Not Really a Skyrim-Killer

 Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon was in early access for a while and full-released just recently. Many people have called it some sort of new inheritor of the Bethesda-style open world crown or something. I'm less than convinced of that, though it's pretty good.

It's got the first-person (with third available) gameplay in a large sandbox down well. I found combat and movement felt better to me than Avowed. Like Avowed, the map is made up of large zones (3 in this case) rather than fully open like the most known Bethesda games. Interiors/dungeons are still loaded separately. Spells being largely treated as weapons is fine, though feels a bit less magical. There's weapon/armor/potion/food crafting. There's weapon/armor upgrading (though not spells apparently). There's fishing. There's even in-game sketching.

A lot of those systems aren't required or used as much as they could be. In fact, my biggest complaint about the game is that everything feels like it trails off in the latter half. I never found any crafted item recipes that felt worth exploring beyond a couple quests. There are a few new weapons to be found, but after about the mid-point of act 2 (of 3) I really didn't find any new spells that were exciting or good enough to switch to. I was engaged in some of the quest stories in Act 2, but Act 3 felt like a lot of busy work for people who didn't appreciate it. Kamelot (yes, with a K) was an oft-referenced city/power, but is not a location you visit in the course of the game. Anything about the Red Plague is brief and optional. The input from the spirit of King Arthur you're carrying around drops off after Act 1, going from something to say at every point of interest to one or two visits per Act. The endings feel a bit lackluster. It does leave me wondering if more time in development could have led to a better endgame.

The most memorable portion of the game, for good or ill, comes toward the end of Act 1. You arrived early at a settlement looking for approval and help from the guard captain to take the power of Excalibur. He's not there, though. You find him later and find he's been plotting to undermine Kamelot. Really, he seems like kind of a jerk who says he'll help you if you deal with a knight who's arrived. And okay, the knight is arguably worse - epitome of law over anything else, killing people for questioning and so on. So, yeah, I kill the knight and go back to the captain who showed off Kamelotian experiments into immortality and says he'd going to reveal all this, cast Kamelot in the worst light to undermine their power and so on. At that point, I decided, "Eh, whatever, but I'm not helping you do that, I'm just going on my way now, bye." So he orders the settlement to be hostile. It didn't matter, as I was done there, but left me feeling "yeah, both these guys were dicks and I don't really want to help either of them, maybe this world does deserve to burn." I guess that's "dark fantasy" for you.

So... decent game. Could have been better, but still pretty good. It doesn't feel nearly as open and expansive as a Bethesda-style open world, though. In games like Oblivion and Skyrim, I can get lost in the moment-to-moment small-scale quests and exploration, leaving the main story behind for entire playthroughs. That is not this. Tainted Grail had side quests, certainly, but nothing that carried me off on unrelated distraction for lengthy periods of time.