Fellow vagri,

2024 is coming to its inevitable end and so we are closing the books on this year’s adventures as well. For this occasion, we thought we’d look back on the past year and list some of the things that happened around Vagrus before signing off.

How It Started

We kicked off 2024 with a post about our plans for the year. In retrospect, wanting to release smaller bits of content at intervals while developing two very content-heavy DLCs with our tiny writing team was wishful thinking. Why it did not exactly pan out like that also involved a lot of other factors, like the many, many other aspects of the game we’ve worked hard to improve. Also, it seems that there’s no such thing as “smaller bits of content” when it comes to Vagrus. With millions of words worth of written content behind us, everything is interconnected and adding things can be very tricky. Also, players now expect meaty additions, so just any odd small story just won’t cut it. Still, this effort gave us Clandestine, so it was not in vain.

This week we’d like to broach a matter for the sake of transparency. Reality in the context of global gaming industry trends has set in, and the result is hard times for everyone. We are no exception and, since we have an insatiable desire for creating quality DLCs, this has left us in a rather precarious situation.

As we’ve alluded to in recent posts, the recent release of Old Acquaintances has set the creative part of the team into action on our next DLC, but what have our programmers, UI, and quality assurance people been up to?

Why, improving the game, of course. This is why we’re happy to present some impactful quality of life (QoL) changes that will help make your Vagrus experience all the smoother.

As part of our ongoing efforts to elicit the best feedback, we’re focusing on you this week; we would like to know what pivotal decisions you made during our latest content releases. To this end, we would like you to answer a question.

Which Companion did you keep in Old Acquaintances?

Please visit Facebook to cast your vote.

To celebrate the release of Old Acquaintances in a somewhat different fashion than usual, the team gathered for a long-awaited session of boardgaming last week. And this, dear vagri, was no game of Monopoly – oh no! Instead, a struggle awaited us in the form of the game Eldritch Horror. And so everyone gathered, and we began learning the rules. This was the kind of team building we could all get behind. Sure enough, soon the pieces were in their places and it was time to cooperate; after all, we had an apocalypse of the Ancient Ones looking down the barrel at us!

Having deployed Old Acquaintances’ first hotfix, the team at Lost Pilgrims Studio has moved on to our next project: the regional DLC. The beginning of this process is iterative and requires intense coordination; it begins with the design phase, planning locations, and an overarching narrative. We need to understand what unique gameplay elements the DLC will bring to the table, which narrative beats we want to focus on, and finally, which characters or NPCs will drive that narrative.

Hey everyone,

Hot on the heels of last week’s Old Acquaintances release, today we’re deploying a hotfix to ameliorate the issues that players have reported. We are happy to see that there were no big problems, and even happier with the great feedback we’ve received from the players currently enjoying the DLC.

Old Acquaintances is now live! As part of the release, we have included a telling menu background, one which many vagri will be familiar with, especially those who have played the Pilgrims of the Wasteland scenario. The Black Sands and the distant ruins of Arx Mortis is, after all, where it all ended – and where it shall begin anew in the new DLC – for Sedarias.

New Content

• The DLC ‘Old Acquaintances’ will now be unlocked to all its owners. It includes two Companions for the main campaign – Javek and Sedarias – with fully-fledged storylines including new enemies and rewards, their own Skills, Prowess progression, as well as four new Hirelings available at the Freelancers’ Guild in Tor’Zag’s Shelter, Deven, Avernum, Larnak, and (for owners of ‘Sunfire and Moonshadow’) the Onyx Outpost.

User Interface Improvements

• Clarified the visual guidance of Evading, including when you Evade to a position occupied by another character.
• Clarified the visual guidance of Javek’s Hypnotize Skill.
• We streamlined tooltip behavior while using a controller based on feedback and expanded their functionality.
• Changed the Move Skill in Companion Combat, giving it better feedback and a more streamlined usage.

Bug Fixes

• Steam cloud saves are now working and can store up to 200mb of save files.
• Tutorial windows no longer appear minimized under any circumstances.
• Owned DLCs will now always show up properly under ‘Extras’ in Vagrus games in GOG and Epic Games Store libraries.
• Event choices with an Achievement dependency now show the proper icon (chalice).
• When using a controller, the Chart tutorial no longer scrolls the same way as the Chart is zoomed in and out.
• Fixed a rare issue occurring on GOG and the Epic Games Store, causing players to be unable to select the Knowledge Ambition upon vagrus creation when owning the Vorax Free-LC.
• You can no longer turn back in the initial parts of Pilgrims of the Wasteland when using a controller.
• Fixed an issue caused by owning more than 10.000 Bross upon loading a game.
• Fixed an issue that caused the game to freeze in Companion Combat when Suppressing Shot would trigger an Evade.

Stay tuned and conquer the wasteland!

Let’s keep it short and sweet: our new Old Acquaintances DLC is now available on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store! It’s been a long time coming, and while we’ve enjoyed the ride, we can’t wait for you – the players – to sink your teeth into the stories of both Javek and Sedarias, the two new Companion characters included in this piece of content. We hope you’ll enjoy the expanded lore, characters, and hirelings on offer – all have been a pleasure to work on.