Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is one of the more surprising successes of 2025. Questline's open-world RPG gives Arthurian legend the Elder Scrolls treatment, letting players explore a decaying, war-torn version of Avalon while guided by the ghost of King Arthur.
Tainted Grail's unusual world and intriguing questlines more than made up for a few rough edges, as Sam Desatoff explained in his Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon review. "Every NPC has something worthwhile to contribute, and most of them offer side quests that add new wrinkles to the larger story," he wrote back in June. "They can also be surprisingly funny: you'll help a nobleman fake his death to get out of a loveless marriage, uncover the lair of an undead chef chasing the next great meal, assist a woman who accidentally turned her husband into a pig, and more."
Questline has updated Tainted Grail sporadically since launch. But the latest patch—v1.1—is by far the biggest yet. Not only does it squash a vast array of bugs nibbling at the RPG's underbelly, but it also adds several major features and a bunch of new locations for players to explore.
The headline update is a New Game Plus mode, which resets the game and lets you run through it again to experiment with different choices (or, if you're anything like me, make exactly the same choices because you don't like change). In typical fashion, you get to keep most of the equipment you had at the end of your first run, while the enemies you face will be significantly tougher. Armour will also be debuffed for each NG+ level, so the more runs you do, the more you'll have to rely on your own skills.
Other new features include a head-bobbing option for first-person players, and a "transmogrification" system that lets you change the visual appearance of items to any similar item you've discovered. In other words, if you like the stats of a weapon or armour set, but don't like how it looks, you can switch its model to something else.
Beyond this, the update adds three new dungeons, six extra quests and more than a dozen additional items including new weapons and armour sets. It also gives numerous existing missions and locations a tune up. In particular, the patch makes substantial changes to Tainted Grail's third act, adding three new caves to explore while also scattering significantly more loot about to make exploration more rewarding in this latter stage of the story.
The 1.1 update is available now. As is fashionable with big updates like this, Questline has also put Tainted Grail on sale at a 20% discount for the next few days. This reduces the price to $36 (£30), which ain't bad for a modern RPG. The discount runs until September 16.
It's been a weirdly good year for Elder Scrolls fans, even though The Elder Scrolls 6 remains years away from release. Aside from the launch of Oblivion Remastered, Tainted Grail and Avowed both brought big chunks of Elder Scrolls-adjacent RPG action to the PC this year. The modding community has been on fire too, with Tamriel Rebuilt adding a huge new region of Morrowind to explore and fan-made Oblivion remake Skyblivion gearing up for a launch later this year, though a former dev on the project has cast doubt over those plans.
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