We've got a bit of an announcement on our hands, folks! As it happens, you are about to get a new, previously unannounced companion for your travels in the person of Nedir, the lovely (but cruel) lady you can see on this character art image. It's no easy task adding new companions to the game but it is certainly rewarding to create them - we hope it'll be equally fun to find Nedir and have her as a member of your team. So who is she and what does she do?

Hey Folks,

this patch is a beast in all sense. So many new features and changes have been added that if you ever considered starting a new play-through, this might be the perfect time for it. A shedload of tweaks has been applied to make the early game a little more forgiving (without making the late game easier), and we look forward to your feedback on the direction of these changes.

With the relatively recent arrival of Factions to Vagrus, you guys finally got your hands on a new way to specialize your comitatus. Up until now, this meant some obscure (albeit very welcome - I'm looking at you, road tax) boons and perks but now, with the addition of claimable rewards, Factions are going to become your best friends.

This week marks the addition of Leader Status and Perk Summary panes to the Leader UI. And although it might seem a superfluous gain, these will round out the status effect AI as well as the information provided about Perks, so it is indeed a very important milestone in our march towards completing the game.

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.

In this video, you can see a short display of the Trade Task system that has been added recently to the live builds of Vagrus. It starts with accepting Tasks on the new Faction UI in settlements, then goes on to show the Tasks and their related data in the Journal. Finally, the demonstration ends with traveling to the destination and turning in a Task for the promised rewards.

We have long been talking about improving the experience with factions in Vagrus. They are currently in the game and can be interacted with one way or the other but there is no UI to track your standing with them, nor is it possible to claim rewards for each unlocked reputation tier (although there are already a lot of implicit benefits and rewards for high reputation with almost every faction). With Tasks being implemented and so intimately intertwined with factions, we thought we'd give you a rundown of what to expect from the next large addition to the game.

Based on the ton of feedback concerning initial difficulty and learning curve, we have listened to you, our players, and implemented Trade Tasks to make the initial experience smoother in the open-world campaign. While there, and because they are deeply intertwined, we also decided to include the brand-new Factions UI and the faction tier system. We were happy to see that everyone who tried it in the preview build loved it and we are also satisfied with the result. To top it off, we also have a long list of adjustments, fixes, and tweaks (see patch notes at the end of this post).

While working on Trade Tasks (see more here), we took the chance to revisit passengers and unified their currently existing UI with the new Task UI in the Journal since passengers are in fact Tasks both by definition and application.

The brand new passenger page shows all the associated stats, including (finally) the workforce the passenger provides or needs. For those passengers that reward faction reputation on arrival, you will now see the pretty new faction icons, too. Lastly, the expected tip upon fast arrival is also indicated.

According to players currently testing the open-world, it is hard to make a living as an independent comitatus in the Empire. That was an intended design choice, because almost all the trade is controlled by factions on the continent, be they Trading Houses, religious organizations or criminals. With their Imperial trading monopoly licenses or their raw negotiating power, factions buy and sell at significantly better prices. With that in mind, we have planned to include a Task-system from the beginning and we are now getting closer and closer to implementing it.