The greatest thing about running open development is receiving amazing feedback from players that helps improving your game. The hardest thing about open development is identifying what the actual problem is that your players are having an issue with.

The perfect example of all this is Crew Combat in Vagrus, which is an aspect of the game that players complained about fairly regularly. After adding the Flee/Appease option, it got slightly better but not as much as we had hoped. While digging for the reasons, we came to some interesting realizations. Whenever we heard someone getting irked about how they bled out against a much stronger enemy, we asked whether they tried appeasing them and they pretty much all said "No, 'Flee' implied losing big time".

Veles gladiators are mobile, evasive fighters who are best at supporting the sturdy Murmillos in the arena, although they can dish out punishment surprisingly suddenly if the tide turns in their favor. Although they are not the most stalwart front line fighters, their high Block and Evade stats make them actually hard to defeat. That, coupled with their good Armor and their amazing Initiative, gives them enough opportunities to control the flow of battle. Their Skills are not amazing, but dependable, with the kick being able to upset enemy lines and create opportunities for lethal attacks:

Companion Combat is an important facet of Vagrus even though players have quite a lot of control over how much they want to engage in it. At the same time, it is the most complex part of the game when it comes to code, so whatever changes we make requires more time relative to other parts.

After we added Mercenary Tasks, our focus has moved back to improving Companion Combat, partly because a lot of players opt to enter it from Crew Combat, so it is our goal to keep these fights interesting for as long as possible. The current set of changes are thus aimed at spicing things up a bit: more movement and thus further emphasis on positioning instead of spamming Skill 1 while standing still. The changes include:

Hey Folks,

it's been a long time coming but finally Mercenary Tasks are live in the latest build. These not only add a ton of variation and replayability but also go a long way in softening up story content and allow the running of a combat oriented comitatus for players. Fair warning, though: just like none of the other income sources work by themselves, Mercenary Tasks do not either. Combine them with Trade Tasks, passengers, and stories, with an emphasis on whichever you prefer over the others.

What is this 'Dissonance Mode', you ask? Essentially, it is a game mode you can select when starting a new game and that shifts the experience toward a more narrative route, easing up on the management and combat mechanics to transform Vagrus into more of a visual novel for those that find the challenge too taxing.

Hey Folks,

we have been a bit busy. Sorry about that! Now we are coming back big time with a patch that is a culmination of all the changes we have made on the main game over the course of the last nine months.

COVID did not help matters for us but overall, we are happy with our progress thus far. Read more about how 2020 went for us in our blog post here: 2020 Year-End Summary.

As we teased in our latest devlog post about Mercenary Tasks, we are extending Crew Combat with a new feature: you can deal with the enemy from now on following a victorious battle. This simply means that you can decide the fate of the defeated foe.

The option appears on the Crew Combat UI at the end of the fight opposite your heal options provided that your enemy surrendered (remember, only humanoids can), fled or retreated but you caught some of them while pursuing them.

The Sharduk are a savage, cruel, and opportunistic people who are notorious for raiding all the more civilized lands bordering their vast, barren territory, the Great Eastern Desert. When designing these tribal marauders, we went for a versatile damage-dealer enemy type that - when left unchecked - can work itself up to a huge threat.

In Part I. of our breakdown of Mercenary Tasks, we discussed what this new kind of gameplay element brings to Vagrus, how it works, and began describing the types implemented in the current build. In the second part, we focus on the other four types of Mercenary Tasks, in which passengers play an important role.

The Veles Gladiator enemy is an arena combatant in traditional Imperial gladiatorial arms in the Veles tradition, which was modeled after lightly-armored, mobile spear-wielding warriors from the ancient times of the Third Age. This mirrors how a peculiar kind of ancient Roman gladiator was also following a precursor military unit's doctrine - although in this real-world parallel, the arena fighter in question was quite different from our Veles. Still, our design was based on historical sources, albeit tweaked to fit the dark fantasy setting of the Riven Realms better. The enemy itself is a quick, evasive warrior that can work well in concert with heavier frontline fighters like the Murmillo.