Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon

[Finarfin]

They are balancing a ******* Singleplayer RPG...

[Roguey]

They are balancing a ******* Singleplayer RPG...

All games need tuning. People complained it got too easy, so why not?

[Oyster Sauce]

they released a big 1.2 update
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 4595311628

Please note that consoles, as per usual, will need a few more days to approve the update and go live. But the wait will be worth it, as both consoles just got a huge upgrade: we introduced 40 FPS mode support! If your screen supports 40 FPS, we recommend enabling this mode along with VSync for a smoother gameplay experience.

[The_Mask]

One of the best narrative designers I've worked with put a lot of work into Fall of Avalon... a supposedly "wannabe" studio. Not sure being dismissive of creators working on new content to make the game better is a great message, either.

Everyone else - it's worth checking out @TaintedGrail_AR. The story quality is what Dying Light 2 could have been.

[maidenhaver]

Kill all games jornos.

[Roguey]

One of the best narrative designers I've worked with put a lot of work into Fall of Avalon... a supposedly "wannabe" studio. Not sure being dismissive of creators working on new content to make the game better is a great message, either.

Everyone else - it's worth checking out @TaintedGrail_AR. The story quality is what Dying Light 2 could have been.

Chris whenever he meets a woman writer

[JustRun]

I want a final say, i this game HQ or LQ?
Fan of skyrim and oblivion and the like

[Oyster Sauce]

I want a final say, i this game HQ or LQ?
Fan of skyrim and oblivion and the like

I liked the magic. Wasn't finished when I played at release.

[Huzderu]

I've been recommended this RPG a lot, but I had to drop the game due to how childish, post-modernist and tone-deaf the writing was. I can't for the life of me understand the positive reviews. Modern idioms, quippy tones, characters who sound like they browse social media rather than live in a dying Arthurian wasteland. ("Superstitious much??", the misuse of "literally" by NPC' etc.). I thought the gameplay and exploration might make up for it, but sadly, they have not.

The first time you get to the Horns of the South fortress, the act 1 quest hub, there's this merchant woman who immediately complains about being surrounded by a bunch of repressed virgins and morons. Might as well have called them incels and it would not have been out of place with the quality of writing so far. Complete immersion break. The truth is, she would have walked bow-legged before there were any 'frustrated virgins' in any realistic scenario of the game's setting (dark-age, medieval), and she would certainly not have mouthed off like a brat to the armed men in the keep who protect her. Instead, she's just a self-insert, serving the woman writer's (Joanna Malik-Krupińska) need to signal that strong women talk back to men.

This is just one of the more egregious examples I can remember from Act 1, but it started off with slop early, even from the 'tutorial' island.

King Arthur constantly calls you 'little/young one'. A king, and Arthur no less, would address a stranger according to their apparent station and threat. "Little one" is how a modern writer imagines a wise mentor speaks, because they have absorbed it from other poorly written fiction. It is a trope with no foundation in how men of authority actually speak.

Some of your first conversation options with Caradoc are:
- I don't care about all that
- And why killing Arthur is so important to you?
- You realize you're asking for my help right after you've attacked me?

Nevermind the absent-minded brat teenager dialogue options the player is presented with; the sentence is grammatically malformed. "And why killing Arthur is so important to you?" is a subordinate clause posing as a question. The word "and" at the start compounds the error, binding it to nothing.

The correct forms would be plain enough: "Why is killing Arthur so important to you?" or, if the writer wanted the conjunction for conversational flow, "And why is killing Arthur so important to you?" The inversion of subject and auxiliary verb is what makes an English sentence interrogative. This is consistent with a Polish studio writing in English without sufficiently rigorous editorial oversight. Questline, the developer studio, is Polish, and in Polish the word order for questions is more flexible. "I dlaczego zabicie Artura jest dla ciebie takie ważne?" works perfectly well in Polish with that structure. They have translated the syntax rather than the idiom, and no native English editor caught it, or if one did, the correction was not implemented.

Amusingly, they bragged they have had Charlene Putney, who previously worked for Larian (not exactly a stellar endorsement ), edit their writing for English. She did work on Baldur's Gate 3. But she worked on it as a writer, not as an English editor. Awaken Realms credited her as "English Editing" on Tainted Grail, which almost certainly represents freelance work, a minor engagement well beneath the scope of her other credits. She does not even list the project in her public portfolio or on her LinkedIn. So, she was likely brought in to do a pass, perhaps a consultative one, over material that had already been written and structured by the Polish team.

Broken English aside, the root problem is that, as usual, these writers cannot imagine a world that operates on principles different from their own. They cannot write a medieval mind, voice or outlook, so every character becomes a modern progressive in costume, and the world ceases to be believable the moment anyone opens their mouth.

[logincrash]

I've been recommended this RPG a lot, but I had to drop the game due to how childish, post-modernist and tone-deaf the writing was. I can't for the life of me understand the positive reviews. Modern idioms, quippy tones, characters who sound like they browse social media rather than live in a dying Arthurian wasteland. ("Superstitious much??", the misuse of "literally" by NPC' etc.). I thought the gameplay and exploration might make up for it, but sadly, they have not.

The first time you get to the Horns of the South fortress, the act 1 quest hub, there's this merchant woman who immediately complains about being surrounded by a bunch of repressed virgins and morons. Might as well have called them incels and it would not have been out of place with the quality of writing so far. Complete immersion break. The truth is, she would have walked bow-legged before there were any 'frustrated virgins' in any realistic scenario of the game's setting (dark-age, medieval), and she would certainly not have mouthed off like a brat to the armed men in the keep who protect her. Instead, she's just a self-insert, serving the woman writer's (Joanna Malik-Krupińska) need to signal that strong women talk back to men.

This is just one of the more egregious examples I can remember from Act 1, but it started off with slop early, even from the 'tutorial' island.

King Arthur constantly calls you 'little/young one'. A king, and Arthur no less, would address a stranger according to their apparent station and threat. "Little one" is how a modern writer imagines a wise mentor speaks, because they have absorbed it from other poorly written fiction. It is a trope with no foundation in how men of authority actually speak.

Some of your first conversation options with Caradoc are:
- I don't care about all that
- And why killing Arthur is so important to you?
- You realize you're asking for my help right after you've attacked me?

Nevermind the absent-minded brat teenager dialogue options the player is presented with; the sentence is grammatically malformed. "And why killing Arthur is so important to you?" is a subordinate clause posing as a question. The word "and" at the start compounds the error, binding it to nothing.

The correct forms would be plain enough: "Why is killing Arthur so important to you?" or, if the writer wanted the conjunction for conversational flow, "And why is killing Arthur so important to you?" The inversion of subject and auxiliary verb is what makes an English sentence interrogative. This is consistent with a Polish studio writing in English without sufficiently rigorous editorial oversight. Questline, the developer studio, is Polish, and in Polish the word order for questions is more flexible. "I dlaczego zabicie Artura jest dla ciebie takie ważne?" works perfectly well in Polish with that structure. They have translated the syntax rather than the idiom, and no native English editor caught it, or if one did, the correction was not implemented.

Amusingly, they bragged they have had Charlene Putney, who previously worked for Larian (not exactly a stellar endorsement ), edit their writing for English. She did work on Baldur's Gate 3. But she worked on it as a writer, not as an English editor. Awaken Realms credited her as "English Editing" on Tainted Grail, which almost certainly represents freelance work, a minor engagement well beneath the scope of her other credits. She does not even list the project in her public portfolio or on her LinkedIn. So, she was likely brought in to do a pass, perhaps a consultative one, over material that had already been written and structured by the Polish team.

Broken English aside, the root problem is that, as usual, these writers cannot imagine a world that operates on principles different from their own. They cannot write a medieval mind, voice or outlook, so every character becomes a modern progressive in costume, and the world ceases to be believable the moment anyone opens their mouth.

This post made me want to check the game out. So I pirated it and started it up. The first couple of minutes felt like Oblivion. Then I tried to talk to some chick named Lisa in a cell and the game crashed. It wouldn't launch back up no matter what I tried.
Incredible experience.

[Roguey]

I've been recommended this RPG a lot, but I had to drop the game due to how childish, post-modernist and tone-deaf the writing was. I can't for the life of me understand the positive reviews. Modern idioms, quippy tones, characters who sound like they browse social media rather than live in a dying Arthurian wasteland. ("Superstitious much??", the misuse of "literally" by NPC' etc.). I thought the gameplay and exploration might make up for it, but sadly, they have not.

The first time you get to the Horns of the South fortress, the act 1 quest hub, there's this merchant woman who immediately complains about being surrounded by a bunch of repressed virgins and morons. Might as well have called them incels and it would not have been out of place with the quality of writing so far. Complete immersion break. The truth is, she would have walked bow-legged before there were any 'frustrated virgins' in any realistic scenario of the game's setting (dark-age, medieval), and she would certainly not have mouthed off like a brat to the armed men in the keep who protect her. Instead, she's just a self-insert, serving the woman writer's (Joanna Malik-Krupińska) need to signal that strong women talk back to men.

This is just one of the more egregious examples I can remember from Act 1, but it started off with slop early, even from the 'tutorial' island.

King Arthur constantly calls you 'little/young one'. A king, and Arthur no less, would address a stranger according to their apparent station and threat. "Little one" is how a modern writer imagines a wise mentor speaks, because they have absorbed it from other poorly written fiction. It is a trope with no foundation in how men of authority actually speak.

Some of your first conversation options with Caradoc are:
- I don't care about all that
- And why killing Arthur is so important to you?
- You realize you're asking for my help right after you've attacked me?

Nevermind the absent-minded brat teenager dialogue options the player is presented with; the sentence is grammatically malformed. "And why killing Arthur is so important to you?" is a subordinate clause posing as a question. The word "and" at the start compounds the error, binding it to nothing.

The correct forms would be plain enough: "Why is killing Arthur so important to you?" or, if the writer wanted the conjunction for conversational flow, "And why is killing Arthur so important to you?" The inversion of subject and auxiliary verb is what makes an English sentence interrogative. This is consistent with a Polish studio writing in English without sufficiently rigorous editorial oversight. Questline, the developer studio, is Polish, and in Polish the word order for questions is more flexible. "I dlaczego zabicie Artura jest dla ciebie takie ważne?" works perfectly well in Polish with that structure. They have translated the syntax rather than the idiom, and no native English editor caught it, or if one did, the correction was not implemented.

Amusingly, they bragged they have had Charlene Putney, who previously worked for Larian (not exactly a stellar endorsement ), edit their writing for English. She did work on Baldur's Gate 3. But she worked on it as a writer, not as an English editor. Awaken Realms credited her as "English Editing" on Tainted Grail, which almost certainly represents freelance work, a minor engagement well beneath the scope of her other credits. She does not even list the project in her public portfolio or on her LinkedIn. So, she was likely brought in to do a pass, perhaps a consultative one, over material that had already been written and structured by the Polish team.

Broken English aside, the root problem is that, as usual, these writers cannot imagine a world that operates on principles different from their own. They cannot write a medieval mind, voice or outlook, so every character becomes a modern progressive in costume, and the world ceases to be believable the moment anyone opens their mouth.

Poles and the Polish-adjacent will give a pass to games when the game developer is Polish. Some other majority-European forum voted this their RPG of the year. It was a rather poor one, a "best of the worst" competition, but still, ridiculous.

[Huzderu]

I've been recommended this RPG a lot, but I had to drop the game due to how childish, post-modernist and tone-deaf the writing was. I can't for the life of me understand the positive reviews. Modern idioms, quippy tones, characters who sound like they browse social media rather than live in a dying Arthurian wasteland. ("Superstitious much??", the misuse of "literally" by NPC' etc.). I thought the gameplay and exploration might make up for it, but sadly, they have not.

The first time you get to the Horns of the South fortress, the act 1 quest hub, there's this merchant woman who immediately complains about being surrounded by a bunch of repressed virgins and morons. Might as well have called them incels and it would not have been out of place with the quality of writing so far. Complete immersion break. The truth is, she would have walked bow-legged before there were any 'frustrated virgins' in any realistic scenario of the game's setting (dark-age, medieval), and she would certainly not have mouthed off like a brat to the armed men in the keep who protect her. Instead, she's just a self-insert, serving the woman writer's (Joanna Malik-Krupińska) need to signal that strong women talk back to men.

This is just one of the more egregious examples I can remember from Act 1, but it started off with slop early, even from the 'tutorial' island.

King Arthur constantly calls you 'little/young one'. A king, and Arthur no less, would address a stranger according to their apparent station and threat. "Little one" is how a modern writer imagines a wise mentor speaks, because they have absorbed it from other poorly written fiction. It is a trope with no foundation in how men of authority actually speak.

Some of your first conversation options with Caradoc are:
- I don't care about all that
- And why killing Arthur is so important to you?
- You realize you're asking for my help right after you've attacked me?

Nevermind the absent-minded brat teenager dialogue options the player is presented with; the sentence is grammatically malformed. "And why killing Arthur is so important to you?" is a subordinate clause posing as a question. The word "and" at the start compounds the error, binding it to nothing.

The correct forms would be plain enough: "Why is killing Arthur so important to you?" or, if the writer wanted the conjunction for conversational flow, "And why is killing Arthur so important to you?" The inversion of subject and auxiliary verb is what makes an English sentence interrogative. This is consistent with a Polish studio writing in English without sufficiently rigorous editorial oversight. Questline, the developer studio, is Polish, and in Polish the word order for questions is more flexible. "I dlaczego zabicie Artura jest dla ciebie takie ważne?" works perfectly well in Polish with that structure. They have translated the syntax rather than the idiom, and no native English editor caught it, or if one did, the correction was not implemented.

Amusingly, they bragged they have had Charlene Putney, who previously worked for Larian (not exactly a stellar endorsement ), edit their writing for English. She did work on Baldur's Gate 3. But she worked on it as a writer, not as an English editor. Awaken Realms credited her as "English Editing" on Tainted Grail, which almost certainly represents freelance work, a minor engagement well beneath the scope of her other credits. She does not even list the project in her public portfolio or on her LinkedIn. So, she was likely brought in to do a pass, perhaps a consultative one, over material that had already been written and structured by the Polish team.

Broken English aside, the root problem is that, as usual, these writers cannot imagine a world that operates on principles different from their own. They cannot write a medieval mind, voice or outlook, so every character becomes a modern progressive in costume, and the world ceases to be believable the moment anyone opens their mouth.

Poles and the Polish-adjacent will give a pass to games when the game developer is Polish. Some other majority-European forum voted this their RPG of the year. It was a rather poor one, a "best of the worst" competition, but still, ridiculous.

Is there any Polish studio left that has not been subverted? Dying Light: The Beast is the same deal. Kamil Krupiński, the Executive Producer on Tainted Grail (whose wife is the Narrative Lead), came out of Techland's narrative department.

The game's set in a town in the Western Alps. The only two white men who look like they belong there are the villain — a blonde aristocrat doing Mengele experiments, Nazi caricature as usual — and a blonde blue-eyed guy you find halfway up a tower, already bitten. He's been careless you see, and shoots himself in the head ten minutes later.

Half the zombies are black, never explained. At the first survivors' camp in the Town Hall, you're greeted by four men, two black, one Asian. You ask for their leader, the Sheriff, where he's gone off to, and are promptly corrected by the ****** scientist that *she*'s up in the tower. She turns out to be an androgynous girlboss from Texas, shaved sides, aggressive, whose husband was stationed in Stuttgart. So naturally she runs the place. Once you're back down, the survivors stand around the bitten guy as he thanks everyone and blows his brains out and one of the black guys immediately starts moaning about having to scrape them off the floor. Very positive Steam reviews

EDIT:
I just checked out Marius Fischer's (the main villain)'s wiki page:

Marius Fischer came from the infamous and powerful Fischer family, who are well-known for practicing witchcraft and unethical experiments to unlock psychic potentials in humanity.
European (presumingly German or German Heritage) - I almost thought he was Jewish

[Rand]

This game is too... something.
Baroque?
Weird looking, anyway.
Same issues I have with the "souls" series and Crimson Desert.

[Rand]

I've been recommended this RPG a lot, but I had to drop the game due to how childish, post-modernist and tone-deaf the writing was. I can't for the life of me understand the positive reviews. Modern idioms, quippy tones, characters who sound like they browse social media rather than live in a dying Arthurian wasteland. ("Superstitious much??", the misuse of "literally" by NPC' etc.). I thought the gameplay and exploration might make up for it, but sadly, they have not.

The first time you get to the Horns of the South fortress, the act 1 quest hub, there's this merchant woman who immediately complains about being surrounded by a bunch of repressed virgins and morons. Might as well have called them incels and it would not have been out of place with the quality of writing so far. Complete immersion break. The truth is, she would have walked bow-legged before there were any 'frustrated virgins' in any realistic scenario of the game's setting (dark-age, medieval), and she would certainly not have mouthed off like a brat to the armed men in the keep who protect her. Instead, she's just a self-insert, serving the woman writer's (Joanna Malik-Krupińska) need to signal that strong women talk back to men.

This is just one of the more egregious examples I can remember from Act 1, but it started off with slop early, even from the 'tutorial' island.

King Arthur constantly calls you 'little/young one'. A king, and Arthur no less, would address a stranger according to their apparent station and threat. "Little one" is how a modern writer imagines a wise mentor speaks, because they have absorbed it from other poorly written fiction. It is a trope with no foundation in how men of authority actually speak.

Some of your first conversation options with Caradoc are:
- I don't care about all that
- And why killing Arthur is so important to you?
- You realize you're asking for my help right after you've attacked me?

Nevermind the absent-minded brat teenager dialogue options the player is presented with; the sentence is grammatically malformed. "And why killing Arthur is so important to you?" is a subordinate clause posing as a question. The word "and" at the start compounds the error, binding it to nothing.

The correct forms would be plain enough: "Why is killing Arthur so important to you?" or, if the writer wanted the conjunction for conversational flow, "And why is killing Arthur so important to you?" The inversion of subject and auxiliary verb is what makes an English sentence interrogative. This is consistent with a Polish studio writing in English without sufficiently rigorous editorial oversight. Questline, the developer studio, is Polish, and in Polish the word order for questions is more flexible. "I dlaczego zabicie Artura jest dla ciebie takie ważne?" works perfectly well in Polish with that structure. They have translated the syntax rather than the idiom, and no native English editor caught it, or if one did, the correction was not implemented.

Amusingly, they bragged they have had Charlene Putney, who previously worked for Larian (not exactly a stellar endorsement ), edit their writing for English. She did work on Baldur's Gate 3. But she worked on it as a writer, not as an English editor. Awaken Realms credited her as "English Editing" on Tainted Grail, which almost certainly represents freelance work, a minor engagement well beneath the scope of her other credits. She does not even list the project in her public portfolio or on her LinkedIn. So, she was likely brought in to do a pass, perhaps a consultative one, over material that had already been written and structured by the Polish team.

Broken English aside, the root problem is that, as usual, these writers cannot imagine a world that operates on principles different from their own. They cannot write a medieval mind, voice or outlook, so every character becomes a modern progressive in costume, and the world ceases to be believable the moment anyone opens their mouth.

Say what you will about the "The Witcher" games (and there is plenty of room to be critical) but they not only did very well keeping a consistent period/locale tone, but they had excellent translations.

[Roguey]

Is there any Polish studio left that has not been subverted? Dying Light: The Beast is the same deal. Kamil Krupiński, the Executive Producer on Tainted Grail (whose wife is the Narrative Lead), came out of Techland's narrative department.

Urban Poles are woke.

Say what you will about the "The Witcher" games (and there is plenty of room to be critical) but they not only did very well keeping a consistent period/locale tone, but they had excellent translations.

Those were made during a different cultural period, they've since caught up. https://www.cdprojektred.com/en/diversity

[rusty_shackleford]

slavs are only rivaled by canadians and west coast america in terms of libtardedness

[Rand]

slavs are only rivaled by canadians and west coast america in terms of libtardedness

The British are well ahead on their speedrun now.

[rusty_shackleford]

slavs are only rivaled by canadians and west coast america in terms of libtardedness

The British are well ahead on their speedrun now.

britbongs have so little cultural impact that nobody really knows

[Roguey]

The destruction of Dr. Who, the destruction of James Bond.

Coming soon: The destruction of Grand Theft Auto?

[The_Mask]

Okay, since April Fools' is now over, it's time to post something more serious (sorry, Qrko!)...

Our third free DLC for Tainted Grail is now live! Enter Merlin’s Tomb, a brand-new endgame dungeon. Complete unique trials and face the tainted version of a man who was once the greatest sage.

If you're playing on Steam, just add the DLC to your library for free. On all other platforms, it has been introduced as a part of the base game.

Alongside Merlin's Tomb, patch 1.21 has landed, featuring various improvements.

[maidenhaver]

So many taints.