Commerce in the Riven Realms is held by the iron grip of Trading Houses through official monopolies or the control of locations that produce valuable goods. A simple merchant who deals in smaller quantities of wares can not begin to imagine what profit these factions work with, especially compared to what the actual manufacturing or harvesting costs. Yet there are considerable expenses involved in these operations, too. If the hardships of travel over the accursed wastelands were not enough by themselves, factions regularly wage bloody wars for resources, mostly in the shadows but often openly as well out on the frontier - and these are astonishingly expensive.

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.

With the relatively recent arrival of Factions to Vagrus, you guys finally got your hands on a new way to specialize your comitatus. Up until now, this meant some obscure (albeit very welcome - I'm looking at you, road tax) boons and perks but now, with the addition of claimable rewards, Factions are going to become your best friends.

This, too, has come to pass: we entered Early Access with Vagrus on Steam and GOG.com over a week ago. It has been an emotional roller-coaster since, to say the least, and a very exciting experience altogether. In this post, we thought to give you our thoughts on the whole shebang and look into what comes next.

We have long been talking about improving the experience with factions in Vagrus. They are currently in the game and can be interacted with one way or the other but there is no UI to track your standing with them, nor is it possible to claim rewards for each unlocked reputation tier (although there are already a lot of implicit benefits and rewards for high reputation with almost every faction). With Tasks being implemented and so intimately intertwined with factions, we thought we'd give you a rundown of what to expect from the next large addition to the game.

Based on the ton of feedback concerning initial difficulty and learning curve, we have listened to you, our players, and implemented Trade Tasks to make the initial experience smoother in the open-world campaign. While there, and because they are deeply intertwined, we also decided to include the brand-new Factions UI and the faction tier system. We were happy to see that everyone who tried it in the preview build loved it and we are also satisfied with the result. To top it off, we also have a long list of adjustments, fixes, and tweaks (see patch notes at the end of this post).

According to players currently testing the open-world, it is hard to make a living as an independent comitatus in the Empire. That was an intended design choice, because almost all the trade is controlled by factions on the continent, be they Trading Houses, religious organizations or criminals. With their Imperial trading monopoly licenses or their raw negotiating power, factions buy and sell at significantly better prices. With that in mind, we have planned to include a Task-system from the beginning and we are now getting closer and closer to implementing it.

We have started almost every single project update with 'A lot has happened since our last update' but now the 'lot' of the past seems kind of tiny compared to the 'LOT' of today.

The Pandemic

Corona hit hard and unexpected. What we looked at with blissful ignorance and naivety in the early days turned our lives upside down in mere weeks.  Luckily, everyone from the team is safe and sound as of now, though being in the middle of the flu season we cannot be certain whether we've been exposed to the virus already or not. Either way, we  stay home to keep everyone around us safer.

• MS 6: Crew Combat Alpha
• MS 14: Unrest and Obedience Mechanics (Partial delivery): Liberate or Discipline Slaves to gain Obedience. Unrest will be added in a later update.
• Butcher beasts or mounts for supplies
• Warning triggers if an action would result in cargo loss

• MS 10: Chart Exploration
• MS 11: Companion Select during Events
• MS 13: Hidden Stash and Smuggling Contraband

• New sound effects for a number of creatures
• Camping without guards decreases Obedience
• Radial menu icons automatically pop up on the campaign map
• Node sizes increased for Point of Interests to better indicate them
• Goods tooltips now show more trade information
• Merged a few perks to make them more impactful

• Passenger destinations are now generated correctly in new games (thanks for catching and reporting this!)! Old saves remain bugged.
• New Day save now works after combat encounters in the Fighting Pit event
• Cargo slot changes are now applied immediately
• Fixed tutorial pins for closing the Journal and the Codex
• Fixed a bug causing Companion conversation portraits to be empty
• Healing companions no longer triggers the incorrect Event result text
• Fixed the Journal entry order for The Black Knight chapter V, Eliminating the Abolitionist Camps
• Clicking on the Journal or Codex during "Hold space..." tutorial/narration is up now does not open them

• More Sound Effects
• Vagrus Creation for the Main Campaign
• Companion Combat tweaks and additions
• Factions UI
• Animations for all characters

• Open World Prototype

As the new Trading system was shaping up for Milestone 5 alongside the emergence in our storylines of some of the less lawful factions (such as the Loader's Guild), we figured we would need a sub-system for smuggling goods as it makes sense that these organizations would be willing to hire a vagrus to do just that.