And by Ahskul what a journey this has been so far. Speaking of which, there is a bit of a parallel here that could be drawn between caravans trudging across a barren, post-apocalyptic dark fantasy world and a tiny studio scrambling to deliver a huge open world game but we let's not go there on this fine day! :D

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

Tarkian Mercenaries are versatile fighters effective both in melee and from range, so they can be commonly seen in mercenary or outlaw rosters in different setups. They are quite tough with high Block values and good Initiative but light armor. All of this relegates them to a support role, which their Skills reinforce:

In the long line of UI reworks, our next stop is the crew UI where all the panes will now receive a lot of changes and upgrades. We planned to make these changes earlier but the design was in motion all the time - with new stats and mechanics being added - and so other things were completed and added before these in the end. And so now, so close to 1.0, we finally got around to implement the new crew UI.

Necromancy is the arcane art of manipulating life-force, allowing practitioners to communicate with the dead and animate Undead minions. In most of the Riven Realms, this school of magic is associated with the Priests of Ahskul - worshipers of the God of Death - and Necromancers. The majority of the latter either belong to the Church, too, or are otherwise licensed by the Empire. Thus in Vagrus, Necromancer enemies almost always strengthen Imperial rosters, although you can come across some rogue practitioners, too.

'Kindly Sister' is a euphemism that has become a colloquialism throughout the long and bloody centuries of the Fourth Age, denoting the common members of Nosferatis Sisterhood, a coven of furtive dark sorceresses and witches. The religious organization has secretive goals revolving around magical research but beyond that the Sisters support Imperial agenda all over the Realms.

Hey Folks,

it was amazing to see how our latest patch was received. So many great new reviews and quite a few previously negative ones flipped to positive. We appreciate you all immensely for your vote of confidence! Especially as apparently we left a huge bug in the game that made the late game easier, instead of the early game, as we originally intended. So that's getting fixed but what else comes in this new patch, you might ask? Let's dive in!

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".

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 everyone,

we thought we would share with you a glimpse into character art work that has been coming along for a while now. You may have noticed that common enemies in-game (like certain outlaws or Orc warriors) have received new variants when it comes to looks and well, this is how it began - concepts and outlines and ideas that ended up reworked until we picked the three or four we thought would be best. We believe that these small but significant variations give a lot of diversity to the roster of your more common foes and we hope you feel the same! Have at them!