impact[/b]-style dialogue choices where both options say essentially the same thing, just worded differently. Enemies literally spawn right in front of your face. It's 2025. Great. The only genuinely good thing about this game is the price. But even that advantage disappears because of its terrible technical state. It's hard to enjoy any combat when your FPS constantly drops into the 40s. Overall, I [b]DO NOT[/b] recommend this game. If you haven't played proper RPGs like [b]The Elder Scrolls[/b], [b]The Witcher[/b], or, God forgive me, the [b]Gothic[/b] series, then don't even think about buying this indie abomination. But if you've already played every RPG you can get your hands on... well, when there's nothing else left, you know how it goes.

The game is pretty good, for the first few hours. Positive first: The controls feel pretty good, the atmosphere is very nice in a lot of places and i enjoy the many different types of weapons and armor. I do feel like this is a step up from Skyrim when it comes to gameplay (for the 1st act, at least) I also enjoyed the dungeons (in act 1) as they reminded me of MMO dungeons. Negative: During the later half of the 2nd act the game loses steam and becomes quite tedious. Endless fetch and talk quests with not very well written characters. The 3rd act was so jarring, that i never even bothered to finish the game. It's hard to describe, but it feels like washing the dishes and once you think you're done, someone dumps another tray of dirty dishes infront of you. The only enjoyment you have is thinking that you have finished washing the dishes, but it just keeps going and the washing itself is not fun anymore. In fact, i would rather be washing my dishes right now. Anyway, the main reason why i give this game a negative review is because is has very obvious and clear AI generated content, but it doesn't disclose it on the store page, which they have to according to steam guidelines. I have found, and yes i am somewhat of an expert, Instances of AI generated: textures (mosaic art, wall art, wood, cloth and more), Inventory Icons (i think most of them, potions and spells are the most obvious), background music(2nd act town.), spoken Dialouge(Blacksmith in 2nd act), written dialouge(various), flavor text (various) and i might be wrong, but some 3d models look strange and out of place compared to the rest.(might just be assets made different people) I am not trying to shame an indie studio for using AI to help make their game, but i think not disclosing it is dishonest. Should you buy this? If you don't care about AI usage and can ignore the last third of the game, sure Otherwise, no.

An RPG in a similar vein to Elder Scrolls - fun, janky, with some excellent storytelling. Tainted Grail has you playing as a stranger. Just like Oblivion, you start by escaping a jail, though this one is an island prison run by the Red Priests. They're trying to find the cure for the Red Plague by... torturing people? 600 years prior, King Arthur fled to Avalon (Ireland) because the Red Plague ravished the mainland (England). Now, you find a fragment of Arthur's soul when escaping, thrusting you in a quest to put him back together across Avalon as it crumbles. Gameplay-wise, Tainted Grail wears its RPG inspirations on its sleeve. First person, two hands for two weapons, knights, magic, constellation tech trees, etc. If you've enjoyed RPGs like Oblivion and Skyrim, you'll feel right at home. Heck, I'm not a huge fan of those games, and I enjoyed it! Graphics are lovely without turning your computer into an oven. Music was alright. Some tracks stood out for me, and others were fairly mundane. Nowhere near Skyrim levels, but enough to set the scene. The story was great, as were the little bits of worldbuilding dotted about. Avalon is in a grimdark decay - lots of death and tragedy - and many quests feel weighty with their burdens. There was little black and white in each decision to make, and even the ones where it was obvious who the bad guy was, they provided some interesting arguments! It's worth going back to NPCs a little after completing their quests. Some have repercussions you'd otherwise not notice. The writing has a sense of humour too. It is a dark world, yet you can find such fun things as [spoiler]a spell to transform people into cheese[/spoiler], [spoiler]a husband who turned into a pig and quite likes it[/spoiler], and [spoiler]a sword that complains as you use it.[/spoiler] I love it when a world has whimsical extras hidden within! It wasn't all perfectly perfect though. The balance seemed all over the place. Some bosses seemed incredibly hard, others easy peasy. Early on was especially uncertain. Had a few moments where quests didn't fully load properly, and characters wouldn't talk to me. Loading one of the autosaves usually fixed it. There are a bunch of missable achievements if you're an achievement hunter. I found it somewhat disappointing to beat the game, check the achievements, and find I was locked out of the fun-looking ones. I'll also mention I did the areas in this order: 1, 2, DLC, 3. I think I would have enjoyed the 3rd area more if I hadn't done the DLC, as by then I felt the game had outstayed its welcome. But the DLC was great, so I'm torn about whether I recommend doing the DLC first, or leaving it till post-game. But besides them, this was a brilliant game.

I was interested in this game after playing the demo, so I bought it on sale. I could look past the janky combat at first as I thought is would improve as I progressed, but starting act 2 just confirmed it wasn't going to get better. Then I saw some very clearly AI generated artwork and some suspicions I had were confirmed. It is an unforgivable offense to use generative AI to produce assets. It is even worse to do this WITHOUT disclosing it on the store page. I would never have purchased this game if I knew about the AI use so I am disgusted that they have got away with taking my money for this. Give your money to developers that can be bothered to pay actual artists, instead of stealing from them.

Another frustrating instance of a “Steam Deck Verification” meaning nothing to the consumer. I bought the game on Xbox at launch and loved it, but really wanted to play it on the go and not be tied to the TV, so seeing that little green checkmark made it an instant buy for me. Once I got out of the introductory dungeon, I had to lower all the graphics settings to the lowest and cap my framerate at 25 fps - and it still dips as low as 5-10 fps during any sort of combat, outdoors. It looks and runs awful on Steam Deck. Absolutely should not have Verified status. I wish this game wasn’t as good as it is. Uninstalling it and giving up, with no hope of a refund, has soured me on a game I’d been hyping and recommending to friends. I spent at least half of my playtime tweaking settings and trying everything I could find online. ProtonDB suggests running it in Desktop Mode and that doesn’t do much at all. It actually introduced new issues. Art, music, gameplay, writing? Really impressive. On a console or a PC that can actually run it, that is. Steam Deck will make you wish you hadn’t bought it. So disappointed that I don’t think I’m going to bother with it on Xbox either. They got my money twice, so joke’s on me. 😛

There is a great game in here, somewhere, buried. I've played up to act 3 and including the DLC, I cannot bare to play this any longer. The world is devoid of much worth seeing or exploring, its a very nothing world, even the bespoke dungeons are incredibly short and very identical. The combat is inconsistent, it is much deeper than Elder Scrolls but it is so odd, frustrating even, you can absolutely steamroll or you can get locked into a mortal struggle that lasts minutes, there seems to be little rhyme or reason to this. Difficultly is so peaks and troughs, the start is brutal, you are in intense fights that are nice until randomly you bump into something that just one shots you and now you're helpless and then randomly as you proceed everything starts in turn being one shotted and you end up just not having a game to play, all or nothing really The game also has boss fights that try to be more like Dark Souls bosses, they have patterns, AOEs and combos that you need to learn or they murder you. Catch is that the first major one has no actual tells or indicators, it just picks and choses super quick attacks that dunk you. And then the enemies themselves are super annoying, they animate quite poorly and can do some bizarre mismatched animations with their attacks or can just be spammy and frustrating with heavy hitting attacks that knock you over (fighting a bear for the first time is an experience rivalled by jumping in a tumble dryer, the first Buggane encounter is absolute torture) A lot of the sidequests as well are very nothing quests, a lot of the classic Kingdoms of Amalur esc talk to A, go to B, make dubious choice (kill B, do not kill B) and then talk to A for berating or praise, or collect like 5/10/20 of a bunch of random resources and call it a day. Look, TL;DR, I really do not like this game.

I was seriously excited for this game as a big Bethesda game fan throughout the years thinking that a scrolls-like from a studio with fresh ideas might be what it takes to reinvigorate this style of RPG that I love. However, buyer beware, this game is riddled with undisclosed AI. Art is very clearly AI, especially with the Sanctuary of Sarras DLC. It became bleedingly obvious to me after starting the game and looking at these wildly different art assets with this very strange stylistic disconnect so I did some digging. Turns out Awaken Realms is a massive supporter of AI in their board game art assets and use it very liberally, something that some folks have found out they are doing with their game development business as well after emailing them about it. Now you may have whatever point of view you like about AI in game development, but it is undeniable that they are being disingenuous by not disclosing their usage of it to possible buyers. AI in development pipelines is nothing new, just used to be called machine learning, but AI has no place in the creativity of game development where something so promising like Tainted Grail can be so ironically tainted by it's usage of AI in it's art and writing. Me personally, I'm just not interested in AI slop in my RPGs. Buyer beware.

高清破产版《上古卷轴5》，沉浸感十足，不舍昼夜连玩两周通关了还真有点舍不得