In the leadup to the release of At the Heart of Ruin on the 22nd of October (accompanied by the Ruinous Supporter Pack), we’ve already talked about new mechanics and features, like the updated throw-out or Exploration Encounters, but we thought it’s also time to touch upon the narrative and graphic art side of things.

This week we’re keen to discuss one of the newest and most exciting features we’re adding to the upcoming expansion of Vagrus: Exploration Encounters.

How They Came To Be

While it would not be entirely truthful to say that the game’s development has always followed a carefully curated path, it is not exaggeration to mention that our imaginations have run boundless thanks to that, leading to a myriad of ideas and, occasionally, feature creep. We have, however, always felt that more Events to cover simpler matters – mining salt, random encounters, or procuring scrap, for example – would have a place in the game, even if their creation may not be the best use of our writers’ time.

As the day’s heat settles over the deserts and arid wastelands of Xeryn, travel becomes even more treacherous. In Vagrus, several game systems represent or contextualize this – Vigor loss, Movement Point costs (that include difficulty from “climate”), and even Events that deal with the hardships or challenges presented by scorching weather. In our upcoming At the Heart of Ruin expansion, the heat will be turned up even more. The Mountains of Fire might not be beaten by the cruel sun all day due to the blanket of ash obscuring the skies, but volcanic activities take care of raising temperatures to even greater extremes.

Hey everyone,

While work on the upcoming DLC (or rather, expansion: At the Heart of Ruin) is ongoing, the team at Lost Pilgrims is also busy fixing bugs and adding performance improvements. This patch includes several of both, with some added love to controller support. We’ve also thoroughly optimized our asset handling, freeing up a whopping 1.5 Gigabytes of hard drive space.

Hey everyone,

We return to you with another round of updates, this time the focus being on performance improvements and save game files. Controllers received some love as well, fixing inconsistencies, updating UI, and squashing bugs that pertained to them specifically. We also reworked the Extras Menu due to requirements on certain other platforms, though admittedly, its functions are much better now, allowing you to listen to tracks of the OST there and check out other extra content you own.

This Saturday marks the occasion of the 16th Comics Festival of Szeged and this time, Lost Pilgrims will be there, too, with a presentation titled "A Caravan Journey from Worldbuilding to Interactive 2D". Join us there if you can - there will be tons of intriguing presentations and goodies from the fields of graphic novels and other related media!

Hey everyone,

This week’s update addresses several issues that we’ve been aiming to fix since our last patch. It also adds several new small Quality of Life features that further streamline UI and UX elements across the board. Alongside this, we are continuing to work hard on our coming DLC, and will endeavor to share more about it as we move closer to the end of the development cycle.

New or Updated Features

• You can now double-click to move on the campaign map.
• Revamped key bindings: defaults have been changed to be more intuitive and grouped by topics or UI categories, and new hotkeys have been added.
• The Leadership Perk “Command” has been reworked: it now unlocks all advanced Crew Combat actions passively and when Resourcefulness is spent, it raises Combat Strength and Defense by 15% as well as turns Critical Failure rolls to Failure.
• The effects of multiple “Terrifying” Perks no longer stack. Stacking caused Skills that target multiple positions with characters with the Perk to be close to useless.
• You can now butcher Beasts and Mounts directly at your Outpost instead of having to move them to the comitatus.
• You no longer lose Mounts when Fighters leave you during Events (ie. Outriders do not take their Mounts) for narrative reasons.

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.

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.