Tainted Grail Patch 1.3 & Fist of Fury DLC — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] What's going on everybody, Mortem here, this time bringing you the patch 1.3 highlights for Tainted Grail, The Fall of Avalon,

[00:14] which is primarily concerned with the recently released Free Fist of Fury DLC, which is aimed at enhancing the unarmed combat that was previously available but admittedly quite underwhelming.

[00:28] Now this update dropped a couple of days ago on October 1st Which I did know about ever so slightly ahead of time But I actually had to finish up a couple of other things before I could really take much of a look at it And thus here we are

[00:41] However, in any event, this DLC is, as I mentioned, free You can just go pick it up on the game's Steam page So it is readily accessible And to celebrate that, as well as the Steam Autumn sale

[00:53] Tanky Grail itself is half off for $22.50 at least for the base game, with the paid expansion also being half off, bringing it to about $7.50, it's a pretty good time to jump into it, especially since we've already been building off of some great updates for this game

[01:09] since its initial release, including things like that paid expansion, which adds a whole new area and a couple progression systems even, other patches and the like aimed at fleshing out some of the underwhelming parts of the late game in particular, such as Act 3.

[01:24] But I have covered all of that previously, so let's go ahead and focus purely on the new stuff from here. And unsurprisingly, most of the patch notes really constitute changes coming from the DLC itself,

[01:37] which includes a new quest line, a new category of weapons, new armor and items to support the unarmed playstyle, alongside a skill tree for the same reason. Now pretty much all of this can be easily accessed through the new quest line in the Horns of the South or the first area that you find yourself in within the Flooded Mine which is very close to the starting point for the game You can now run into both a vendor for some of these new items

[02:03] as well as the master of unarmed fighting who will send you on some quests, as well as give you some rewards for said quest to get you started on your merry way when it comes to using unarmed combat. Now, I personally did find this vendor kind of annoying and just immediately killed him,

[02:20] Or, perhaps I should say, tried to kill him? Which I mention purely because if you do that, he drops all of the new weapons and a bunch of the new items for the unarmed playstyle,

[02:38] with much of the rest of it coming from the questline itself. And I think they did a pretty good job with trying to make these items interesting. Now, you do have your basic sort of introductory starting items that don't really do much of anything other than, you know, actually make you use the baseline level of the stuff.

[02:55] When you start getting into the other items, however, they start kind of leaning into one of the, I guess you could call them specializations for unarmed fighting, usually things that either involve just straight-up damage, regenerating your stamina, increasing your movement or speed alongside your critical chance, so on and so forth.

[03:14] So you do have a bit of room to specialize in a specific approach to this if that is something you want to do. Now, an interesting thing about the combat style as a whole, though, is a lot of it seems to embrace the idea of getting stronger the longer combat continues.

[03:31] Much of this is handled through things like consecutive hit bonuses. That is to say, if you keep hitting the same enemy, you will get stronger and reduce defenses, etc. Or if you want you can lean into a slightly more high play style with some of these items giving you large bonuses if you are under a certain threshold of health usually around like 10 if you really want to go for the glass cannon approach Now some of these new items also include jewelry items and these are interesting in the

[03:59] sense that they actually are trade-offs. For instance, one of them will actually give you a bunch of increased unarmed damage at the cost of you taking more damage as well. So there is some interesting interplay between all of these different items, which gets that much better then

[04:14] when we start looking at the brand new skill tree for unarmed. And as with basically any RPG skill tree, some of the basic skills here do in fact just increase the damage percentages for these

[04:27] things, you know, your base damage, your critical chance, etc. However, others are a little more interesting, such as allowing you to deal damage directly to an enemy's stamina, potentially stunning them, or leaning into the dash mechanic, like increasing your damage after a dash,

[04:44] or increasing your defenses after you dash, alongside more bonuses to things like consecutive hits, etc. So, if you want to lean fully into the skill tree, or perhaps specialize in one of those

[04:57] things, that combined with the new weapons and items should make for a viable unarmed pass throughout the entire game, which is honestly pretty nice. Tenet Grail as a whole inevitably gets compared to Skyrim especially, but often the Elder

[05:12] Scrolls at large, and if you've ever watched me play or review any of those games, you know that I do like to punch things to death. But as fun as that is, we are not quite done. There are a handful of other changes worth talking about.

[05:24] In particular, this patch fully supports Xbox Play Anywhere, so saves, achievements, etc. should carry over seamlessly between different platforms, etc. As with any patch however this one also introduces all sorts of bug fixes as well as some general optimizations Now on the optimization side of things we should be seeing a variety of performance and stability improvements across all platforms

[05:53] In particular, they call out how they've optimized graph density, which should be especially helpful for particular use cases, such as GPU-bound setups. They also added official SSR support for your upscaling options.

[06:07] The Steam Deck version actually got two different graphic presets added, quality and performance, which aren't wildly different. But still, on PC in particular, they've increased the ability to increase the draw distance in particular up to 120% for people, of course, with the, I would say, hardware capacity to do so.

[06:29] With the rest being a few key fixes, in particular things around text and UI scaling being most of it. And that is the bulk of what is going on with Painted Grails Patch 1.3 and the Fists of Fury DLC.

[06:44] As a little reminder, this game is, again, on sale for half off, both it and its paid expansion, which I had quite a bit of fun with overall. And while all the patches and everything already improved the game quite a bit,

[06:57] this approach to unarmed combat I think is a welcome addition, at least for me. And I'm excited to see what people think of it when they get their hands on it. yes, pun intended, which of course means to like, comment, subscribe, all that YouTube jazz,

[07:10] but regardless of any of that, truly, just thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. May you wander in wisdom, and have an amazing day.

[07:35] you