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.

This week we’d like to broach a matter for the sake of transparency. Reality in the context of global gaming industry trends has set in, and the result is hard times for everyone. We are no exception and, since we have an insatiable desire for creating quality DLCs, this has left us in a rather precarious situation.

Hey everyone,

So Steam has updated its policies related to games sold on the platform, eliminating direct links from one page to another. This means that our main Vagrus page can no longer link to our Demo (Prologue) and vice versa. Before this was the case, we had our Demo (Prologue) set up as a different application, whereas now we must enable the Demo (Prologue) store page beneath the main game.

New or Updated Features

• You can now double-click to move on the campaign map.
• Revamped key bindings: defaults have been changed to be more intuitive and grouped by topics or UI categories, and new hotkeys have been added.
• The Leadership Perk “Command” has been reworked: it now unlocks all advanced Crew Combat actions passively and when Resourcefulness is spent, it raises Combat Strength and Defense by 15% as well as turns Critical Failure rolls to Failure.
• The effects of multiple “Terrifying” Perks no longer stack. Stacking caused Skills that target multiple positions with characters with the Perk to be close to useless.
• You can now butcher Beasts and Mounts directly at your Outpost instead of having to move them to the comitatus.
• You no longer lose Mounts when Fighters leave you during Events (ie. Outriders do not take their Mounts) for narrative reasons.

After last week’s feedback round-up, the bulk of the team has been focusing on delivering the quality of life (QoL) changes we spoke of roughly two weeks ago, which by now include a great deal of things. Among the most important of these is the ability to move on the campaign map by double-clicking and the extra information players will be able to view on their Companions’ character panes about Skills and summoned creatures.

This week we’re taking a look at an illustrative cross-section of recent feedback we’ve received about the game and highlighting some of the changes that are coming as a result. We pride ourselves on iterating Vagrus and improving the game at every chance we get, even if we can’t always fulfill the more extreme requests of our players and reviewers.

As we’ve alluded to in recent posts, the recent release of Old Acquaintances has set the creative part of the team into action on our next DLC, but what have our programmers, UI, and quality assurance people been up to?

Why, improving the game, of course. This is why we’re happy to present some impactful quality of life (QoL) changes that will help make your Vagrus experience all the smoother.

To celebrate the release of Old Acquaintances in a somewhat different fashion than usual, the team gathered for a long-awaited session of boardgaming last week. And this, dear vagri, was no game of Monopoly – oh no! Instead, a struggle awaited us in the form of the game Eldritch Horror. And so everyone gathered, and we began learning the rules. This was the kind of team building we could all get behind. Sure enough, soon the pieces were in their places and it was time to cooperate; after all, we had an apocalypse of the Ancient Ones looking down the barrel at us!

Hey everyone,

This new patch brings with it one really important and big change and some other fixes we applied since our last update. The large change in question is the altering of how victory works in a campaign. Previously, you were able to win the game, then choose to continue playing. This caused a lot of consistency issues with Ending slides, as you were unable to check them later on and so even if something changed (like a major questline that has its own slide was completed) after the victory, players would miss them. And so from now on, once you retire as part of a victory, you will not be able to continue playing afterward. You can complete the victory condition and then play indefinitely until the time comes you decide to conclude the playthrough and then retire to experience the Endings. Of course, you can also save the game, retire to check the slides, and then load to play more.

Having deployed Old Acquaintances’ first hotfix, the team at Lost Pilgrims Studio has moved on to our next project: the regional DLC. The beginning of this process is iterative and requires intense coordination; it begins with the design phase, planning locations, and an overarching narrative. We need to understand what unique gameplay elements the DLC will bring to the table, which narrative beats we want to focus on, and finally, which characters or NPCs will drive that narrative.