Ever since we came up with the idea of Vagrus, a game where you manage a comitatus, we knew we needed to develop an elaborate, dynamic trade system that would serve as one of the major features of the game and would also aid in fleshing out a living world.

Basic Premises 

While trading was always to be one of the main sources of income for the player, we also wanted to avoid creating a pure trading simulator game. It's not that those are not fun for the right people - stories about Gabor dominating the Auction House on our server in World of Warcraft for a period of time still surface in conversations among friends - but because our strengths lie elsewhere. Our unique setting, The Riven Realms, and telling stories with memorable characters was the first and foremost motivation to create Vagrus, so it was also much more likely to excel in that rather than in a simulation - which we knew relatively little of.

You will most likely come across the artwork you can see here when wandering into sewers below Imperial cities in Vagrus' main campaign. This might not seem a very good idea since such places are typically neglected and extremely filthy. They are also most likely infested by mutated beasts or stray undead. Yet a vagrus needs to plunge into such vile places more often than not.

As we are getting closer and closer to releasing the first playable build of the main campaign of Vagrus, it is perhaps a good time to talk a bit about the differences between the open world campaign and 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland'. The focus of this is going to be narrative design and stories but there are going to be implications on gameplay as well.

Besides working on implementing new features into our Open Access build, we made great progress with prepping for the debut of the first Open-world region - Tor'Zag's Shelter and its surroundings -  which basically is about the first half of the main game. We are actually contemplating to bring its release ahead of polishing all the features.

'You can say a lot of nastiness about the Imperials but one thing is for sure: they know how to build stuff. Take Fort Larius, for instance. They constructed it over seven hundred years ago. It survived the war against the Dragons and the Orcish invasion! The fools abandoned it and the ages gnawed at its walls and turrets incessantly until it became a hollow ruin. And yet, the towers and walls still stand, only awaiting someone to occupy the place and make use of it.'

We attended yet another game show, this time in Jönköping, Sweden, where DreamHack was born more than ten years ago. While DreamHack Summer is somewhat smaller than its big brother, DH Winter, it still blew our minds, with thousands of players moving in for three days... and by moving in we literally mean taking their PCs, chairs, and air-mattresses with them.

Skornar may keep reminding you that he is getting old but he is still one of the best fighters you can have among your Companions. Sturdy and crafty, he is very tanky, able to mitigate and sustain a lot of damage before going down. Though he may not deal tons of damage, his support skills make him extremely useful on the battlefield.

We went to PlayIT game festival last Saturday and we are glad to report that we had a great time there! It being Hungary's largest gameshow, we knew what we had signed up for and though by the end of the day we had sore feet, we also had a lot of positive energy from the support and curiosity of the show audience.

April  and May were tough on us with a super busy schedule but it was well worth it. Let' see why in some detail!

We attended Reboot Develop Blue in Dubrovnik as you may know and talked to a number of press representatives. A great example of that is the video above, which was recorded as part of a longer discussion that you can read here: https://www.shacknews.com/article/111819/vagrus-the-riven-realms-interview-born-from-a-tabletop-world

Hey Vagrus Fans,

while our Fig crowdfunding campaign is in full effect, we've been busy working on one of the gameplay updates: the new deployment features for Companion Combat.

Above you can see the old and the new Deployment UI and probably can easily spot the differences.