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.

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.

Behold the captivating cityscape of exotic Kabur, the Jewel of the North. It is one of the most prominent locations in Sunfire and Moonshadow, the expansion of Vagrus that has gone live on Steam, GOG, and Epic. This alluring city lies in the northwestern part of the continent of Xeryn, nestled at the mouth of the valleys at the foot of the Brown Mountains. Kabur, in its colorful magnificence, is dotted with slender towers and shiny onion-shaped domes. Tarkians have laid its foundations even though it is located far away from Tark, and it has become a melting pot of cultures Imperials consider to be exotic. A Handjari Prince rules the metropolis in the name of the Emperor, trying to make a tidy profit in these difficult times of war and insurrection in the north.

Big news: we had a visitor!

Last week, we had the pleasure of meeting PeterJ, one of our long-time players. If you are present on our Discord server, you might know him – he’s quite active there whenever new builds are published for the game. Apart from family, friends – and of course participants at cons – he is the first living, breathing individual we've met in person who knows and plays Vagrus. Ever since our Fig campaign back in 2019, he has played around a whopping 1,000 hours! Very impressive if you ask us, and we are absolutely honored by his dedication. We are also grateful for his continued assistance with providing invaluable feedback on preview builds in particular.

Hello everyone,

This one is going to be an update on localization. A while back, we cited the game’s complexity, size, and it being a niche game that resulted in a relatively low sales volume as factors that made any kind of localization unlikely. Despite that, we have been encouraging players to still wishlist the game and let us know what languages they would like to see it translated into in a dedicated localization thread and promised to reassess the situation after a while to see what is desired and viable and what is not. A year has passed since, and it is time for us to do just that, which led to a good and bad news kind of situation. The bad news is that sales figures and declining wishlists in non-English-speaking regions made the prospect of official translations not viable.

Our post last week featured James, one of our recently hired writers. We hope you expect the unexpected because today’s post is about Zeli, a recently hired writer! Both of them have joined Lost Pilgrims at the same time, so their tasks have been essentially the same: working on the Glossary, reviewing existing material, delving into the rich lore of the Riven Realms, and of course spinning tales for the upcoming Seekers of Knowledge DLC – among other things.

As part of our ongoing efforts to expand the team, one of the tasks we set about doing was hiring a couple of new writers. James is one such writer; born in Zambia to British parents, he grew up in New Zealand where he took to games, fantasy books, and D&D at an early age – wasting far too much of his time running campaigns with his school and university mates.

Have you ever arrived at the final step of a character creation screen and felt completely stumped as to what you are going to call yourself in the game? Do you wonder what kind of names would be appropriate for your vagrus based on their background? We’ve been there, and we get it.

That’s why our new random name generator has been a long time coming. Our priorities were two-fold: give options to those who would rather not worry about such matters, and also to allow players some insight into naming conventions in the Riven Realms. This feature will be available with our next build, and you can check out a preview video here.

Hey everyone,

as we’ve mentioned before, we’ve been in the process of expanding our team - the unintended side-effect of which was our work slowing down a bit. Looking for new people, reviewing their test tasks, and interviewing them do take up an awful lot of time and energy. The effort, however, yielded several new hires who are on their probation period right now.

We are always excited to see Vagrus popping up here and there when curated lists of games are concerned. This time, RPG Codex's users took to vote for Game of the Year and we made top ten! We are honored that Vagrus came in 10th place from a large selection of great games, ending up in exquisite company.