For a long while now I've been working on what we call loyalty questlines for the eight companions in the game. These are long, complex stories, often with branching endings, personal to each companion. In this project update, we wanted to give you a heads-up about certain aspects of these without spoiling any content.

How Loyalty Questlines Work

As we teased in our latest post, IGN has picked up our Official Release Date Trailer as an exclusive for the live show they hosted as part of Gamescom.

Watching our game trailer live on such a prestigious event was a blast, and now it is time to share it with all our players and followers!

'You have taken our herd-brother captive, two-legs. Now you either trade him back to us or face the wrath of my tribe. I would think twice before you answer. When irked, we are not unlike Kal-dai-Ruhk, Great Spirit of the Eternal Wastes, when he summons his calamitous gales to wipe away whole cities.'

- The Kal-rish traveling merchant Ku-ro-Rath bargaining for his kin's life with a soon-to-be destroyed outpost's magistrate

Necromancy is the arcane art of manipulating life-force, allowing practitioners to communicate with the dead and animate Undead minions. In most of the Riven Realms, this school of magic is associated with the Priests of Ahskul - worshipers of the God of Death - and Necromancers. The majority of the latter either belong to the Church, too, or are otherwise licensed by the Empire. Thus in Vagrus, Necromancer enemies almost always strengthen Imperial rosters, although you can come across some rogue practitioners, too.

Hey Folks,

with so many of you well over the hundred hours mark in the game, it was high time for us to add the opportunity to actually win it. The first winning condition we have implemented is the Renown victory. The other two, Wealth and Knowledge will become available in the 1.0 release later this year.

Oh, wow!

Check out the amazing ReformistTM playing our narrative-heavy strategy RPG #Vagrus in his Pure First Impressions video!

Great voice acting & professional commentary! Hope to watch him continue his journey!

'I heard that your son's birthday was late last moon. What did he get from you, my friend?'

'An army of his own. It is time for him to become a man and begin his own hegemony.'

- A conversation between the Trade Princes Tufael Rashad and Faisal Khamravi

Handjari are a caste in Tarkian society that has its power base in their great cities, wealth accumulated from trade, and ties to the priesthood of Inubis, the moon- and night-god of that desert realm. Professional soldiers organized into armies and warbands that were raised, trained, and employed by the Trade Princes are also called Handjari. These warriors are famous for being organized but also being able to take the initiative by themselves - specialist in skirmishing, light cavalry, and archery. Because of the close ties between the Empire and the Handjari Trade Princes, these soldiers can often be found attached to Imperial legions or garrisons.

By 'alternative Wyrms' we do not refer to a group of odd subculture, but a series of new enemies that are coming to ruin your day! These Sand Wyrm variants share the general look of the basic creature with slight modifications (and in some cases, differences in size). The reason for this diversification is that the long, high-end storyline involving them we are working on called for more and more varied enemies to make fights interesting and keep players on their toes.

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!

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".