Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon – Sanctuary Of Sarras DLC Review
What’s going on everybody? Mortem here. This time bringing you a DLC review for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon and its Sanctuary of Saras DLC. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a wonderful little title that uh people love to compare to Skyrim, but I don’t think that really tells you the whole story, mind you. But I get it. Either way, it released earlier this year back in May to be specific. And about 6 months later here, we now have its first DLC. That DLC comes with a base patch, a free DLC alongside it, and some other information I wanted to go over. As this is a game I really enjoyed this year, and while it was certainly a little bit buggy, especially in the last act, the work they have done over the course of the time since its release has really kind of brought this game together. And I think with the extra content added from this DLC, it’s in a really good spot. But before we get into all that, important that I mention that while this DLC is launching a little later today from the time this video releases, that is possible because I received an early access version of it via the game’s developer and publisher, uh, Awaken Realms and Quest Line. The embargo for this was actually yesterday, so you may have seen some videos on it already. I was a little bit behind because I was busy making some Divinity videos. But with that out of the way, let’s actually dive into what this is and why it’s important. But first, we’re going to start with the uh patch that released a couple days ago, kind of alongside this. That is patch 1.15. Mostly, a lot of what this did was optimizations and some gameplay fixes and just improving a little few things here and there. Nothing like crazy as far as this patch goes. Mostly just trying to make sure the game isn’t crashing in certain instances while also optimizing for load times, stuff like that. Now, on the gameplay side of things, they’ve restored some items that were apparently missing. Allowed you to access your stash from resting at the fireplace, tweaked the uh overall experience and new game plus and everything, literally the experience, how much you get from enemies, that type of stuff. And they also fixed a couple quests, added a new option to complete the quest price of healing, while also including some minor changes like they have a different font option now that you can toggle to make things hopefully more legible for people. tweaked how certain tool tips were displayed to make sure everything was visible, that kind of stuff. So, a good patch, but nothing exactly groundbreaking. Before we get into the rest of the DLC, they did drop a free DLC alongside the expansion DLC. The free DLC added five new armor sets. Uh, these are now rewards for completing certain quests throughout the experience. You’ll get a potential armor set for those. They all look pretty cool. And then alongside those armor sets, you can also get some alternative looks for main characters in the game like King Arthur or Keradok. Nothing crazy, but nice that they released it for free to be sure. But with that out of the way, let’s actually get around to the DLC itself, finally. So, the sanctuary of Saras is actually a sort of underwater DLC where you explore a series of shipwrecks or a little bit of civilization that has popped up underwater around these shipwrecks that introduces uh roughly 5 to 10 hour story line I would say and then a bunch more of exploration that you can actually partake in which means honestly just a lot more content which I think will more than likely be able to uh smooth out some of the drop off when you get to the third area where there’s just a bit less to do, frankly. But first, you of course have to access this DLC. And assuming you’ve got it paid for and installed and everything, you can start it from act two or act three, basically by resting at your campfire, you’ll either be visited by a new individual who seems to be the lord of the depths who tells you about where to go to solve some problem that happened 600 years ago. or if you’ve already made it to act three, you will instead be assaulted by someone throwing a fish at you, which gives you more or less the new information as well. Either of those uh interactions, let’s say, will point you to a shrine in the second zone. Act two, Kuan. And this chapel is your ticket down to the deeps or the sanctuary of Saras. Saras is actually a big flagship that King Arthur used with his people to arrive on Avalon. it would seem all those years ago. As you find out uh very quickly once you arrive here, what you’re seeing is an area that has built up and been founded around the wreck of the Saras and two other ships that were with it when some rebels of King Arthur’s attempted to flee Avalon to head back to the homelands. Unfortunately for them, that was never going to cut it and the ships were sank off the coast, which has resulted in this sanctuary area. Your job is to try to get to the bottom of this. decide the fate of this little colony that has popped up. And along the way, we’re going to see a lot of different stuff. The main story, of course, which has some interesting quests involved. Gives you even more background on some of the stuff that King Arthur and Merlin were up to. Along the way, we’re going to fight new bosses, enemies, and encounter this wonderfully designed zone, by the way, which includes picking up and gathering all sorts of new equipment, like tons of new armors, weapons, that kind of thing, all with a sort of underwater theme, as you would probably expect. We’re also going to encounter a bunch of new side quests, some of which were actually pretty interesting. They did some fun stuff with exploration even, so a fair bit to go over, but the main story was decent. It’s relatively short. If you’re a high level, you can just kind of burn through it pretty quick. But the key thing that it does here is kind of give you some more background on Merlin and Arthur and the type of people they were and the type of decisions that they had to make, especially on the fly. And it was pretty cool overall. probably not going to blow your mind, but I thought it was good enough for what this expansion is trying to do. I think the real standout of this DLC for me actually was the zone itself. So, this is an entirely new zone. It’s roughly the size of the others, maybe a little smaller, and you’ll get to explore and interact with its denisonens that have been here for an extremely long time. These guys are fantastically weird. I think the zone itself is gorgeous. I love what they did with this place. And what makes it more interesting to me is how you actually get around. So, this zone is uh sort of subdivided off into tiny little like islands, I guess you could call them, despite them being underwater. And the way you travel between them is the gates that house some sort of like fish-like entity that then swims you from place to place, but only if you appease it first through some little quests you’ve got to do. It was a very amusing way to approach these things. But also on top of that, they’ve introduced geysers that add some verticality to the landscape as well. There are these geysers that effectively act as like elevators moving you up and down from various areas. And it certainly makes running around and exploration a little more interesting. But that’s not all because a short ways into the main story, you get this scythe that will cut open uh specific blocked passages, and you have to charge up this scythe by killing enemies in order to use it. But this will get you all sorts of like hidden loot and gear. So, for me at least, the best part of this DLC was realistically just the uh exploration. The zone itself is a really cool place to explore. The new enemies are fun to see and combined with the new items which will lead to uh new transmog sets on top of of course what you can do with the character building as that was something Tainted Grail did a lot of good stuff with. But believe it or not, we’re still not done yet because this expansion also introduces a new bit of progression, the Saras skill trees. So, there are basically these shrines throughout the DLC that you will uh find, and praying to them gives you a point for these three skill trees. In order to actually use them, you typically have to interact with the shrines themselves, by the way. It took me a little while to realize that. So, you’ll pray at them to get the point, but then you have to interact with them again to spend that point. These skill trees, though, are basically your warrior, mage, or rogue type. Some basic archetypes associated with them. But the catch is you can only have one of these trees active at once. However, you are free to swap between them whenever. So, the way this actually works and goes down is that interacting with one of these shrines gives you a point to spend on each tree. But the catch is again, you can only have the one active, so you can swap between them. And probably unsurprisingly, these trees are strong. But they do have one thing that I’m not so keen on and it’s important to mention actually and that is that the enemies in this expansion are actually scaled to your level. However, that is adjusted based on the number of these shrines you have found. The more you have found, the stronger you will be in relation to these enemies, and it is a pretty noticeable effect. Though, to be honest, I was kind of using an overpowered build here, so it wasn’t super difficult to begin with. And if I had to pick this apart, the level scaling of these new skill trees and how that works is a bit of a bummer to me personally as I don’t think that was necessary really. But the trees themselves are very, very strong. Those will be, I would say, defining things for potential builds. So much so that it actually makes me a little bit worried in combination with the experience that you’ll gain throughout this DLC as well about the balance of the rest of the game being thrown off as a result of you completing this like early or whatever. Which is just about a wrap for everything I’ve got on the Sanctuary of Saras DLC. Basically, I think the zone is really the highlight. Exploring this place was awesome. I would say it’s probably my favorite area of this game now by far. The content was pretty good. I liked interacting with all these new weird things. All of the new build options and stuff they’ve added via like the items and stuff. I’m sure that’ll be fun for a lot of people. But my main hang-up is mostly that while this new skill tree is cool, it’s also associated with some level scaling that I’m not wild about. And I again think that it might actually create a balance issue for the rest of the game if they’re not careful. But for me personally, I would have been happy to pay for this just to check out the zone itself. And to that end, this DLC is about $15 US. And given the overall length of the DLC, all of the options and stuff that it adds, I think that’s a pretty good price for this. They are still improving the base game with things like the patches and stuff they’ve been putting out. The game does just straight up feel, at least to me, like it’s in a better place than when I initially played it back in May. And so, while if you are waiting for all of the DLC to be out, I have no idea if they have more planned. I don’t even know that they were planning this one that I knew of. And so if you’re looking for that information, I can’t really help you. But this was a cool bit of DLC. I really loved the zone, which is where we are going to wrap up this particular DLC review. Certainly hope you enjoyed it. If you’ve played Tainted Grail this year, I would love to know what you think about it. And of course, this DLC specifically. So with that in mind, don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe, all that YouTube jazz. 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.
Taking a look at the expansion DLC, Sanctuary of Sarras, for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, just ahead of its official release. The game has come a long way since launch!
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