Hey everyone,

We return to you with another round of updates, this time the focus being on performance improvements and save game files. Controllers received some love as well, fixing inconsistencies, updating UI, and squashing bugs that pertained to them specifically. We also reworked the Extras Menu due to requirements on certain other platforms, though admittedly, its functions are much better now, allowing you to listen to tracks of the OST there and check out other extra content you own.

This week’s article introduces not just another scalding locale where perilous heat is a given, but it is also held by one of Varnurud’s most determined scavenger gangs, the Hollow Men. Dubbed “the Bastion” by its current occupants, the ruin itself is ancient and of Dwarven origin. Following the Calamity and subsequent catastrophes on the mountain, half of its stone buildings were consumed by lava, yet at least for the time being, the rest of the scorched stone structures remain accessible. There is no telling today what the purpose of the ancient Dwarven settlement was but it had sturdy buildings and tall towers that commanded a large swathe of the area.

This week we’re excited to show off some recent revamps of our UI that we’ve been working on, namely a rework of the Extras menu point in the game’s main menu. The most important improvements here entail the ability to rewatch all Vagrus cinematics, including the main campaign’s intro, as well as the story trailers of Old Acquaintances and At the Heart of Ruin, our upcoming DLC.

After revealing our trailer for ‘At the Heart of Ruin’, our second region DLC, we’re now ready to share a little more about the new realm you will be able to explore. The first area we’ll look at here is Varnurud, which is one of the traversable parts of the great Mountains of Fire. As harsh and unforgiving as it is, most vagri will spend a great deal of their time here, as they navigate searing magma flows and the seemingly endless hordes of madmen who run roughshod over it.

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.