Vagrus is 5 years old! Over the past week, we’ve been looking back at the places, faces, and sounds of the Riven Realms, while asking you to share your own favorites. Thank you for joining the conversation and sharing the memories that made Vagrus special for you. Now we have asked our team about their favorite memories from the past five years. We are also coming with gifts, and besides the Anniversary Edition and the in-game banners, we’re also celebrating with a GIVEAWAY, where 5+5 lucky winners can choose a Vagrus key for their preferred platform.

The time has come to sharpen your quills, dust off your scrolls, and return to your studies. Or, if you happen to live in the Riven Realms, perhaps also to sharpen your blades, inspect your beasts, and make sure your supplies will last until the next statio.

While there may not be a universally recognized academy capable of preparing someone for the life of a vagrus, surviving the wasteland requires a surprisingly broad education. A successful leader must be part explorer, merchant, commander, diplomat, warrior, and even historian. So, with the season of learning upon us, we thought we'd put together a rather unconventional curriculum.

In this article, we’re taking a closer look at the fixes and improvements introduced since the most recent major update, bringing together the key changes in one place. With the release of the Expedition storyline’s final chapter, we reached a major milestone for Vagrus, but our work on the game continues. Since its release, we’ve been steadily addressing community-reported issues, improving performance and stability, and polishing the experience through patches and hotfixes across all platforms. As of late, the focus was on campaign map movement and trade economics. You can jump to the list of changes at the end of the article.

Since our last article on the design and lore considerations behind some of our companion cosmetics tied to Supporter Packs, some of you have expressed an interest in reading more about such insights. Thus, we return, this time to discuss another companion’s alternative attire. And that companion is none other than Vorax, everyone’s favorite, annoying Undead cook.

After a road that was almost as long and arduous as that of Kharandar and his merry band of explorers, we have finally reached our destination: the closing chapter of the Expedition storyline is now available to all owners of At the Heart of Ruin! The free content is accompanied by a slew of performance improvements and tweaks, which we believe, improve the games significantly.

One year ago to the day we shared an article about the Conflagration Village, a place we hoped you would never have to visit in game: the dwelling the Cleansing Conflagration – a gang of pyromaniacal, murderous scavengers – call home. Though it may not look much at first glance, it is a place of terror, sacrifice, and depravity, where there are artifacts and effigies aplenty to remind you of what cruelty goes on there.

In the video game industry of the last decade or so, it has become increasingly common and appealing to talk about involving players in developer decision making, though what this means exactly can vary greatly between projects. In this article, we’ll discuss some elements related to eliciting, handling, and incorporating player feedback in Vagrus, so if you are interested in how you all had an effect on this game, dive right in!

If you have been following our updates, you might have noticed the mention of Exploration Encounters receiving vignettes. What are they? In this context, vignettes are small pieces of lineart (in an ink-on-paper style) that accompany bits of text to invoke a certain atmosphere. Vignette sets are assigned to Exploration Encounters based on their location, environment, and foes. For instance, the districts of Dum Garok have their own sets of these illustrations to invoke the place’s unique character. A whole other set of them appear in Exploration Encounters in the Ember Mines.

Since the recent release of our second Supporter Pack that provides cosmetics to all Companions, we often get asked if the packs include new apparel for the DLC Companions. The answer is a resounding “yes”: both Sedarias and Javek (who you get by owning the Old Acquaintances DLC), as well as Vorax (who everyone gets for free), have a cosmetic associated with each Supporter Pack!

We’re excited to finally reveal that At the Heart of Ruin will arrive on Nintendo Switch on December 22. It is the last platform to receive the expansion due to its longer approval process, but that extra time worked in everyone’s favor. Drawing on the wealth of feedback from players across all other platforms, we’ve been able to refine, tweak, and polish the experience even further.