Hey everyone,

As usual, we’ve been working on fixing issues and adding new features as well as improvements. The most significant additions include our new name generator, along with the custom journal and chart notes features. As for improvements, besides smaller optimizations across various parts of the game, we have made the Companion Combat AI significantly faster while the initial loading time has been shortened as well.

Have you ever arrived at the final step of a character creation screen and felt completely stumped as to what you are going to call yourself in the game? Do you wonder what kind of names would be appropriate for your vagrus based on their background? We’ve been there, and we get it.

That’s why our new random name generator has been a long time coming. Our priorities were two-fold: give options to those who would rather not worry about such matters, and also to allow players some insight into naming conventions in the Riven Realms. This feature will be available with our next build, and you can check out a preview video here.

The artbook of Vagrus is finally here (well, technically it is also on its way to everyone who ordered it) and holding it in our hands is indeed fantastic.

Admittedly, putting the book together was quite rough. Some of us thought that pulling it together from already existing artwork and writing texts around the art is going to take a couple of weeks. Turns out, compiling and writing something this big for physical publishing takes a handful of months, more like. All this in spite of doing a sort of a dry run previously with the smaller (A5) art booklet that went into the Collectors' Editions, albeit that had no texts accompanying the images. 

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.

Hey everyone,

we've had a final patch for this year in the works for a while now. This one also includes fixes and tweaks primarily before we move on to adding chunks of new stuff next year. Still, rounding these glitches out first was more important than rushing headlong into creating new stuff, so we hope you appreciate the work we put in this one.

'This place is death.'

- Thula, apprentice shaman, upon entering the Writhing Oasis for the first time

Even among an abundance of amazing artwork pieces that we are lucky to have in Vagrus, the one depicting the weird and disgustingly beautiful Writhing Oasis is an exceptional one. Anyone who has seen the art of Péter Kovács, our amazing location painter, will know that he is quite at home when it comes to working on dark, haunting, or corrupted landscapes, while biological abominations are especially dear to his heart. Entrusting him with the Writhing Oasis - a cursed grove around a tainted pond that grew together to create a single deadly organism - was a no-brainer, and the result speaks for itself. I love all the little details and the strong call-back to Warhammer artwork.

What is this 'Dissonance Mode', you ask? Essentially, it is a game mode you can select when starting a new game and that shifts the experience toward a more narrative route, easing up on the management and combat mechanics to transform Vagrus into more of a visual novel for those that find the challenge too taxing.

The latest content update (Patch 0.5.30 Codename: Brimstone and Bones) brings with it a spacious region to explore, the most prominent part of which are the Smolderbone Flats. Players who took the 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland' standalone story for a spin surely recognize this place, as it was an important location in that story. And yet you will find that much has changed since your last visit, with 10 years passing, allegiances shifting, and new threats rising.

The province of Tark was formerly a sovereign country conquered and assimilated into the Empire. It has always been a region of vast deserts and arid mountains. Its people are a hardy folk who were already adapted to a life in barren lands, which allowed them to easily adapt to the many new deserts on the continent after the Calamity. Thus, a lot of them are natural explorers and traders - but quite a lot of them are mercenaries.

'Ah, Larnak, the city of contradictions. It sits in the middle of the hottest, driest desert of the continent and yet you could not find a more damp and dark place. The reason is, of course, the presence of the vast underground lakes around which the settlement was built. The waters are sacred to the desert-dwelling Sadirar tribes and yet these days the Imperials use them as industrial ponds to grow their precious brightkelp. But that is not the strangest thing to see in Larnak, oh no. For that reason, take in its wonders but tread lightly, good master.'