We promised that we would bring Vagrus - The Riven Reams to you in Early Access on Steam and GOG.com when we felt the game was ready for it. Today we are proud and exhilarated to announce that the time has come, and now we know the exact date.

Vagrus - The Riven Realms enters Early Access on Steam and GOG.com simultaneously on July 22 2020.

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).

We have always planned a fairly elaborate system of healing mechanics but when creating 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland', we first focused on getting the main features ready and implemented a more streamlined, placeholder set of healing rules.

Out with the Old

The PotW system simply had you use a relatively valuable resource - medical supplies - to fully heal one Companion at a time during camp. This is not only too 'gamey' but also very obtuse and not what we intended for the game or the setting.

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.

Initially, we built Companion Combat without too much focus on the combat AI, knowing full well that it would be a massive task to code and having most of the combat features locked before we do so would make it overall a more efficient undertaking.

Keeping your comitatus well-supplied - or in some cases even keeping it from starving - has always been intended to be challenging in Vagrus, and it makes sense: you are the leader of a daring traveling company in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world where resources are often scarce and terrible encounters can turn a simple trip into a living nightmare.

Tor'Zag's Shelter is a vast, dark city in the belly of the Blackblood Mountains, carved out mostly by Imperials after obsidian became scarcer in the region and the fleeing armies of Warleader Tor'Zag, an Orc general, capitulated, leaving the tunnels beneath the mountain at the end of the Orc War. People who lost everything came here to share respite from the scorching sun of the Jagged Waste with traders who were looking to establish a way-station between Deven in the north and the Province in the south. Now, a couple of hundred years later, the Shelter is among the five greatest cities of the continent.

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.

Scorpions of all sizes, colors, and features plague the arid wastelands of the central continent of Xeryn, and most travelers are quite used to their presence and to the threat they may present. However, nobody is used to the presence of a Stinger Scorpion, this hulking yet frighteningly fast monster that hunts beasts and men during the cool night hours. Unfortunate souls may learn that while these solitary scorpions are inert during the day when they are buried under the sands, they are far from being safe around, as they can awaken with a sudden and fatal rage. There is a cunning viciousness about them that makes them far more than simply a large animal.

One of the last big additions to Vagrus' Open World Campaign that is now coming very close to being released is the character creation sequence at the start of the game. That is the feature that allows you to customize and set up your own vagrus by selecting a variety of options in subsequent steps. To give a quick idea of the many amazing options, here's a little rundown: