Tainted Grail News

Hello everyone! It’s here! We managed to get our Patch 0.97 done in time and we’re really happy with everything we’ve accomplished for the past few weeks and can’t wait to share it with y’all – and hear your feedback!



The best thing about this patch, for us at least, is that it isn’t just a regular update – it’s an end of our “transition” period to new systems and approaches. We’ve been rebuilding, tweaking, changing a lot of invisible stuff in order to make the game better and it’s really paying off. We’ve made a lot of progress since the launch of Seeds of Corruption in October and even though there’s still an insane amount of work ahead of us… we’re really excited about the results of everything we’ve accomplished so far!

We’ve been sharing a lot of info about these changes in our updates throughout the past few months, so let’s go through the most recent changes and additions:





We’re ready to share the Necromancer with you. We feel that this class is a really nice addition to Moonring and we can’t wait for your feedback – as usual, expect some balancing issues, but please let us know what you think so that we can make proper adjustments!

Necromancers are somewhere between the Blood Mages and Summoners in terms of playstyles – their minions are automatically activated but don’t have limits on their promotion levels. However, in order to unlock their second set of abilities, you have to sacrifice them. They’ll turn into their ethereal forms then – and even though they’ll become more powerful, they won’t be targeted by enemies, making you the main target. Additionally, dead enemies can be resurrected as Ghouls which can help you on the battlefield.

The main treat, though, is that Necromancers charge their ultimate ability whenever something dies – and when they’re at full charge, they can transform into a Lich.



Lich form is powerful – but lasts only for one turn. Depending on the number of sacrificed minions in a turn, your passive skills, and reforges, the Lich’s playstyle can be adjusted to your liking. It can be used to deal massive amounts of damage to enemies or as a powerful debuffer who can change the flow of combat in your favor. This means, yes, new cards available only for the Lich:





Yes, finally! We’ve implemented the first iteration of systems that support one of the most important features of the game world. Now wyrdness makes sense gameplay-wise and isn’t just a visual trick! The most important thing we’ve changed is that wyrdness started to influence the map (only a bit for now, though) and – most importantly – combat.

Instead of working as a binary force – where you’re inside or outside of it – you’re now traversing through wyrdness constantly and the influence it has on your game is dependent on the burn stage of your wyrdcandle.



There are several stages of the brightness of your candles – and the less you have, the more dangerous the game becomes. Sometimes, if your candle’s out, you’ll be surprised by a combat encounter appearing out of nowhere. Sometimes, if it’s burning low, enemies might heal themselves at the end of their round. It’s up to you to decide what kinds of danger you’re able to face – It’s all about the risk you intend to take now.

In turn, if you don’t want to risk negative effects appearing during combat, you can burn more candles and make sure they won’t happen. Currently, Instead of just making candles last longer, using several of them makes the flames burn “brighter”. And this brings positive effects to your game and can affect your combat encounters in a positive way.







With this new patch, we’re also introducing our first iteration of passive progression systems bound to your character – meaning that you can grow in power over the course of your runs.

For this patch, we’ve decided to add these features to the NPCs you have in your village. We’ve separated them by category of progression upgrades and you can spend your hard-earned Wyrdstone to unlock certain things and boost certain options for your character.

So, currently, it works like this:

The Seamstress allows you to influence your character stats. For example, you can buy a permanent Damage or Armor boost, or a new point of Energy and start every combat encounter with 4 Energy points instead of 3.

The Candlemaker will now add boosts to exploration-related systems (for example: more XP or Wyrdstone earned), while the Blacksmith will allow you to permanently unlock runestone slots so that you can immediately start with more than two of them. The Ghost will allow you to upgrade your items: all consumables will start in their weaker forms, and you'll be able to boost their power over time.

Also, all of the deck management options in the village were moved to the Master-At-Arms so no more removing stuff from deck at the Lost Soul’s tent. Lst Soul, in turn, allows you to boost some healing options and pick a Quest Card at the start of your journey (also, healing mixtures were unified: there's only one type of HP potion in the game now and you can upgrade it's healing power at the Lost Soul).

We’ve also rebalanced a lot of interactions and changed various options here and there but there’s so much that we’ve touched these past weeks that it doesn’t even make sense to list all the changes here. Let us know what you think, how you feel about these changes, and so on.



This is another thing that we’ve been working on (and, again, we’re not done!), but we’re constantly trying to make the game more approachable and just more “fun” to play, in general.

One of the things we wanted to do was to streamline the character selection process and make sure that it’s understandable for all – we’ve reduced the amount of screens you have to go through and things you need to click in order to start playing. We hope you’re going to like this change.

Also, we’re not yet done with this, but we’ve made some improvements to the handling of runestones – we had to change their visuals (since there’s more of them now) so they’re now bigger, have different colors, and runestones you can combine are automatically highlighted in your inventory.

But one of the biggest quality of life improvements we’ve introduced is...

Improved Combat flow

We felt that battles in our game tend to be a bit sluggish and we didn’t like the fact that you have to wait for animations to finish before playing another card. That’s not the case anymore. You can spam cards as fast as you want now and that’s a game changer.





So we’ve made A LOT of changes and additions here and we’d have to make this post even bigger if we were to list them all here so let’s just say that

We’ve added around 10 new cards to Moonring/Children of Morrigan and a lot of new runestones. We’ve also changed a lot of rewards and costs in interactions with NPCs and Locations (some of them were absurd, some rewards were pointless, and so on). We’ve changed a lot of stuff within the village, and tweaked a lot of the numbers.

One change deserves a separate paragraph, though: it’s touching the Pathfinders – their Ultimate ability grants 1 Energy for every 6 charges instead of 3 (and it lost additional 1 bonus Energy for activating the Ultimate at min 9 charges).



So, as we’ve said in our roadmap and other posts, we’re going to take a holiday break now. Obviously you can expect a hotfix before the holidays in case something breaks, but we’re going to resume proper full-time work in January!

We’ll be reading your feedback, though, and it will allow us to plan better for the future. The things we do want to work on, currently, are:

Story-Related Interactions

We’re not really all that happy with the way NPCs and Locations work in the game and we want to improve these elements of the game. We’ve started working on this but it just wasn’t possible to implement pretty much anything related to the game’s storyline in this patch. And by story we mean everything that happens whenever you talk/interact with a character.

What you can expect in the future are character-related questlines. You can expect hidden interactions that will manifest after certain conditions are met. A lot of surprises in terms of narrative and fleshed-out characters whose stories are intertwined… And, yeah, since it’s a roguelike, there’s high chance you’d need to have a bit of luck in order to find everything!

Combat

We want to “modernize” the combat UI, improve the way crucial information are presented, and also improve plenty of things related to combat in general. In terms of visuals (new animations, new enemy models, getting rid of some ancient ones – we’ve deleted the Hydra-Wyrm and Kraken from the game in this patch, replaced them with Dullahan and Mistbearer!), general flow (speed-it-up!), and so on, and so on.

New Content

Yess, Falen Kamelot! New year, new faction to play with ;) But more info… soon.

This post got really long, sorry! So, have fun playing the new patch, let us know what you think, and – HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Take some time off, play games, spend time with your families… and let’s all hope that 2021 will be a better year! :D

HELLO, HELLO, HELLO!

We have plenty of great news for you today. It’s been 3 weeks since we’ve released our last patch and we’re finally updating the game with some new features and fixes. It’s been a while... but it must’ve been a while since we burrowed ourselves in some really tough changes which were touching the very core of the game.

The most important one:





What this means is that we’re finally able to make the game prettier AND smoother. The major idea, in short, is that things we had to use in order to make the game relatively pretty on the former pipeline were extremely heavy on CPUs/GPUs. Now, even better results are easier to achieve (since we have more tools, etc.) and they are also less demanding in terms of processing power. It's a simplification, but we don't have time to dig deeper into all these technical details ;)



So far we’ve been focused on fixing and improving the exploration aspect of the game because it was a tough thing to do and to get right. We’re almost there (certain things still need some polishing and adjustment – like, for example, the village) but already it’s one of the biggest leaps we’ve made so far in terms of visual upgrades.



This transition should also, paradoxically, make the game run smoother. So far we’ve seen reports that it’s running as it was or, in some cases, better on low-end machines than it used to. We’re pretty sure we’ll be able to make it run even better in time - but that’s something that we’ll be working on until the end of production.





We’re finally pretty happy with how cameras work in the game. In our new build, you’ll get to choose your starting view (but no worries: you’ll be able to change it anytime you want) and the game should be playable and enjoyable in both modes. The point is that we’ve made major improvements to the Third Person Perspective mode – the camera is now following you properly and it’s smoother/easier to play using your keyboard for movement.

We’ll be doing more tests with that at some point but we’re pretty happy with how it works now (and we’re another step closer to making the game playable on gamepads). Let us know!





Another huge change we’re introducing, and we’ve already heard some players responding positively to it, is the Corruption rebalance.

This is a complex topic so let me wrap-up what’s going on:

• We’ve raised the default difficulty level for the game – just a bit. For example, before today, enemies on Corruption #1 and #2 had -25% Armor, Health, and so on. This made the game much easier. We’ve changed that, among other things, and they start on default stat levels and they get modified much more slowly than before. Additionally, up until a certain Corruption level, enemies receive new attacks and behaviors, so that some of the enemies that you’re used to might surprise you when you meet them later on in the game.
  
• At the same time, we’ve introduced an Easy Mode for all of you who aren’t in the mood for a challenge or just want to show the game to someone who’s not experienced in roguelikes or card-games. It’s a hybrid between the C1 and C2 we’ve had before this patch. You can find it in “Scenarios”.
  
• In terms of raising difficulty – enemy patterns were changed and boss fights were revamped. In order to make the game feel smoother and more interesting, we’ve made a couple of changes to enemy behaviors, and so the thing you encounter should appear in more interesting patterns than before and should present you with more interesting puzzles (enemy configurations). We’re not done here but it’s a start! Also, we’re pushing changes to all boss fights in the game now: you’ve seen some of them already, but we’re pretty sure you don’t expect the last boss to be what it is now. Also, we know he’s really easy to survive a fight with… but since it’s all about the leaderboard, it might be interesting to see what scores you’ll get within 15 turns to go and with his current patterns!
  
• The maps – and what’s happening on them – were changed, too. This is only a part of what we’re planning to do but a major change nonetheless. We’ve removed treasures from our maps and introduced minibosses that guard Big Treasure Boxes containing Big Rewards. You won’t get a bazillion consumables just by walking on the map anymore – you’ll get a really cool reward after beating an additional hard monster, though! We’re not done here, either, but it’s the first iteration of this feature and we’d really love to hear your thoughts.
  

The map adjustments in terms of gameplay don't yet work as well as intended but with our next patch we aim to introduce a lot of fixes to NPC encounters and other things like that... and it all should just "click" together in the end!



Gameplay-related changes and additions:

• We’ve introduced starting decks for every class. So, currently, we’re testing a new approach in which every class has a deck tailored to their basic playstyles. We’re having some internal… discussions about the way it’s currently implemented but we agree that some of those cards are really cool. Also, we didn’t do an editing pass on all our new text files so please forgive us for any inconsistencies or errors!
  
• Now it’s also possible to draw the same card multiple times after levelling-up. Yay, more Breath Controls per turn!
  
• However, we did introduce a limit to cards you can have on hand at any given moment. It’s been reduced from infinity to 15.
  
• A major change that will probably reduce insane damage numbers: we’ve capped negative armor at -500.
  
• We’ve reworked Stun mechanics. Now you can not only stack stuns, but it also changes the intents of enemies.
  

Quality of life stuff

• You can now equip runestones directly in the loot screen – this means you can prepare and plan your next moves right after you’ve won your combat rewards.
  
• So, in the Story UI, you can now see how many items of a certain type you have in your inventory before making a trade.
  
• Equipped runestones can be combined (and will be taken into account while clicking on). Effects of runestones are also visible during combat.
  
• We’ve removed the option to convert gold into wyrdstone from the Lost Soul’s shop. Gold will now be converted automatically to Wyrdstones after you’ve ended your run.
  

We're planning to release our next huge patch (0.97) before the Holidays. However, we want to say already that since it's a time of the year when people tend to take some time off we might run a bit late with that. We hope we won't, though.

What we want to introduce with our next big patch is in our Roadmap but, to specify, here are our focus points for the next few weeks

• Playable Necromancer class (almost done now, waiting mostly for art)
  
• New wyrdness-related systems (wyrdness is going to Do Something, finally!)
  
• A LOT of new runestones and consumables (already done, waiting for artworks)
  
• Redesigned locations, encounters, and a more robust passive progression in your village (we're waiting for some tools that will allow us to introduce this properly)
  
• Improvement to combat visuals (long overdue, but we're finally getting ready to do that!)
  

And a lot of different fixes, changes, ideas, like - for example - new, cleaner, and prettier HUD.

So, see you next time and definitely LET US KNOW what you think about the newest changes and fixes!

Hello everyone!

This week we have something you've been asking us about from time to time - an updated roadmap leading us to the full release date of Conquest.

There are a couple of important things we need to tell you about, though!

We were pretty optimistic in our last week's update - and we've managed to do a lot this week - but ultimately we've decided not to release a patch to the game today. It's still a bit unstable and not everything is working as it should be so we need a bit more time to polish it out a bit before releasing an official patch.

The next patch, however, should get us really close to version 0.97 - the version you should expect by the end of December.

We're making steady progress with most of what you'll find in the roadmap and we've decided to share a sneak peek on our private branch for the members of our Discord channel :)

It should be available now - along with more details on a special channel. However, as is often the case with builds that aren't public, it's still heavily broken ;)

The second thing is: once again thank you for feedback about the split of the game into two products. We're working closely with Valve to make this happen and even though we're not yet quite sure on how the second product will be shown in your game library, we're confident that all's gonna be okay. Don't worry then - and, well, from today onwards... Conquest is a separate game!

We're still waiting for information about the GOG version. We'll let you know about it as soon as we know something :)

Anyway, here's our updated roadmap!

Hello everyone!

We have a pretty important update for you today! So, without further ado...



You could’ve noticed that some things have changed on our store page. Yes, thanks to your support and positive feedback we’ve decided to split Tainted Grail into two separate products – Conquest and The Fall of Avalon.

It will be easier for us during development, it will be easier for new players to understand what they’re getting, and it will be easier to prevent confusion of players who thought they’re playing an RPG and ended up playing a roguelike.

Two important things, though:

[h3]1. If you already bought Tainted Grail or received it as a Kickstarter reward you will get both games.[/h3]

[h3]2. If you still want to get both games for the price of one – you can do it until the next Friday, the 27th of November.[/h3]

Any purchases made after that date will be only for Conquest.

The game’s price will be reduced but after 27th you’d have to buy these games separately (and the campaign mode isn’t yet available).

So, here’s a Steam page for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon if you’re interested in wishlisting ;)

And now, let's get to...





So, as promised last week, we have a couple of gameplay-related things to share about the future of Conquest.



We’re still in the process of moving the entire game to a new rendering pipeline. This caused A LOT of issues and we’re still fighting with them and figuring out how to approach certain challenges. But every single day we’re seeing insane improvements to the way the game looks and feels.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Here’s a quick comparison of the same area from before and after the change:



This level of details, of lightning, graphical fidelity is something we’ve been aiming for since… well, for a long time. Finally, we’re able to let our assets shine! This means that we’re able to have more fun with visual details in general.

We really hope we’ll be able to share this with you next week but – well – it’s a very complicated process and our artists are doing all they can to make this transition happen… but we’re constantly hitting unexpected roadblocks. Fingers crossed!



We aren’t happy with how Corruption works in our game. They’re scaling infinitely, yes, but they’re scaling in a very unpleasant way – boosting the most irritating stats of enemies, making the game a really slow, not that exciting, experience.

Currently, we’re testing a new approach: that the game should become harder because the situations you find yourself in are tougher, not because it’s just artificially rising in difficulty.

So, currently, new Corruption levels (up to a certain threshold) will spawn new enemy groups and give enemies new attack patterns. The stat scaling will kick in later and will be less punishing – but we’re going to add debuffs to the Player so that the game’s harder because you have more challenges to overcome.

We’re testing this and we hope to get the first iteration of this feature working and ready to share with y’all around the next week!



We’re making progress with implementation and testing – there’s still a lot left to do (mainly because this class requires some additional visual aids and in this case we’re dependent on the progress of #1, HDRP transition) but we hope we’ll be able to share our progress next week… on a private beta branch of the game available for members of our Discord channel.



And here’s the last of major changes we’ll be making to the game. We’re not happy with how NPCs, exploration in general, and the village feel in the game and because of that, they’re going to get a major boost. We’ll start cleaning this whole thing next week and within the next two or three weeks, you should be able to see some initial results.

The major idea here is that we’re going to introduce a new progression system – the things you find and unlock aren’t going to be dependent on Corruption anymore. We don’t want to force players to play on harder difficulties in order to unlock content and have more fun – we want them to unlock content just by playing the game.

The main storyline will still be dependent on Corruption levels, though. But with the way we’re approaching the difficulty now (see #2) we’re pretty certain that, given enough time, most players should be able to reach the necessary levels to see the entire storyline.

Another thing is that, since most of the game is finally in place, we’re ready to start redesigning NPC interactions and the Village. We don’t want to spoil too much, but expect the interactions to feel a bit different – and better.

So... as we said last week: this was a text update for today, let's hope that we'll be able to patch the game with some cool stuff next week!

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).
  

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 :)