Vagrus - The Riven Realms News

[h3]Hey Everyone,[/h3]

Our aim at Lost Pilgrims is not just to create memorable gaming experiences, but also to introduce you to people who contribute to building our cozy community. Therefore, we have interviewed Ben the Human, who has been streaming Vagrus for a while now and recently arrived at a major milestone by concluding a run with over 250 episodes. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask him about his gaming journey and his experience with Vagrus:

[h3]Lost Pilgrims: When did you start playing video games?[/h3]

Ben the Human: I've been playing video games since I can remember. As a kid, my family had a Super Nintendo, and playing Mario was one of my earliest gaming memories and I never stopped gaming!

[h3]LP: What games do you feel were formative for you as a gamer?[/h3]

BtH: The games I played the most when I was little were classics like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64 and Age of Empires II on PC. As I got older, I started getting into more challenging games like Dark Souls and XCOM. I even have a soft spot for racing games because Need for Speed Underground was the coolest when I was younger.

[h3]LP: What is it that you particularly like about streaming gameplay? What are the biggest challenges in streaming for you?[/h3]

BtH: I started streaming and recording gameplay as a hobby in late 2022/early 2023. People seemed to enjoy it, so I kept it up. It's been a big learning experience – everything from video and audio production to figuring out what kinds of games people like to watch. But I'm still learning and improving all the time!

[h3]LP: How did you find Vagrus and what caught your interest?[/h3]

BtH: Vagrus was a game I had my eye on for a while before playing it. I had read some great things about this in-depth trading RPG, so when I decided to start recording for YouTube, I thought, "Why not give it a try?" Now I have over 250 episodes recorded!



[h3]LP: What aspects of Vagrus do you like in particular?[/h3]

BtH: I was instantly hooked by the incredible world-building in Vagrus. It's this living, breathing world that you get immersed in, where your actions can have major consequences – or go completely unnoticed. The narrative is brilliantly done, and the challenging yet rewarding trading simulation gameplay is a lot of fun to figure out.

[h3]LP: What are your most memorable stories, quests, or questlines in the game?
[/h3]
BtH: My favorite quest overall has to be the one with the Sand Wyrms. I spent so long fighting those horrible creatures that I think I developed some trauma! But the quest builds to this epic, climactic finale that it's definitely earned its place as one of my favorites in the game.



[h3]LP: In a Companion Combat, which Companions do you tend to use? What is your “best team”?
[/h3]
BtH: I find myself really attached to certain characters in combat. Right now, my frontline is Eylani, Gor'Goro, and Skornar, with Nedir, Finndurarth, and Javek in the back. Before Javek, I was torn between Crifta and Garrick for the other backline spot.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]LP: Full mounted or all-in hunting & foraging?
[/h3]
BtH: I think my approach is a bit of a middle ground - I'm too attached to my beasts of burden to go fully mounted, but I also don't max out my scouts or foraging parties. I just kind of pick up supplies as I go and it seems to work out.

[h3]LP: What was your biggest challenge so far that you had to face in the game?
[/h3]
BtH: Nedir's questline was one of the toughest for me to complete. It might have been because it was relatively early in my game and my fighters weren't fully leveled yet, but that was the combat I had to restart the most.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]LP: Do you remember any moment that drew an outstanding or weird reaction from you and your audience?[/h3]

BtH: One of the coolest experiences was the first time I used the portals to the Bronze Desert. Popping out on the other side of the world in that vast desert was just an incredible feeling - a really unique moment in Vagrus.



Ben is taking a little break from streaming Vagrus for now, but cannot wait to get back into it and try our new DLC coming later this year. Don't forget to follow Ben on Twitch or Youtube for more amazing content!

With that, we’ll sign off for now. As for you, as always, stay awesome and conquer the wasteland!

– The Lost Pilgrims Team

[h3]Fellow vagri,[/h3]

With 2024 behind us, we're closing the book on those adventures and looking forward to what 2025 brings. For this occasion, we thought we’d look back on the past year and list some of the things that happened around Vagrus.

[h3]How It Started[/h3]
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.

[h3]Clandestine Part 1[/h3]
Of course, we haven’t forgotten about Clandestine, which started out as a multi-part, free questline that we wanted to add part by part. Unfortunately, we fell in love with it, so it became intricate and too big in scope. We have every intention to keep adding the other parts but with the shift of the industry towards the middle of the year, we realized that we can’t spare the capacity for more free stuff for a while and instead have to concentrate on things that generate revenue. It’s not an ideal position but watching so many companies and studios close down around us made us face harsh realities. We’re super satisfied with Part 1, though – it has a unique atmosphere, artistic identity, and creepy storyline that we’d love to revisit one day.


[h3]Soundtrack[/h3]
In the first quarter of 2024, after finally squashing most issues with Sunfire and Moonshadow, we also got around to adding its awesome soundtrack to the OST. With that, we also immersed ourselves again in the great, forlorn ambiance of Vagrus’s music.

[h3]A Team of Pilgrims[/h3]
This year will no doubt go down in gaming history as a painful one for many and we’ve had our fair share of hardships. Despite these, we managed to keep the team mostly intact. Bence and Zoli, both consummate professionals in their own fields (graphic design and quality assurance/coding), have been integral parts of our team since last year even though we officially welcomed them early this year. Viktor also returned to Lost Pilgrims after spending some time honing his coding skills, which allowed us to expand into new territories. We’re happy to report that the Pilgrims also like spending time together outside work, be it fighting Great Old Ones on the tabletop or gathering for a few drinks and chatting.


[h3]Praetor Edition[/h3]
Another big milestone was the introduction of the game’s Praetor Edition, our largest collected offering to date. It includes everything we offer for Vagrus, including the OST, the Patronage Pack, and the Season Pass, too, at what we believe is a great price.

[h3]Turn-based Thursday[/h3]
It has become somewhat of a tradition now for us to get involved in the organization of this festival on Steam. Once again, we teamed up with Terra Randoma, Trese Brothers (Star Traders: Frontiers & Cyber Knights: Flashpoint), Unleash the Giraffe (Seer’s Gambit & Obsidian Prince), and Curious Dynamics (Folk Emerging). We can’t recommend these games enough.


[h3]QoL Quest[/h3]
One of the important marks throughout 2024 for the team was our almost single-minded dedication to improving the game’s UI, mechanics, tutorials, and controls by adding quality-of-life (QoL) features or expanding already existing ones. There were several rounds of updates revolving around these, as well as improvements for the outpost (a seemingly well-received part of gameplay) and a complete rework of keyboard controls.

[h3]Old Acquaintances[/h3]
June brought with it (apart from crippling heat) Vagrus’s second DLC that is part of the Season Pass, Old Acquaintances. It reintroduced two Companions from ‘Pilgrims of the Wasteland’ and expanded their stories in the main campaign. On top of that, it added four hirelings you could make use of in your playthroughs. It took longer to develop than we had anticipated but it delivered a depth in storytelling and characterization that we’re really proud of. The DLC’s reception was great, too, and we were really excited to see players enjoying the intricately built Companion storylines as they returned to old playthroughs or began new ones.


[h3]Store Page and Demo changes[/h3]
While patching was being done on Old Acquaintances, we already started working on the next big release but we also had to return to some old stuff and rework it. Our demo and ‘Pilgrims of the Wasteland’ deserved a long-awaited new coat of paint, so we went in and made a lot of improvements. Then Steam changed things around and we had to separate our store page for the demo, just in time for us to capitalize on the work we had put into it.

[h3]At the Heart of Ruin Announcement[/h3]
And so, here we are, at the announcement of the next big DLC – the last one of the Season Pass: At the Heart of Ruin. Revealed just recently, it promises to be a unique excursion, with a densely packed, multi-layered region full of overarching stories and a lot of things to do or fight. Check out the reveal trailer we’ve lovingly created here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]What to expect in 2025[/h3]
We are fully committed to releasing At the Heart of Ruin as soon as it is done, which is in the first half of the upcoming year. It is no secret that it’s taking longer to finish but that’s because as usual, we keep adding awesome things to it. We hope you’ll appreciate all the love and cool stuff that go into producing it. It’s difficult to say further than that for now – especially times being what they are – but rest assured that we have plans and will reveal them in the upcoming months. There are some things we’d love to discuss already but we can’t just yet.

That concludes 2024's year review, and boy, what a year it was! We've had the chance to recharge our batteries and get ready to work harder than ever on a cool DLC (or hot, you might say!) for this year.

We hope you had the chance to wind down (or party like Tartaris if that's your preference) at the end of the year and have much planned for the year ahead. Stay safe and conquer the wasteland!

- The Lost Pilgrims Team

Vagri! We’re sure many of you’ve been waiting for more information about our next DLC (shaping up to be expansion-sized once again) and the time has come to deliver just that – in the form of a special story trailer we’re excited to share:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So, there you have it. Some exposition delivered by award-winning voice actor Phil Rowe, along with a title reveal and the year of release. Although the latter is fairly vague, we can already say that we are aiming for the first half of 2025, as we’ve been working on it very diligently for months now. There’s still a lot to go, but we’re making good progress and we’re very satisfied with how it’s shaping up. Can you guess where it’ll be set? There are quite a few indicators, we think.

We can’t wait to share more, of course, including a launch trailer with some gameplay closer to release, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can wishlist the DLC on Steam.



[h2]Holiday Deals[/h2]

In other news, we’ve teamed up with fellow developer Balcony Softworks to promote each other’s work and created a limited time bundle that includes Balrum and Vagrus, called Resourceful Realms. Plenty of story, exploration, and resource management strategy for everyone who loves to delve into such challenges.



Lastly, you might be keenly aware that the Steam Winter Sale is on, with discounts to many great games, including Vagrus.



With a super busy but satisfying year behind us and a very exciting one ahead of us, we’re taking a break soon, if only for a bit. See you after that, but until then have some fun, stay vigilant, and conquer the wasteland!

– The Lost Pilgrims Team

[h3]Hey everyone,[/h3]

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.

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[h2]Patch 1.180[/h2]

[h3]General Improvements :gift:[/h3]

• After considering the overwhelmingly negative player feedback, we removed Chinese and Japanese machine translations because we felt that their quality was not up to standard.
  
• Slightly increased/optimized savegame loading speed.
  
• Greatly optimized the storage of archive logs, which will aid us to better identify certain types of issues in the future.
  
• Added Dual Shock 4 and Dual Sense support.
  

[h3]User Interface Improvements :pencil:[/h3]

• Changed the language selection screen texts to better indicate that those were not official translations.
  

[h3]Bug Fixes :bug:[/h3]

• Fixed an issue that caused manual saves to be impossible if the player’s vagrus had special characters in their name.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the loading screen to lock up.
  
• Pressing Shift+1 on the Settlement main screen no longer opens the first Event on the Story pane in addition to opening the player’s Crew pane (its expected behavior).
  
• Further optimized the performance of the Outer Realms location.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the minus button on the Discipline UI to zero out the value instead of lowering it by on
  

As ever, more is coming, so stay tuned and conquer the wasteland!
- The Lost Pilgrims Team
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Hey everyone,

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.



‘What is that good reason?’ we hear you ask. Well, let’s call it a habit at Lost Pilgrims. While developing large bits of content like the next DLC, we keep enriching them to have better density of content than previous releases. Part of this is organic, the rest is a deliberate attempt to push the envelope. In this case, the region is not going to be as large as the Bronze Desert of Sunfire and Moonshadow, but we are trying to do something special with depth. This includes stories, NPCs, enemies, varied and complex quests, improved reactivity, and so much more.

Needless to say, we shall keep you updated as things develop, writing here and on Steam about the DLC and how it is coming along. And of course, as we move closer to release, we’ll be introducing you to more folk like those pictured below, though we can promise they’ll not all be cannibals. We’ll ride the line between keeping your eyebrow raised and you cracking the code, because that’s what we love. However, the theme and location of the DLC is so telling that it’s quite difficult to reveal something without giving it all away.



Vagrus is currently taking part in Steam’s AdventureX Sale. If you’ve been on the fence about jumping into our newest content or have a friend who you want to introduce to the Riven Realms, you can make it happen.



Until next time, see you out there in the wasteland, vagri; don’t get too caught up in the struggles of the Riven Realms. There’s much, much more to come!

– The Lost Pilgrims Team