Tainted Grail – My Game Reviews

Polish Skyrim: Tainted Grail Sales and Twitch Impact

Polskiego Skyrima, The Polish Skyrim has arrived to shake up Video Games

Poland has shown itself to be a powerhouse in the making of video games with the release of the RPG, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon initial sales

The Arthurian Dark Fantasy game has been released to the world, and it has some impressive sales. The stats that I have put on the top of this blog post show the estimations of how many sales the game currently has right now.

According to the most estimates, it should be at about 150,000 copies sold already which is great for a game of this size.

The game has barely been out and is currently sitting at a healthy review ratio of very positive on Steam. The game is currently sitting at 84% on Steam, which is very positive.

The recent reviews, which represent the reviews relating to Version 1.0, have been also consistent with the early access reviews.

What is important is that the game is getting attention by streamers on Twitch and YouTubers and that will help this game in the sales.

The player count right now is about 12,000 players. I would expect that Tainted Grail is going to be getting more players in the future and it is not going stagnate.

Tainted Grail and Twitch performance

In the mid afternoon on release, the Twitch numbers are good for a independent title such as this.

Many of the players are a great of mix of Americans, British and Eastern Europeans. There is quite a few of people who are Polish and enjoying that their country had made another great video game in the style of the Witcher.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon and return of female beauty in Video Games

It is clear that the beauty of female characters in video games is having something of a renaissance now. There has been a movement away from having nice looking women in video games. Artists in the video game industry are not shying away from showing the female form. The Polish Gaming scene has always been open with depicting women, as can been seen in the famous Witcher games.

In the screenshot above, you can clearly see that political correctness is not governing the design of characters.

Compare this to how Oblivion Remastered ended up changing the look of the female characters and their clothing styles.

One can clearly see the inspiration in the interface of Tainted Grail. However, it is clear that the game is allowing for more skin to be showing in the game.

Some YouTubers have made comparison videos of the graphics between the original version and the new version. I saw that some of the female outfits and armor had been changed as to show less skin or to be less suggestive.

Such changes have been trending awhile in Bethesda.

Fallout 3 had many references to sexuality and yet its sequel basically hid it underneath the companions.

Oblivion and Skyrim were basically sexless games while Morrowind had even less sexuality in comparison to the earlier Elder Scrolls Games. Daggerfall and Arena were products of 1990s culture looking back at the 1980s Fantasy craze and putting them into games.

Tainted Grail is not going to have huge amounts of sexuality in it. One of the prominent screenshots for the game on Steam shows a woman with her belly button exposed. She is holding a huge sword over her shoulder. This is a combination of beauty and brawn all in one image.

Oblivion Remastered’s Censorship gives an opening to Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s beautiful women.

beautiful-liliana-in-tainted-grail-the-fall-of-avalon

The Oblivion Remastered Edition has been censoring women. While these changes are small, it is clear that Bethesda Softworks is still going through the process of ”cleaning up” its games. If you compare the screenshot of my character on the left and the screenshot of a drawn woman in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, it is clear that there are two trends happening here.

Having Intimacy in Bethesda Games

Originally, Oblivion was rated ”T” by the ESRB in America. However, after mods in 2006 were taking the clothes off the female characters, the game was re-rated as “M” or mature. The same thing happened to other popular games such as GTA: San Andreas. The video game industry was much bigger than it had been in the 1990s but it was still under the cover. Many people were not paying attention to it.

However, it was clear that the transition of themes relating to relationships between characters began to change between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, where there is a clear shift in how Bethesda approached the issue of player choice and how they could interact with characters of the opposite or same sex.

Fallout 3 had many brutal and sensous characters. However, Fallout 4 was a strange game that did not repersent a progression of the mythos but more of a regression. The sequel was more about domesticity stolen than anything else. The game starts in the Pre-War suburbs of Boston and the all the beauty of domesticity and family life are broken by atomic bombs being dropped on America. Fallout 4 however refuses to allow the player to be anything but a mother or father searching for their son.

This trend meant that Bethesda did not want to make attractive women characters anymore. Any hint of any intimacy in the games was taken out and instead it was hidden behind violence and better shooting mechanics.

The charm that made the Bethesda games simply unique was taken away from the games.

What Tainted Grail can bring some beauty back into games

While this is only a small section of the game, having the image of a woman that is beautiful in a game is enough to garner some outrage in some circles. However, among gamers who think with the heads, are going to be okay with it. That is what matters here. They shouldn’t be trying to appeal to people who have no interest in playing video games. In my previous article on Tainted Grail, I say that it has the potential with becoming the next Skyrim. With the genre being so stagnant, it is clear that there is something needed in order to get to be needed to revigoriate it.