Tainted Grail Fall of Avalon and Its Amazing DLC Sanctuary of Sarras
Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls series is almost an entire genre of its own. It’s a particular kind of RPG, vastly different from most others out there. Titles made with the Infinity Engine, for example, including the timeless Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment, are nothing like TES games. JRPGs like Final Fantasy are also role-playing games but, again, completely unlike Oblivion or Skyrim. And, for various reasons, games that model themselves after TES have been rare in recent years.
Why not? Mostly because the scope of a TES-like is far beyond what small development studios can handle. Such projects involve a ridiculous array of mechanics, art, and content. So a small indie studio either refuses to even attempt it, or fails spectacularly in the end, releasing a glitchy, unbalanced mess.
It’s a rare sight to see the stars align just right for a great TES-like to release. Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is one such game. Made by the relatively new Polish studio Questline, it manages to match ambition with execution, capturing the magic of early Bethesda with a smaller but denser experience.
What’s So Great About It
Setting
First of all, FoA has the perfect setting for the genre. A fantasy world based on historic Britain, centered around the legend of King Arthur. It weaves a rather dark tale through a well-written main quest and the many engaging side quests spread across the map. The stunning landscapes and atmospheric settlements reinforce the setting, creating a captivating narrative.
Roleplaying
The roleplaying, though, is where FoA especially shines. It lets you act as you please, making you choose between morally ambiguous options and express your character through moment-to-moment combat decisions. The dialogue trees offer diverse options, and the choices can have actual impact on the story or the gameplay. For more minor decisions, you almost always get acknowledgement for your actions. The roleplaying options aren’t on the same level as the great classics like Fallout but they’re more fleshed out than what you would find in Oblivion.
Combat
Combat-wise, FoA is surprisingly great. We’re used to lacklustre combat in this genre with examples set by Morrowind and Oblivion, so it’s a breath of fresh air to have such responsive, fun combat mechanics. You can shape your char into any combination of the standard warrior, mage or rogue archetypes, each executed really well. For me, dodging is particularly addictive, so playing as a dual-wielding lightweight warrior relying on distance management has been extremely rewarding, but feel free to play as the inevitable stealth archer or even a shameless necromancer.
Progression
To complement the combat, you’ve got some elegant skill trees that can cater to your specific playstyle. You can specialise in niche styles like unarmed combat through obtaining a meaningful range of abilities that have a real effect on the gameplay beyond stat scaling.
Also most weapons you find have interesting effects. It’s not just about finding higher numbers. And what type of equipment you have matters, as well as its weight, since your skill tree takes these into account. You can get a lot more bang for your buck from your equipment by carefully considering what you’re carrying on you. You can discover some powerful combinations this way.
Exploration
The exploration is incredible largely due to the handcrafted maps full of things to discover. You can turn any corner and expect to see a cool item, an interesting NPC, an easter egg, or a spectacular piece of environmental storytelling, like when I fell into a pit and almost died, then discovered many dead bodies scattered around that pit, clearly fallen to their deaths not unlike what almost happened to me. Moments like this never stop coming in FoA.
Exploration at night is another thing entirely, sort of like in Dying Light. More powerful enemies start spawning at night, accompanied by some eerie music and weird glowing effects everywhere. This is aptly called the Wyrdness in the game’s world, a high-risk high-reward phase that you’ll want to avoid most of the time. It adds some welcome fear of the unknown, but my one gripe with this is that it discourages nighttime exploration, which is a shame because of how atmospheric the game becomes precisely at night.
No Level Scaling
Despite drawing heavy inspiration from Oblivion, Fall of Avalon avoids its notorious level scaling. Enemies have fixed levels regardless of how strong your character is, and they can be impossibly hard or trivially easy to deal with depending entirely on your level. If you can’t handle a particular area, it’s best to continue elsewhere and come back better prepared in true RPG fashion.
There’s also a ton of optional crafting to do under alchemy, cooking, and handcrafting. The more you practice your skills, the better, more intricate stuff you can make.
The DLC
So what about the DLC, Sanctuary of Sarras? It’s excellent. Much like Oblivion (again), the DLC takes you to a whole new area that you can enter after a reasonable amount of progress, and throws at you completely new environments, quests, enemies, items, mechanics, and everything else. It’s kind of like the Shivering Isles in that regard. Except, unlike Oblivion’s Alice in the Wonderland inspired expansion, we have a Lovecraftian and pirate-themed experience here, set under the sea.
The new map is already quite sizeable, but it is also more vertical than the original map, with streams of water allowing access to higher platforms so you can ascend and descend as you crawl through underwater caves. There’s therefore plenty to explore. You’ll find many amusing quests and fun encounters along the way.
The attention to detail is impressive especially for a DLC. For example, you will notice how the speech animations of NPCs with gills and tentacles differ from regular human NPCs with regular human mouths. The impressive environmental storytelling is still here and so much of the assets are new, exclusive to the expansion.
All in all, this is a DLC that keeps the strengths of the base game and simply adds more great stuff. It’s a must if you liked the original 3 acts of FoA.
More Like This
This was a good reminder of how neglected this genre has become since Bethesda turned to releasing Skyrim again and again instead of making a new fantasy title in the same vein. It’s debatable whether they are still capable of making something that lives up to their legacy anyway, which is why devs like Questline deserves our attention to grab the torch and become the next best thing. I’m hoping that other studios also get inspired by Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon and rekindle this genre that’s been smouldering for a long time.
