Thanks to all the insights you have shared with us during Vagrus' Open Access period, the game has grown and improved massively in the last twelve months. We are proud to share that we kick off our Early Access journey with over fifty hours of available content that we look to expand further during our EA period, which is expected to last until the eventual full release sometime in 2021.
Lost Pilgrims had an AMA session over on discord where players asked us questions about the game and the studio alike. We had a great time talking to people and decided to compile the questions and answers into a single AMA article for posterity. We also added some very frequently asked questions to the beginning that players or those looking up information on the game might find informative.
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.
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.
We have started almost every single project update with 'A lot has happened since our last update' but now the 'lot' of the past seems kind of tiny compared to the 'LOT' of today.
The Pandemic
Corona hit hard and unexpected. What we looked at with blissful ignorance and naivety in the early days turned our lives upside down in mere weeks. Luckily, everyone from the team is safe and sound as of now, though being in the middle of the flu season we cannot be certain whether we've been exposed to the virus already or not. Either way, we stay home to keep everyone around us safer.
Hey everyone,
we wanted to provide an update on Vagrus as we come close to releasing the first Open World build. We've been talking about it for a long time now, we know, but we hope you will appreciate the ambition of this small team, along with all the effort and heart poured into the game when you get your hands on it.
There were a number of project milestones that we managed to unlock recently over at fig. Some of these are quite big and we are very excited to be able to work on them as they make the game better and deeper by what they bring to the table. Let's take a quick look at what is being developed currently:
We have thought long and hard about how to deal with manual saves in Vagrus, because there are a lot of complications stemming from certain game elements. Do we let players choose mid-combat? Do we let them save mid-Event? Is there a point to Event tests if manual saves scumming works? These are just a few of the many questions that have arisen.
One of the last big additions to Vagrus' Open World Campaign that is now coming very close to being released is the character creation sequence at the start of the game. That is the feature that allows you to customize and set up your own vagrus by selecting a variety of options in subsequent steps. To give a quick idea of the many amazing options, here's a little rundown:
The decision to add the small portraits of Companions to the steps of Events where they appear was an easy one: it added a lot of character to the texts and was an easy addition due to the portraits being derived from the already existing art assets (idle combat images of said Companions).
But then in true Lost Pilgrims fashion we felt that this could become so much more if ALL major NPCs received a similar portrait, or 'chat head' in Events and so we started producing a few to see what they looked like. Most of these were based on friends to honor two decades of roleplaying together and they turned out so cool that we decided to open these up for Backers and influencers as well. So if you want your mug in the game as one of the many NPCs, here's the chance. :)