Hi Folks,
Thank you for all the feedback you shared with us in the last few weeks! This was immensely useful from the smallest bug reports to the super-ambitious ideas on how to turn Vagrus into a AAA title [thanks for crediting so grand a potential to our tiny team], and we appreciate you taking the time to help us with your insights.
Lately, we have been working on Crew Combat to further enhance its mechanics and the latest improvement is the 'Flee' feature. Let's check it out!
Flee!
Fleeing will now be added to a selection of Crew Combat encounters with the following considerations:
With the previous large update (Codename: Bandage), we have introduced some changes to Scouting on the campaign map and we thought that we should give you a more detailed change log of what exactly happened. These alterations all appear on the Scouting Result UI.
As you can see, we have been working on making Scouting more desirable for players, as we feel that in its current form it is rather under-used. This is but a first step - we have many more ideas and will hopefully be able to implement them as we go along. Thank you for all the amazing feedback and improvement suggestions you all gave us!
Murmillo is a gladiator type from ancient Rome, one of the most iconic in fact, so when it came to designing gladiators for the world of Vagrus, there was no question about including one that looks and feels exactly like the real world warrior of the same name. We wanted to change it around a bit to make it compatible with the pseudo-Roman fantasy world, but these changes are subtle at best, like the absence of fish imagery, bronze used for the metal parts due to the rarity of harder metals, as well as a different loincloth and belt.
TL;DR: A new, extended Demo is coming to Steam and GOG so that those on the fence can take Vagrus for a spin and see what we've been cooking for a while now. This all comes at the tail end of over a month of hard work with the freshly released Open-World prototypes.
Now, let us see in more detail all the things that happened recently around the game.
We have always planned a fairly elaborate system of healing mechanics but when creating 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland', we first focused on getting the main features ready and implemented a more streamlined, placeholder set of healing rules.
Out with the Old
The PotW system simply had you use a relatively valuable resource - medical supplies - to fully heal one Companion at a time during camp. This is not only too 'gamey' but also very obtuse and not what we intended for the game or the setting.
Initially, we built Companion Combat without too much focus on the combat AI, knowing full well that it would be a massive task to code and having most of the combat features locked before we do so would make it overall a more efficient undertaking.
The Riven Realms has been around for over two decades now for us who created it for our tabletop campaigns, and the setting has quite a lot of currencies, even if one only considers the continent of Xeryn. When we set out to develop Vagrus, we picked three coin types not to overcrowd the UI: the Lyrg, a copper coin; the Bross, a silver coin; and Draka, a rare and very valuable golden coin. These are all coins that are used fairly often in large-scale commerce on the continent, and they are also fairly easy to identify as the copper-silver-gold trio of currency is fairly common in historical and fantasy settings.
The have been or will be game design posts about all but one: narration so let's focus on that for a second.
New Content: Extended Narration
It has taken much longer than expected to reach Charles - the voice of Agos the Wanderer - due to some personal matters as well as his change of career. We are happy to share that now we have all the narration recorded for Agos through-out Pilgrims of the Wasteland, and even for the beginning of the main game as he leaves your comitatus after sharing his story. We plan to make a few minor sound editing changes to these new recordings but wanted to delay this build no further, so we will do that in a subsequent iteration only. When playing the PotW story, it gives so much to it already that we think you will like this a lot. Also, here's a shout-out for Charles' new focus as he instructs singers on how to become more confident. Check out and sign up to support his Patreon page if you are interested.