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It's a little surprising there aren't more The Elder Scrolls clones. Aside from Avowed, the only other example I can think of is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. It launched in May last year after a stint in early access, and the response was positive, perhaps surprisingly so, considering how tough it must be for a relatively young studio to make a game of this scale. Our reviewer wrote that it "puts an interesting spin on Arthurian legend and presents a competent world that plays like a love letter to the open-world first-person RPG genre."

It's a "dark reimagination" of Arthurian legends, set entirely on the island of Avalon. There are three distinct zones to explore—in this sense, it wends closer to Avowed—and it has all the usual distractions: you can fish, farm, cook, mine, smith weapons, mix spells, and sketch in your journal, between the usual bouts of dungeon crawling, overworld exploration, and "morally ambiguous" choice making.

I've played a couple of hours on Steam Deck and it runs pretty well there too, albeit at around the 30-45fps mark. The art style is darker than Skyrim's, coming off almost as a hybrid of Dark Souls and Morrowind. It feels unmistakably like a first-person Bethesda RPG, but has a lot of ideas of its own, especially where combat is concerned. Maybe it's not so surprising given it's been 15 years since Skyrim came out, but the melee here is much more elegant.

With the next Elder Scrolls game so far off I reckon Tainted Grail is well-worth checking out. Especially because it's currently 50% off on Steam, which is cheaper than I've ever seen it. If you're unsure, there's a demo you can try before you buy.

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The discount coincides with a major new patch and free DLC drop. It adds new items, a new "ultra+" graphics preset for extremely well-endowed PCs, as well as new armor sets for rangers and sorcerers, as well as new bows and wands. There's apparently a new romance option, too.

Less than a week after Ubisoft promised that a new Ghost Recon game is coming but probably not anytime soon, the company says it will mark the series' 25^th anniversary in August with some proper news on what's coming next.

"It’s been a while Ghosts!" the announcement excitedly states. "We know some of you saw some updates, we’ll have more to say on the 6th of August when we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Ghost Recon. Intel coming soon."

My initial impression was that this is basically a scaled-down version of last week's big Bethesda blowout: A blast of the hype machine intended, at least in part, to help you forget about all the bad stuff going on, specifically the sweeping layoffs at Xbox that are putting thousands of people out of work.

Obviously an update on the Ghost Recon franchise, whose most recent game is now seven years old and was decidedly not great (although it has gotten better in the years since), doesn't have the hype heft of Fallout 5. But Ubisoft's condition is dire, and sometimes the best gun is the one you can reach.

My second and more lasting impression, however, is one of annoyance, and I'll tell you why. After a few seconds of pondering this Ghost Recon update, I thought to myself, perhaps there will also be news on Splinter Cell! After all, Tom Clancy is Tom Clancy, right? Hard men doing unpleasant things for freedom and stuff. The Ghosts, the Rainbows, the Echelons—it's all Clancyverse underneath, right? And if anyone in that gang is overdue for some attention, it's Team Splinter Cell.

Ah, but they are not all the same, at least not in the way that matters at the moment. I popped around to the Splinter Cell X account and found a Ubisoft 40^th anniversary retweet from earlier in July, a half-dozen 2025 posts (mostly about the Splinter Cell animated series on Netflix), one retweet from 2023, and a relative flurry activity from 2022. I thought for a second that would correspond to the announcement of the Splinter Cell remake, but no: That was actually announced in 2021, believe it or not. (Hint: Believe it.)

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The 2022 activity marked the 20^th anniversary of the first Splinter Cell game; it was also the year that remake director David Grivel left Ubisoft for "a new adventure." He's had enough time since then to work on Battlefield 6, then return to Ubisoft and resume directorship on the Splinter Cell remake.

In that same stretch we've also seen Netflix make its Splinter Cell cartoon without Michael Ironside, the Splinter Cell movie starring Tom Hardy get cancelled, and Ubisoft making everyone mad by posting the wrong picture of Sam Fisher, which I genuinely think was intentional because at this point it's clear that Ubisoft just gets off on screwing with us.

Of course, this isn't a problem unique to Splinter Cell. Consider the Sands of Time remake, which was cancelled after six years of futility, or Skull and Bones, which came out six years late, or Beyond Good and Evil 2, which will soon celebrate 20 years of non-existence. Timeliness just isn't Ubisoft's strong suit, which is how we got here—"here" being the recent announcement of a "quieter year" in Ubisoft releases before things start happening in 2027-28—in the first place.

One possible spot of good news, relatively anyway: The 25^th anniversary of the first Splinter Cell game lands on November 18, 2027, about a year and a half from now. Maybe Ubisoft just really digs big anniversaries and has decided that at this point it might as well hold out for a good one before it drops any more Splinter Cell news. So there's something to look forward to. In the meantime, we'll let you know what's cooking in the world of Ghost Recon when it happens.