We promised that we would bring Vagrus - The Riven Reams to you in Early Access on Steam and GOG.com when we felt the game was ready for it. Today we are proud and exhilarated to announce that the time has come, and now we know the exact date.

Vagrus - The Riven Realms enters Early Access on Steam and GOG.com simultaneously on July 22 2020.

Based on the ton of feedback concerning initial difficulty and learning curve, we have listened to you, our players, and implemented Trade Tasks to make the initial experience smoother in the open-world campaign. While there, and because they are deeply intertwined, we also decided to include the brand-new Factions UI and the faction tier system. We were happy to see that everyone who tried it in the preview build loved it and we are also satisfied with the result. To top it off, we also have a long list of adjustments, fixes, and tweaks (see patch notes at the end of this post).

The time is upon us! As we have previously announced, a new version of Vagrus' free Demo is going to be published at the Steam Game Festival. You will probably be pleased to know that this incarnation of the Demo will have a small set of achievements you can complete! 

While working on Trade Tasks (see more here), we took the chance to revisit passengers and unified their currently existing UI with the new Task UI in the Journal since passengers are in fact Tasks both by definition and application.

The brand new passenger page shows all the associated stats, including (finally) the workforce the passenger provides or needs. For those passengers that reward faction reputation on arrival, you will now see the pretty new faction icons, too. Lastly, the expected tip upon fast arrival is also indicated.

The time is upon us! As we have previously announced, new versions of Vagrus' free Demo is going to be published to GOG.com in the next couple of days or so (perhaps it is already out as you are reading this). You will probably be pleased to know that this incarnation of the Demo will have a small set of achievements you can complete!

'You know the saying: Only and idiot looks directly at the sun. Now, just so you know, only the king of the land of the greatest idiots looks directly at the calerus in daylight.'

- Valkhor, local guide of Lumen, to a group of newcomers

Nestled at the border of the South Calerus, the town of Lumen sprung up many decades ago when the Empire decided to try and emulate the successful crystal harvesting operations of the Kalani people of the east. To date, the settlement is indeed the most successful such operation outside of Sargot Kala.

TL;DR: A new, extended Demo is coming to Steam and GOG so that those on the fence can take Vagrus for a spin and see what we've been cooking for a while now. This all comes at the tail end of over a month of hard work with the freshly released Open-World prototypes.

Now, let us see in more detail all the things that happened recently around the game.

A new combat idle animation we wanted to show off is right here! Slings are deadly and these guys know it.

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Our crowdfunding campaign is LIVE at Fig.co. Get instant access to the Alpha build now!

We have always planned a fairly elaborate system of healing mechanics but when creating 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland', we first focused on getting the main features ready and implemented a more streamlined, placeholder set of healing rules.

Out with the Old

The PotW system simply had you use a relatively valuable resource - medical supplies - to fully heal one Companion at a time during camp. This is not only too 'gamey' but also very obtuse and not what we intended for the game or the setting.

According to players currently testing the open-world, it is hard to make a living as an independent comitatus in the Empire. That was an intended design choice, because almost all the trade is controlled by factions on the continent, be they Trading Houses, religious organizations or criminals. With their Imperial trading monopoly licenses or their raw negotiating power, factions buy and sell at significantly better prices. With that in mind, we have planned to include a Task-system from the beginning and we are now getting closer and closer to implementing it.