'We don't do alms 'ere, mate.'

- The "honest merchant" Narbo, talking about Scrapheap

The junk pile town of Scrapheap is one of the first locales you can visit in 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland', the standalone narrative scenario of Vagrus, and its location artwork was one of the first to be painted. Bazsó Lossonczy, the artist behind this amazing piece, captured the brooding, oppressive, desolate atmosphere of this town of scavengers in the sweltering shadow of the constantly volcanic mountains.

Hey Folks,

it was amazing to see how our latest patch was received. So many great new reviews and quite a few previously negative ones flipped to positive. We appreciate you all immensely for your vote of confidence! Especially as apparently we left a huge bug in the game that made the late game easier, instead of the early game, as we originally intended. So that's getting fixed but what else comes in this new patch, you might ask? Let's dive in!

This week, we return with new Companion Combat targeting options that suit different play-styles. The changes include a number of options from the main menu that allow the configuration of the way you target your foes and friendlies during the fights in Vagrus:

Animated by pure hatred and unspeakable despair, the specters are mere echoes of people that lived long, long ago. Phasing in and out of reality, they are a looming danger to anything that is alive.

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'While looking into the etymology of these remarkable, albeit quite belligerent, creatures, I was surprised to learn that not only does the Draconic tongue attribute a negative connotation to the base 'Ifrean' but also does so for some ancient, undisclosed reason that most contemporary speakers of the language do not know about. What or who this 'Ifrean' was to cast such a long shadow is something we will probably never know unless the Dragonlords themselves reveal the knowledge to me. However, it seems that the bad reputation of these reptiles is acknowledged even in the naming of their kind.'

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:

Contempt personified, the enemy Necromancers are calm and calculating on the battlefield. Few comprehend, however, that most of their mental faculties are used to puppeteer their Undead servants.

The Lost Pilgrims Team

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'This place is death.'

- Thula, apprentice shaman, upon entering the Writhing Oasis for the first time

Even among an abundance of amazing artwork pieces that we are lucky to have in Vagrus, the one depicting the weird and disgustingly beautiful Writhing Oasis is an exceptional one. Anyone who has seen the art of Péter Kovács, our amazing location painter, will know that he is quite at home when it comes to working on dark, haunting, or corrupted landscapes, while biological abominations are especially dear to his heart. Entrusting him with the Writhing Oasis - a cursed grove around a tainted pond that grew together to create a single deadly organism - was a no-brainer, and the result speaks for itself. I love all the little details and the strong call-back to Warhammer artwork.