This week’s post covers the creation of our painted Campaign Map and the interactive Chart, starting from their humblest beginnings in our creative director’s tabletop role-playing game materials to their eventual manifestation in-game, covered by a node grid and expanded with interactive options.

Beginnings

To kick it off, let’s start by taking a look at how it all began for Vagrus.

Hey everyone,

This new patch brings with it one really important and big change and some other fixes we applied since our last update. The large change in question is the altering of how victory works in a campaign. Previously, you were able to win the game, then choose to continue playing. This caused a lot of consistency issues with Ending slides, as you were unable to check them later on and so even if something changed (like a major questline that has its own slide was completed) after the victory, players would miss them. And so from now on, once you retire as part of a victory, you will not be able to continue playing afterward. You can complete the victory condition and then play indefinitely until the time comes you decide to conclude the playthrough and then retire to experience the Endings. Of course, you can also save the game, retire to check the slides, and then load to play more.

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!

Hey everyone,

As we have mentioned before, while we are working on the upcoming DLCs already, we would also like to expand Vagrus with smaller content drops – both the core game and the Expansion. The first of such additions comes in the form of this update, which adds the starting segments of a lengthy questline to all owners of Sunfire and Moonshadow. Without getting into spoilers, the quest deals with the Dreamwalker’s followers and will take you to places previously unseen. To start it, you have to have interacted with these strange fanatics several times and explored the Bronze Desert.

Hello everyone,

Xeryn is about to become even more captivating as we proudly announce the release of our highly anticipated expansion: Sunfire and Moonshadow, featuring a vast new region to explore. As of now, it is available to the public on Steam, GOG, and Epic Games and it can be purchased as part of our Season Pass  on Steam, GOG, and Epic., which includes two future DLCs. Check out the trailer here.

Hello everyone,

While the expansion is getting very close to the finish line, we've been busy making some quality-of-life improvements to enhance your gameplay experience in all of Vagrus. In this article, we wanted to provide detailed information on these updates, so here's a quick rundown of what's new and improved:

Last week we talked a bit about porting and screen optimization. The main goal is still to bring the game to a larger audience, of course, and so the next logical step in this endeavor is controller support across platforms. More specifically, we are working on full controller support for standard controllers and gamepad layouts including PCs, mobile devices, and – at some point – we hope we can get things working on hand-held and desktop console ports as well.

Following on from last week’s post about our overhaul of manual scouting, today we’re excited to delve a little deeper into our newest feature: Auto-scouting.

First off, let’s talk a little about our goals with these changes. We had been aware for some time that many players did not feel scouting was worth the investment, so when we set out to rework it, our approach was multi-pronged: we needed to provide changes to scouting in general that made it compelling and useful to engage with manually, while also offering a lower investment approach with some level of trade-off with the automated version.

Hey everyone,

We keep working on improving features and fixing issues for the game and from time to time we push it into the Demo build as well – this is such a time! The most significant additions are Character UI-related improvements, as well as new content, albeit the restricted nature of the Demo makes accessing some of these a bit tricky. Still, we included them for the sake of thoroughness. We have also improved visuals and fixed about a dozen bugs.

Hey everyone,

As usual, we’ve been working on fixing issues and adding new features as well as improvements. The most significant additions include our new name generator, along with the custom journal and chart notes features. As for improvements, besides smaller optimizations across various parts of the game, we have made the Companion Combat AI significantly faster while the initial loading time has been shortened as well.