Fellow vagri,

2024 is coming to its inevitable end and so we are closing the books on this year’s adventures as well. For this occasion, we thought we’d look back on the past year and list some of the things that happened around Vagrus before signing off.

How It Started

We kicked off 2024 with a post about our plans for the year. In retrospect, wanting to release smaller bits of content at intervals while developing two very content-heavy DLCs with our tiny writing team was wishful thinking. Why it did not exactly pan out like that also involved a lot of other factors, like the many, many other aspects of the game we’ve worked hard to improve. Also, it seems that there’s no such thing as “smaller bits of content” when it comes to Vagrus. With millions of words worth of written content behind us, everything is interconnected and adding things can be very tricky. Also, players now expect meaty additions, so just any odd small story just won’t cut it. Still, this effort gave us Clandestine, so it was not in vain.

This week we’re gracing your web browsers and social media feeds with another teaser of our upcoming DLC. These characters belong to another gang that will attack you outright, for the Raptors are hardly a sane bunch. Most follow a descendent of their mysterious leader, who stumbled upon a rogue Wyvern and believed it to be the remains of a divine creature of the skies. In their quest for meaning and purpose, the followers of this founder – considered by many to be blessed – sought to imitate these creatures and themselves become ascendant and escape their earthbound existence.

For today’s post, we’re pushing it further with teasers, and we have one of this writer’s favorites in store: the Hollow Men. The Hollow Men are a gang of warriors, ex-legionnaires, and mercenary criminals, and they have a long history going back to Legio. IX, or “Mortis”, with their story beginning when they lost on the battlefield to Raokan in p.c. 1074.

This week’s update addresses several issues, removes the much criticized Chinese and Japanese machine translations and features some Quality of Life optimizations. Alongside this, we are continuing to work hard on our coming DLC, and will endeavor to share more about it as we progress.

Important Note: Considering the extent of the improvements, there is little to no chance that we broke nothing in the process. Assume that we did not want to make anyone's life harder. If you see something amiss, please flag it to us using the usual channels, like the inbuilt reporting tool (F1 button), forums, and our Discord server.

This week’s post covers the creation of our painted Campaign Map and the interactive Chart, starting from their humblest beginnings in our creative director’s tabletop role-playing game materials to their eventual manifestation in-game, covered by a node grid and expanded with interactive options.

Beginnings

To kick it off, let’s start by taking a look at how it all began for Vagrus.

As we move into full swing with teaser season, we come to you today with another reveal of a group of foes. These predators of the wasteland may not feed on the flesh of their victims like the bloodletting miscreants we showed you previously, but they are an efficient lot with an affinity for hunting and slaying beasts, many of which you will come across in our upcoming region DLC. For now, we can only show you one of their ilk, but rest assured: the Wasteland Stalkers – their name among themselves and others – are deadly and exacting in their modus operandi.

As we approach the end of 2024, it's time to give an update on our upcoming DLC. While our hope was to release it this year, it has become clear to us that it is an unrealistic target. We cannot announce its release date just yet, but we can be sure that it will take at least until next year to complete, and with good reason.

Today’s post takes a short trek down memory lane. Long, long ago, before any of the team at Lost Pilgrims sported grey hairs, we set about creating the UI for the game – an indubitably difficult ask for any game studio. Yet despite any trepidation, we forged forward and created one of the first renditions of Vagrus’s UI.

As most of you are aware, we use a video – meant as a kind of introduction to Vagrus – at the top of our store page. While this feature is exclusive to Steam, we have been meaning to replace it with a more up-to-date version for a while now. The old one with Kormakr was a fine video, but a lot has changed about the game since its creation, be they options available to a comitatus, the UI, and even content.

Today we have a delectable treat for you: new enemies from our coming DLC (which is swiftly becoming expansion-sized). These sick, depraved would-be tribesmen don’t exactly look like the types of folk you’d have around for dinner; however, they would love to have you! You can tell just from their grisly outfits and bloodied weapons – they are the “love you and eat you” types.