Today’s post takes a short trek down memory lane. Long, long ago, before any of the team at Lost Pilgrims sported grey hairs, we set about creating the UI for the game – an indubitably difficult ask for any game studio. Yet despite any trepidation, we forged forward and created one of the first renditions of Vagrus’s UI.

Well, one lost pilgrim to be precise. On 7th September, I was fortunate to have participated in Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 in the UK, representing Lost Pilgrims there in exhibiting the City of Thieves graphic novel I’ve been working on with Chameleon Comix’s founder Gyula Szűcs and mega-talented graphic artist Krisztián Balla. We met and chatted with a lot of enthusiastic Fighting Fantasy fans, encountered living legends, listened to intriguing talks, and saw a ton of cool stuff, including the new gamebook The Dungeon on Blood Island by Sir Ian Livingstone himself.

Great news, everyone: today we at Lost Pilgrims are excited to announce that we are releasing a new Praetor Edition of the game on the 14th of March to coincide with Steam’s Spring Sale. Similar to the Centurion Edition, the Praetor Edition features the updated soundtrack, which we wrote about at length here, the Patronage Pack, and here’s the kicker: the Season Pass, too. The Season Pass is a package that includes our major expansion, Sunfire and Moonshadow, and two upcoming DLCs we plan to release: a Companion DLC and a Region DLC. Picking up this is a great way to support the ongoing development of Vagrus and nab some of our upcoming content at a slight discount to boot.

Team building has come a long way over the years. It used to involve long seminars where team members fought to stay awake, then, people were encouraged to build trust with each other by closing their eyes and falling backward. More recently, it has evolved into all manner of activities – office trivia, scavenger hunts, and of course, the increasingly popular and much-lauded escape room scenario. We at Lost Pilgrims, however, decided to adopt something of an old-school approach: drinks at one of Budapest’s esteemed dive bars – Barcraft II, found in the heart of the city near Nyugati railway station. On that note, things began hard and fast as you can see it in the video above.

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.

Tahrar Barak, or the "Grim Plains", is a volcanic highlands region surrounding the Molten Tongue. To the west, it reaches the Molten Kingdom of Dvendar Tharr, while to the east, west, and north it gives way to the less jagged  but still excruciatingly hot Searing Plains. Clefts in the slag and hard earthen crust run dozens of miles in all directions, creating a hard-to-navigate spiderweb of ravines that most travelers shun.

The Riven Realms, the setting of Vagrus, is a harsh, violent place. Up until now many players have felt that their ventures are the primary targets of this cruelty but with Mercenary Tasks, you will have the opportunity to return the favor. This facet of gameplay has been in the works since we began developing Vagrus, and it not only adds a ton of variation and replayability, but also goes a long way in softening up story content. Along with the branching story and trading, we consider mercenary work as one of the three pillars that hold up the game. Of course, we leave it to players which facet they want to concentrate on at times in each playthrough. Mercenary Tasks even allow for a completely combat-oriented gameplay, concentrating on forging a warband from your comitatus.

Hey Folks,

the time has come to revisit the region that featured in Pilgrims of the Wasteland, the tutorial/prelude of Vagrus. We opened up that very zone for the open-world campaign, albeit we are 10 years in the future compared to that prologue story, so expect some changes. There was a bit of a switcheroo involving several patches in the works and eventually the choice fell onto pushing this out in part to fix a game-breaking bug from the previous patch. For this reason, expect a smaller update in the near future that irons out a few things regarding the currently added content, although we might end up merging that with Mercenary Tasks, the next larger addition.

The most recent patch (Codename: Perky) brought with it a major Event UI overhaul but we did want to mention all the other Quality of Life improvements we managed to squeeze into the update, too. So, let's jump in and see what changed!

Comitatus UI

'If they catch you, they will kill you this time. Or worse, sell you to the slavers of Ash.'

- Ecra to fellow household slave Fabo, upon hearing his plan of escape

As many Imperial citizens would tell you, Ash is truly the ass-end of the Empire, even though there are more remote or less inhabited regions out there over terra supra. And yet most agree that this border town is worse off than most others, or at least that it is among the most unpleasant places you can visit. Its location is rather unfortunate: the Wayward Ash that surrounds it is a desert of lifeless grey silt, tormented by ashen storms all too often. On the other hand, Ash has become the greatest slave market town north of the Sepis Mountains, in part because its surroundings discourage escape, and also because of its remoteness as well as closeness to regions loosely controlled by the Empire; regions where the slavers that converge here can gather their unfortunate inventory. And even though there are many more large slave markets in the Empire, none of them is considered as cruel and soulless as this one.