On November 7, mod author redfieldbloodline17 presented Road to Kamelot, an upcoming mod for Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. The preview showed changes to melee combat and outlined a new balance system intended to keep early-game weapons useful through the end of the game.
How Road to Kamelot changes combat
The author wants to preserve the original game’s identity without turning it into either a fast-paced hack-and-slash or a slower dungeon crawler in the vein of Dark Souls. To do that, the mod changes enemy behavior and stamina rules: enemies no longer spend stamina on their own actions, but you can wear them down with weapon hits and parries.
A successful parry will no longer always make an enemy recoil. You’ll need to read their reaction and choose when to strike back. Here are the changes the author showed in the combat preview:
- Enemy stamina. Weapon hits and parries drain an enemy’s stamina. The less health they have, the more slowly it recovers.
- AI reactions. Enemies take recent hits, blocks and parries into account, change their behavior and try to time their blocks to intercept your attacks.
- Group fights. The mod limits how many enemies can attack at once, so you aren’t overwhelmed by blows from every direction. A successful parry gives you a brief moment to breathe before the other enemies can attack.
- Parrying combos. A single parry no longer guarantees that an enemy will recoil. Parrying an entire combo makes the opponent stumble, opening a longer window to attack.
- Counter strikes. Start a swing within one second of a successful parry, and the attack will be faster and deal more poise damage.
- Heavy attacks and shoves. Heavy attacks deal more poise damage. If an enemy is using a healing item, a shove is guaranteed to interrupt the heal.
- Bosses and minibosses. Adjusted pauses between attack sequences are intended to give you more opportunities to deal damage even outside stagger windows.
- Hitmarkers. White indicates a clean hit, red marks a kill, and a shield icon appears when you hit a blocking enemy.
- Combat settings. You can adjust enemy aggression, group attack limits, stamina damage, poise, stagger duration and hitmarkers.
Early weapons should stay useful throughout the game
A separate, optional scaling overhaul smooths out the increases in health and damage as you progress by adjusting player, enemy and item stats. The author has removed weapon tiers and upgrades in this mode, so early-game weapons are meant to stay useful through the end of the game. Your character will grow stronger through the stats and skills gained as you level up, along with armor and items.
The author recommends using this system, but warns that it has not yet been fully tested in NG+. Keep that in mind before installing it for a New Game Plus run.
🔥 If you like the idea of wearing down an enemy’s stamina with hits and parries, keep an eye on Road to Kamelot. But I’d wait for testing of the new scaling system to finish before using it for a main NG+ playthrough.
If Tainted Grail’s dark Arthurian fantasy appeals to you as much as its first-person combat, take a look at the dark fantasy RPG roundup. It includes Tainted Grail alongside other RPGs with a similar atmosphere but different approaches to combat and exploration.
What’s coming in the first version, and what will follow?
In the announcement, the author said the first version, covering combat and scaling, would arrive soon, but gave no exact release date. He plans to rebalance weapons, armor, accessories and skills later; movement and skill trees are also part of the broader project.
As an example, the author described a test version of the Aspiring Warrior Amulet. Instead of adding one point of physical damage, it grants +5 physical damage and +10% attack speed while health is above 75%. Those numbers come from his current experiments and are not a promise of final values.
You can follow other projects that change familiar RPG mechanics in the modding news section. What would you rather have in Tainted Grail: more thoughtful group fights, or the option to finish the game with an early weapon you love?
