We talked about the Collector's Edition of Vagrus in a previous post and now the time has come to reveal the Emperor's Edition! With all the elements that come in the box having arrived and being prepared for shipping, we can show them off, starting with one of the stars of the show: the Finndurarth miniature.

This week’s devblog is all about the plethora of quests being added to Vagrus with the full launch on October 5th. The update will include a revamped UI, a new companion to recruit, and plenty of quests to find on your journies across the wastelands. Let’s take a look at what’s coming!

Revamped User Interface and Extended Campaign Map

There are a large number of settlements (cities, towns, villages, outposts, encampments) that you can visit in Vagrus, all of them unique locations even though they share some characteristics and features. For a long while now, we have planned a rework for the original UI - as we usually do with all UI elements, really.

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".

Hey Folks,

we have been a bit busy. Sorry about that! Now we are coming back big time with a patch that is a culmination of all the changes we have made on the main game over the course of the last nine months.

COVID did not help matters for us but overall, we are happy with our progress thus far. Read more about how 2020 went for us in our blog post here: 2020 Year-End Summary.

Hey everyone,

today, we are happy to share the changes we squeezed into this new update! Better yet, we have included two additional features that we managed to implement on top of our initial plans.

A quick recap of what we have added (skip ahead to see the bonus additions):

One of the most requested additions by our Early Access players has been Companion progression for a while now, and it's no surprise. Being a party-based RPG at its heart, Vagrus has a roster of unique Companions that are your most trusty lieutenants with their own backstories, skills, and personalities. It is only natural that they can become stronger with time and effort - and we have naturally designed this progression system in the beginning, but we held off on adding it because there were a lot of specifics to work out and the EA experience functioned fairly well without it.

Hey everyone,

and first of all let us thank all of you who shared their views regarding our planned priorities. We took that to heart and worked tirelessly to implement Companion Progression, which includes raising the Prowess cap from two to five, introducing Companion-specific traits that increase stats, and much more.

With the previous large update (Codename: Bandage), we have introduced some changes to Scouting on the campaign map and we thought that we should give you a more detailed change log of what exactly happened. These alterations all appear on the Scouting Result UI.

• A set of colored chevrons now indicate the success or failure state of your scouting in each direction instead of text saying how things went.
• For each successful scouting, a set of icons appear that indicate what to expect there with chances for each of these outcomes next to the icons. The scroll icon indicates an Event, the axe icon means a crew combat encounter, the compass shows an exploration Task destination (but we'll implement this feature in the future), and the crossed-out circle indicates that nothing happens.
• For each critical success, you will now get more precise percentages and more detailed information in the case of Events. The blue scroll indicates a priority Event (story-related or fixed local Event), while the golden scroll means a random Event (general or region-specific).
• Scouting now also provides information about the viability of hunting and foraging on the scouted nodes. Percentages represent the expected chances of such activities on the nodes. The less successful the scouting, the less  accurate the percentages are (with critical success being perfectly accurate).

As you can see, we have been working on making Scouting more desirable for players, as we feel that in its current form it is rather under-used. This is but a first step - we have many more ideas and will hopefully be able to implement them as we go along. Thank you for all the amazing feedback and improvement suggestions you all gave us!

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.