We’re excited to announce that At the Heart of Ruin, the second expansion of Vagrus – The Riven Realms, is now available on Nintendo Switch!

Varnurud, the stage that most of At the Heart of Ruin plays out on, is a varied realm of ruin, past glory, and faded splendor. The kingdom of Dvendarr Tharr, now mostly referred to as the Mountains of Fire, has a great deal of Dwarven infrastructure; ruins of stone are most plentiful. Although most of it has crumbled to rubble or dust in the wake of the Calamity, there are those jutting edifices that yet endure – old watchtowers, cracked roads, small forts, great staircases, and massive walls only a few among them. One does not have to look far and wide.

Today we’re taking you underground, into a realm obscured to most inhabitants of Xeryn. Beneath the broken sprawl of the Mountains of Fire lies a labyrinthine network of cyclopean tunnels: the roads of the ancient Dwarven kingdom of Dvendar Tharr. During Xeryn’s Third Age, before the Calamity wreaked untold havoc, these passages were used for trade, marching armies, and all manner of other activities. In fact, the majority of Dwarves during the period favored them over paths above ground. Small fortresses stood at important crossroads or straddled major causeways, and by now, many of them have crumbled to rubble.

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.

Even with our At the Heart of Ruin expansion already out, there is still a lot of artwork from it we would like to share with you. There is a bit of lore, too – lore that many of our player base have come to relish. Thus, we come to you today with the first in a chain of fine pieces our brushmasters put together: the Ancients’ Causeway.

Hey everyone,

This update not only brings another round of fixes and tweaks, but also adds a lengthy quest called “The Gangs of Varnurud”, changes a location in the expansion, and introduces Fog of War to certain parts of At the Heart of Ruin.

Shoutout to Trese Brothers on Cyber Knights: Flashpoint

Before getting into 1.260, we’d look to mention our good friends at Trese Brothers, who’ve just hit a big milestone for their tactical RPG, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, released earlier this year, while also running a sale. This deep tactical RPG puts you in charge of cyberpunk mercenaries, sending squads on tense heights amidst the megacorps and crime syndicates of the 23rd century. Like Vagrus, it’s a challenging, complex game. It’s not an open world experience or narrative-focused, instead mixing hand-crafted content with clever procedurally generated systems and a huge variety of character build options, for extreme replayability. If you like games like XCOM or Shadowrun, this one’s worth a look!

‘I say: Dwarves! I’ve seen ‘em pass through ‘ere. Folks say they went up the way of the old fort inside the mountain, they did. Whass their business – nobody knows. Maybe in cahoots wif the Elves there? Aye, armor black as night, eyes aglow with malice, I tell ya. Murka said so, ‘fore he died. Poisoned, the poor wretch. Told ‘im not to go to Dum bloody Garok, but he was starvin’. Or uh… might’ve been the spiders, you see. Maybe them Dwarves are in cahoots wif ‘em? Anyhoo, are ya eatin’ that?’

We are absolutely stoked to announce that our expansion, At the Heart of Ruin, is finally OUT! As usual for us, the project’s scope was vast, and after putting as much as we could into it, be they stories, features, locations, factions, artwork, enemies, or rewards, we’re proud of what we’ve achieved and excited to see what you make of it!

Every once in a while in the debilitatingly hot locale that is Varnurud, the ground rumbles. Indeed, earthquakes are frequent to the point of becoming one of the most common sources of peril. But when the ground opens up, revealing an ancient Dwarven town, it’s really something special.

Gorge Town, the “creative” name the local scavengers have come to call it, represents one such special occasion, and today we’re eager to show it to you. It’s just one more place that you might find yourself delving into in our At the Heart of Ruin expansion via the new Exploration Encounters, and if you’re lucky, you can perhaps recover veritable treasures.

Another day, another step closer to At the Heart of Ruin’s release date, October 22. And of course, another teaser. Today’s fare showcases largely avoided territory deep beneath the ruined Dwarven city of Dum Garok. It is a territory where few tread and from which even fewer return.