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.
What is this 'Dissonance Mode', you ask? Essentially, it is a game mode you can select when starting a new game and that shifts the experience toward a more narrative route, easing up on the management and combat mechanics to transform Vagrus into more of a visual novel for those that find the challenge too taxing.
Commerce in the Riven Realms is held by the iron grip of Trading Houses through official monopolies or the control of locations that produce valuable goods. A simple merchant who deals in smaller quantities of wares can not begin to imagine what profit these factions work with, especially compared to what the actual manufacturing or harvesting costs. Yet there are considerable expenses involved in these operations, too. If the hardships of travel over the accursed wastelands were not enough by themselves, factions regularly wage bloody wars for resources, mostly in the shadows but often openly as well out on the frontier - and these are astonishingly expensive.
This, too, has come to pass: we entered Early Access with Vagrus on Steam and GOG.com over a week ago. It has been an emotional roller-coaster since, to say the least, and a very exciting experience altogether. In this post, we thought to give you our thoughts on the whole shebang and look into what comes next.
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.
Keeping your comitatus well-supplied - or in some cases even keeping it from starving - has always been intended to be challenging in Vagrus, and it makes sense: you are the leader of a daring traveling company in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world where resources are often scarce and terrible encounters can turn a simple trip into a living nightmare.
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:
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:
'Worry not, general. Their right flank won't be able to cross the gullies to press your lines. I and my apprentices will make sure that the enemy is flooded in corpus vile. Worry not about squandering resources, either. Those same soldiers in the gully will provide the reinforcements.'
There are many quarries in the middle regions of the Empire, which consists of territories relatively rich in useful resources: stone, marble, crystal, and obsidian. Three of the sites stand out and will be locations in the game:
The Acherus Quarry is the largest and oldest one in the whole region. It was established before the Orc Wars when the armies of the Empire were in dire need of obsidian for the war effort. Since then, Acherus has run dry and only provides little of the black, glassy material every year. It is overseen by House Darius.