The wind was speaking to her, telling her terrible things, singing of her demise, chanting of her worst fears becoming manifest, of her never reaching her destination, never achieving her dreams, never being content, never finding rest or refuge or love. It kept on whining and screaming and whimpering until she herself started screaming in a vain attempt to blot it all out.

There are a large number of settlements (cities, towns, villages, outposts, encampments) that you can visit in Vagrus, all of them unique locations even though they share some characteristics and features. This video showcases the basic settlement functions and UI.

Upon entering a settlement, you can see several panes that you can interact with (on the top right of the settlement window):

We are super excited to share some of our progress as we are getting closer and closer to releasing the build that has the new trade pricing system feature.

This short video demonstrates how the comitatus carries goods from one market to the other trying to make some profit. The quantity and price of goods are calculated based on their source location and the time spent on the road to get to a certain place. Will your comitatus be able to transport them quicker than the market flow to realize a profit? 

Ever since we came up with the idea of Vagrus, a game where you manage a comitatus, we knew we needed to develop an elaborate, dynamic trade system that would serve as one of the major features of the game and would also aid in fleshing out a living world.

Basic Premises 

While trading was always to be one of the main sources of income for the player, we also wanted to avoid creating a pure trading simulator game. It's not that those are not fun for the right people - stories about Gabor dominating the Auction House on our server in World of Warcraft for a period of time still surface in conversations among friends - but because our strengths lie elsewhere. Our unique setting, The Riven Realms, and telling stories with memorable characters was the first and foremost motivation to create Vagrus, so it was also much more likely to excel in that rather than in a simulation - which we knew relatively little of.

You will most likely come across the artwork you can see here when wandering into sewers below Imperial cities in Vagrus' main campaign. This might not seem a very good idea since such places are typically neglected and extremely filthy. They are also most likely infested by mutated beasts or stray undead. Yet a vagrus needs to plunge into such vile places more often than not.

As we are getting closer and closer to releasing the first playable build of the main campaign of Vagrus, it is perhaps a good time to talk a bit about the differences between the open world campaign and 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland'. The focus of this is going to be narrative design and stories but there are going to be implications on gameplay as well.

'When we arrived at the observation  post, Borgan was nowhere to be seen. The craven slaves pointed to tracks in the sand that looked like someone had been dragged away, accompanied by small, triangular stab marks – Yrg prints, I presumed correctly. These led to a dark crevice at the foot of one of the towers. We tried calling after Borgan but there was no answer. Eventually, I sent down one of the slaves with a torch. The unfortunate bloke happened upon the mutilated body of Borgan down there and fled back up in a panic. Yrg are clearly present down in the underside of the city, that much is certain. This ties in perfectly with what we know of the Elven tribes of the Second Age. The accounts of Sage Ikar record that the realm of Dor Anthelas was involved in a great war against the Yrg that lasted for  millennia. What these insect broods were like, I cannot imagine, but  they must have been a far cry from the mostly docile Yrg we know today.'

Besides working on implementing new features into our Open Access build, we made great progress with prepping for the debut of the first Open-world region - Tor'Zag's Shelter and its surroundings -  which basically is about the first half of the main game. We are actually contemplating to bring its release ahead of polishing all the features.