A tiny studio just mogged Bethesda with this game

So, this is the video. People want me to watch the Indie Elder Scrolls. Okay, let's look at this. I haven't seen this at all. One of the greatest RPGs of the last 10 years is nothing but an Elder Scrolls wannabe. That's what PC Gamer just called it anyway. A game that just sold a million copies made by an indie studio of just 50 developers. an RPG with more depth, build variety and choice Bethesda has shipped this decade. And honestly, that got under my skin because calling it a wannabe is not only lazy, it's completely backwards. It's not trying to be another Elder Scrolls, it's doing what Elder Scrolls used to do before Bethesda stopped trying, before they stopped caring. The skill progression, the quest choice, the weird sandbox systems that let you break things, the genuine consequences that actually stick. This is the game that Bethesda should be studying because when Elder Scrolls 6 finally drops, if it drops, they better hope it's even half as good as what a 50 person indie team from Poland just built. And I'm going to show you exactly why. This is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, a firsterson openw world RPG set in a dark Auroran world, not the Noble Knights and Round Table version. By the way, just real quick, I beat the entire game in the DLC. I played this. It's He's right. It's a great game. It's an amazing game. The other one, Lakes of Blood, a decaying Camelot picked apart by plague and Arthur's ghost. bitter and self-aware watching you clean up the mess he left behind. It was built by Quest Line Studio, a subsidiary of Awaken Realms, a Polish board game publisher. And that background actually matters because board games live or die on meaningful choices. Every decision has to count from the start. That philosophy came with them when they made this. The game launched into early access in 2023 and spent two years actually listening to player feedback which already puts them miles ahead of Bethesda who prefer the ignorance's bliss route and it hit I don't think people should look at Skyrim. I think they should look at Starfield because Skyrim came out over like what was it? It came out 15 years ago now. Right now Starfield I think it came out November 2011 and uh like Starfield is their new game. So, you should look at what happened with Starfield and then base Elder Scrolls off of Starfield release in May last year. Since then, they've shipped constant major updates. Patch 1.1 added new game plus transmog, new dungeons. Patch 1.2, which dropped last week, overhauled the entire third act with new locations, quests, enemies, and layout changes. A free DLC coming end of March this year, too. And they just recently dropped Sanctuary of Saras, their first full expansion, 15 hours of content, 20 plus dungeons, 100 new equipment pieces, three entirely new skill trees. This isn't just a studio building an RPG. This is a studio listening to the players committed to making the best RPG they possibly can. Not bad for a this game. So, what makes this game very good is that it's not a 200 hour game, but it's a very controlled, well-designed experience that you can play in a lot of different ways. Like, you can play a melee build, you can play a summoner build where you have different minions that do things for you. You can play a caster build, you can play a bow build, you can play a uh what is it? A dagger assassinate build. Like I think that the best thing about um Tainted Grail is its build variety. I think that's the best thing about the game. Like for me, my character, I have like a I use like the big two-handed mace that you get at the beginning of the game. I just upgraded a million times. It's so good. And it can proc with like an explosion. It's like Thor's hammer. And then I summon a bunch of guys that tank everything for me and I just hit them. And like I I've beaten every boss like effortlessly. Like it's been so [ __ ] easy. And I also have like magic skills that I can use too. And then you can empower your summons. It's it's a really really good game and the build variety with it is great. BA we all miss the times where RPGs actually trusted you to think where you could go anywhere, try anything, break everything and the game would just make you do it. No endless quest markers holding your hand, no obvious correct. Well, I I actually I mean I think this game is a very guided experience. It's like there there are things that happen and you discover spontaneously, but the game it's not like Crimson Desert where it's like pretty much unguided entirely. Like the majority of things in this game, like it tells you what to do. And everything is also fully voice acted as well. And I think that one thing that this game has is that especially in the first I think the first zone is like by far the best zone. It's like not even remotely close. It's like just it the first zone in Tain of Grail was like a [ __ ] like 10 out of 10 RPG zone. And overall, uh, it has a certain grit to it that I think that you don't get with modern games as much nowadays. You don't get it. It's great choices. That freedom has been disappearing in front of our eyes. But Tainted Grail is absolutely dripping in it in a way that we haven't really seen in a fantasy RPG since Morowind. You want to get better at swords? Use a sword. Better at magic, cast spells. Over 20 skill trees, no defined classes, no prescribed path. The game actively encourages you to build something weird. An alchemist berserker, a mystical blacksmith mage, something completely broken that probably shouldn't work but does. It's exactly what I have. It's exactly what I [ __ ] have. And if you want to turn your enemies into cheese, yes, that's an actual thing. The game will let you do that too with a certain spell because it has there's this thing you can channel a cheese beam onto something and depending on how long and how how powerful you are and how powerful the monster is, you can literally turn it into a piece of cheese. Has that older feral RPG instinct where mechanics are allowed to just be funny and stupid. Tons of side quests, a massive world to explore, strange characters to meet. The game doesn't just give you the correct answer because there isn't one. The choice is always yours to make. And the consequences of those decisions stick with you. Join one faction, lose access to another forever. Stick your arm in a frog's mouth and lose it permanently. I'm serious. What you choose not to do matters just as much as what you do. That's the philosophy of the entire game. And if all of that sounds familiar, it should because that's exactly what Elder Scrolls used to be. It's what the game It's what games in general used to be. And I think that after a while they stopped really six out of 10 on IGN by the way tainted grit. No way. No way. This is pathetic. This is genuinely [ __ ] pathetic. And also again tainted grail does not follow modern audience uh you know thinking at all. Click more reviews. I I don't know. Give me actually one second. I my phone. Excuse me. All right. Anyway, to be fair, when it came out, it had game-breaking bugs, a lot of it. But still, I mean, I think that the first like maybe five hours of the game are kind of rough because you have you don't really have your build made. But like other than that, I mean, it's it's such a good game. And like once you're cooking in this game, oh my god. Like it it I played it on hard mode. It's a joke. Like the game is so [ __ ] easy. It's insane. Like I honestly that would be like one of my only criticisms of it is that it's too easy. It's too easy. Like I uneven difficulty. There's nothing hard in the game. If you're have if you're struggling at anything in the game, you're garbage. You're garbage. you suck. So, uh, sounds like Crimson Desert. Yeah, it kind of does, actually, unlike Starfield, which has zero bugs at all. Yeah, Starfield has so many bugs. No, I a six from IGN, bro. I feel like every game that's a six is actually a [ __ ] nine, right? Like, I would rate Ted Grail a nine. I would give it like an eight and a half to a nine. Probably closer to a nine. I actually think that the DLC wasn't at the same quality as the main story. The DLC was decent, but um I thought the main story was better personally. Or Bethesda decided it was too complicated for you. So calling Tainted Grail an Elder Scrolls wannabe is bordering on an insult. It says that Tainted Grail is chasing something. It's patronizing. It's dimminionative and it's intentionally trying to downplay its success to imitate playing catchup. That's exactly what it's sitting at on Steam. Wait, really? Um, let me see here. What does it say? 4.5. Damn. See, like I don't need to I I This is the reason why I make up statistics is because they just turn out to be right. The Elder Scrolls abandoned all of this depth over 20 years ago. The Elder Scrolls 3 Morowind had proper attributes, stats that actually changed how your character moved through the world. Skill progression was tied to how much you use them. Genuine choice complexity that rewarded experimentation quests you could actually fail at. NPCs you There's a transcendent player experience that you go through whenever you play an old RPG. And one of the big reasons why is because so many of them are so [ __ ] punishing. Holy [ __ ] Like you do one thing wrong and you're [ __ ] dead. And now your character's disabled for the rest of your playthrough. Wait, what? They're so unforgiving. It's insane. Could kill and break entire storylines, factions that each other and actually meant it. and you had to pick a side. And then came Skyrim. Attributes gone, skill trees simplified, and somewhere along the way, you can be the arch mage of the college of Winterhold without casting a single spell. You can lead the companions and the thieves guild and the dark brotherhood simultaneously. You can't fail most quests because the game quietly makes sure that you can't. Half the NPCs are flagged as essential, so you literally cannot kill them even if you try. And Skyrim is a brilliant game. The world building is amazing. It's massive. Well, I mean that that's it's a game made for a large audience, right? It's made I mean like that's the thing is like you're like the deep cut games, the POE2s, the tainted grails, the like weathering waves is never going to be as popular as Ginch and Impact because it's a deeper cut, higher complexity, much higher difficulty, and it's it's a gamer's game. I don't think there's anything wrong with Kazan. Yeah, Kazan. Kazan is never going to be as popular as Elder Ring cuz it's just too hard. It's way too hard. Like, you're never going to have Nine Souls compete with Hollow Knight. It's just way harder. That's it. You I've never played Skyrim. Never. He's made a trade-off. Removed all the depth for accessibility, the consequences for comfort. And Bethesda has been making those same trade-offs in every game since. Strip out the complexity, dismiss any complaints, acknowledge it didn't work years down the line, but then just do it all over again in Starfield. A million people Starfield was horrible. It was a It was a profoundly bad game. It was like impressively bad. It was like, wow. And y'all were able to make $300 million disappear. That's crazy. Just bought Tainted demand for real depth and choice didn't disappear. It just waited for a studio who was actually paying attention. We're in a time now where Bethesda are being left behind. It's just whenever I go back and I watch this game, you know what this looks like? This looks like uh hey guys, I AI generated this video game with Grock and then everybody in the comments saying this is soulless slop. Nobody's gonna buy AI games. AI games are not the future. You're a [ __ ] idiot. Like, oh, you're you're in India. Like, everything, bro. Left behind. They spent the last decade chasing ideas nobody asked for. Fallout 76, Starfield's procedurally generated soulless emptiness, Red's catastrophic failure, smoothing off every rough edge of their games until there was nothing interesting left to hold on to. And while this was happening, Independent and DoubleA studios were quietly doing the opposite, giving us what we actually want. And and by the way, there is a chance that Tainted Grail was the first draft and I think it's called Fatebringer will be the final draft because that game is it looks like this but with RTX turned on. Insane quality. Ridiculous [ __ ] quality. wanted. Larian spent years making Bouldersgate 3, a deep, complex, consequence-driven RPG where your choices actually matter. Where you can break quests, kill important characters, fail spectacularly, and the world responds. It's now sold over 20 million copies. One game of the year, nobody saw it coming, least of all the publishers and studios like Bethesda who'd spent years. And another really big component to this is that the replayability. Like I I mean I there's no way Chance hasn't played at least a thousand hours of Balders's Gate 3, right? I mean there's a lot of people I assume that have probably played over a thousand hours of Balders's Gate 3. And the reason why is because it has that replayability. And that replayability is achieved by meaningful choices that lock you out of other choices because it's like, well, what would it be like if I went back and I did this? What would happen if I just killed everybody that I met? What would happen if X, Y, or Z, right? And so that's really the way I think it think about and and also and you see that that and Elden Ring is the same way. It's the exact same way as complex RPGs weren't viable. And then Warhorse Studios shipped Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 a massive dense historically accurate RPG that doesn't hold your hand doesn't protect you from fo does not. Failure and expects you to actually engage with its systems. Another massive hit. And now, Quest Line, 50 people built Tainted Grail, an RPG with more genuine depth and consequence than anything Bethesda has released this decade. The appetite for complex choices never disappeared. Bethesda just decided those players didn't really matter anymore. So, those players found studios who thought they did. And now here we are, the wannabe Elder Scrolls quietly doing everything Bethesda forgot how to. So if you've been waiting for the kind of fantasy and also like if you want to talk about like this tree for example so the way this tree works is that you this is like this is the DLC tree and whenever you get a point in this tree you can swap in in real time in game between the warrior tree the rogue tree and the caster tree. So like it's a keybind and so and you can level up each tree independently. So like if you get five points, you can put five points in this, five points in this, five points in this, and you can swap them around all the time. And so because there there's another component to this where some developers, they try to they try to design a game and they think that making a game old school means that a meaningful choice means uh making respspecing annoying. A meaningful choice means uh meaning that you can't use certain weapons if you pick a certain talent tree. That's not a meaningful choice. That's just annoying. And I think that whenever you punish players in that way for making choices, what happens is that, and this is very simple psychology behavior, when you punish players substantially, players try much harder to avoid being punished and they look it up. And with this game, that's not the case. Respect is what everybody wants. Yes. But like again, but the choices that you do make in the game are choices that are storyline decisions. They're like, "Well, do you want to save or, you know, like destroy this kingdom or do you want to, you know, kill or not kill this guy or whatever or like do you want to help this guy or not?" I mean, like basically the story, I don't want to give away or spoil it too much, right? But there are very very consequential decisions that you have to make and those are the consequential decisions people want to make. They don't want to have to make consequential decisions in their talentries. And this is an understanding of RPG mentality that respects the player while simultaneously giving people what they want. I think that's a good thing. Rolls quietly doing everything Bethesda forgot how to. So, if you've been waiting for the kind of fantasy RPG that actually trusts you, that gives you real choices, real consequences, real freedom to experiment and break things, this is it. This isn't an Elder Scrolls wannabe. It never was. It's the game that revived a philosophy Bethesda spent 15 years quietly abandoning. And when Elder Scrolls 6 finally arrives whenever it's edgy, too. The game's edgy, too. It's really good. That is the bar has been set. The wannabe label got it completely backwards. Tainted Grail isn't trying to be Elder Scrolls. Elder Scrolls should be trying to be this. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, drop a like, a comment, and subscribe to the channel for more. It really does help me out massively. Thanks again. I'll see you in the next one. I mean, he's totally [ __ ] right. I mean, I agree with everything that he's saying in this video, and I I'm a huge [ __ ] fan of this, right? I I I love this.