Vagrus - The Riven Realms News

We are immensely honored, happy, and proud to share that Vagrus has been nominated for two awards in the upcoming Unfold Games Awards show. It feels like quite an achievement for a game still in Early Access, especially since over 400 high-quality games entered the contest. The nominees were selected by a panel of 20 judges comprised of top industry professionals. The two categories are:

- Audience Award - Vote for Vagrus
- Best Game Design Award

We cannot express how much these mean to the whole team, how their love for the game and dedication to turn it into something truly special got recognized in the form of these nominations.

The Audience Award is, of course, one that will be awarded on the votes by players so we would very much appreciate your show of support for Vagrus under the link here:



We are also grateful to You, our players, for having made it possible for Vagrus to get here. Your continued support, constructive criticism, and dedication to the game keep pushing us to deliver more and better.

Stay tuned, stay safe, and conquer the wasteland!
-The Lost Pilgrims Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660?utm_source=steam&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=website&utm_content=footer
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This time, we come to you with a double feature of sorts, combining two topics into a single devlog post: changing the types of the beasts of burden of a comitatus and the mechanics of Trade Offers.



[h3]Beast Types[/h3]

The vagrus's ability to change the type of beasts their comitatus uses has been planned to be added to the game from the beginning but it had to wait until recently for a couple of reasons. The first being that there were a number of other - more important - things to be added before and also because changing between only two types would have been a bit lackluster, but the third type was locked behind content that we got around to just lately (and is available since the addition of Larnak).

Of the three types of beasts, two are accessible in most settlements in-game. Mammals are slightly more common, which means that you can buy them in greater number in mansios, except in the deep deserts where reptiles are more common. Neither of these two types are better than the other in all respects. For example, reptile beasts of burden carry more cargo and move a tad faster but march less effectively and have a much larger consumption. Reptile mounts are slightly better at combat but less effective on long journeys than horses. Mammals are cheaper and so make it easier to scale up your comitatus but require more animal care, thus more work. The third type, insectioids, work as an upgrade in basically every aspect and cost a lot to obtain. This type is meant for high-end comitati in general.

Changing the beast type of your comitatus happens in the mansio and it changes both your beasts of burden as well as mounts to the selected type at once. From then on, you buy beasts and mounts for the new, active beast type, meaning you can never have mixed beast types in your comitatus.



[h3]Trade Offers[/h3]

Commerce in the Riven Realms is held in the iron grip of Trading Houses through official monopolies or the control of locations that produce valuable goods. A simple merchant who deals in smaller quantities of wares can not begin to imagine what profit these factions work with, especially compared to what the actual manufacturing or harvesting costs. Yet there are considerable expenses involved in these operations, too. If the hardships of travel over the accursed wastelands were not enough by themselves, factions regularly wage bloody wars for resources, mostly in the shadows but often openly as well out on the frontier - and these are astonishingly expensive.

In accordance with the above outline, we have always wanted players to only have access to large quantities of wares through factions. We had a lot of the feature in place, including UI elements, but we needed dynamic pricing to work before being able to add Trade Offers. Until it could be implemented properly, the temporary solution was to control stocks through the market of settlements, but it was less transparent in many ways - a lot of players neglected to check back to depleted or markets with a seemingly low goods density, believing that it will never change.

The concept of Trade Offers is not complicated: factions that have presence in a settlement post bulk offers for buyers and sellers alike. The content and quality of these offers depend on a variety of factors, including the faction's interest in and the supply-and-demand of the wares in question, the extent of their presence, as well as the player's unlocked Trade Offer tiers (from I. to III.).

Trade Offers can only be bought and sold in full stacks, and beside the normal price, vagri can get a better deal when spending faction reputation. Although factions do not sell their wares cheaper (except at higher standing with them on the source nodes of the goods), each unit of the offered stack costs the same, which is a great advantage over the dynamically changing market price even though it may seem that the initial couple of units cost less at the market than the offered ones. The result is that large scale trading is mostly viable through faction Trade Offers.

Apart from fitting the setting of the game, the point of this design is to keep smaller comitati more viable through normal market trading while to upkeep larger ones you would have to progress through factions. This is only true of course if the player wishes to delve into the trading aspect. Trade Tasks remain for those who mostly care about a fixed, certain profit without risking their coins.

We hope you will like these new additions - they certainly add new levels of depth and strategy when it comes to comitatus management.

The Lost Pilgrims Team

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[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Dear fellow vagri,

This short video was made to give you a rough idea about how the new comitatus equipment screen and system were changed. Categories have been revamped, with new ones added into the mix.



The new mechanic allows players to use these items in more diverse and specialized ways. New types of equipment, like armaments, tools, and animals were added while we ironed out the older ones as well to make it more consistent and interesting. Many pieces of equipment are available for several slots, so you can mix and match in more ways than one.

Another change is that Deputies are now linked to equipment in a new way - they will open up extra slots for certain types when assigned to their post, further deepening the system. Now you'll be able to make use of more equipment at the same time and come up with combinations that better suit a large variety of situations in game. We also added a lot of new pieces of equipment with the last several patches, making the list of available ones fairly long by now, including some unique ones only acquirable through questing and faction reputation.

The Lost Pilgrims Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660?utm_source=steam&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=website&utm_content=footer
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Wanna see the full game released as early as possible with even more content? Please share our pages and posts with your friends through your favorite social media channel(s). Appreciate it!

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[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

With the arrival of Factions to Vagrus, you guys got a new way to specialize your comitatus. Up until the addition of Faction rewards, however, this meant some obscure (albeit very welcome - we're looking at you, road tax) boons and perks but then with claimable rewards, Factions quickly became our players' new best friends.

The Name of the Game

In its core, the system is well-known in video games: build more reputation by doing repeatable, procedurally generated Tasks as well as unique stories, unlock higher tiers of Standing with a Faction by doing so, and receive your rewards. The higher the Standing, the better the rewards - it is that simple. Or is it? Of course, staying friendly with a Faction might be a challenge of its own, seeing how they tend to hate each other so passionately. This means that gaining reputation with a Faction will reduce reputation with their enemies, albeit not with the same intensity. It was deliberately implemented this way so that you can not get all the goodies in a single run - a balancing act, a tool of immersion, and a factor in replayability.



The Rewards

Two kinds of rewards are bound to Faction Standing:

• Prizes: These Gear or Equipment rewards are one-time only redeemables. Once you have the Standing, you can claim them at a settlement with the right Faction presence. There is some overlap between prizes here and there but you also get a lot of unique rewards among them to make them more interesting. The higher tier ones are powerful and valuable additions to any comitatus.
  
• Boons: These are always Enduring Effects and they will stay applied to your comitatus until you lose the required Standing with the given Faction, in which case you'll lose the boon. However, upon regaining your Standing, you can again claim these effects by simply going to a settlement with any kind of presence for the Faction in question.
  

All in all, we are very happy with how Factions - and the related rewards - have turned out in the game. There is still some tweaking to be done, perhaps overhauls of rewards as well, but we have had a very positive feedback from our player base and we're very excited to see how these awesome rewards will motivate you guys to delve into the Faction system.

The Lost Pilgrims Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660?utm_source=steam&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=website&utm_content=footer
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Wanna see the full game released as early as possible with even more content? Please share our pages and posts with your friends through your favorite social media channel(s). Appreciate it!

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[h3]Hey Folks,[/h3]
the time has come to revisit the region that featured in Pilgrims of the Wasteland, the tutorial/prelude of Vagrus. We opened up that very zone for the open-world campaign, albeit we are 10 years in the future compared to that prologue story, so expect some changes. There was a bit of a switcheroo involving several patches in the works and eventually the choice fell onto pushing this out in part to fix a game-breaking bug from the previous patch. For this reason, expect a smaller update in the near future that irons out a few things regarding the currently added content, although we might end up merging that with Mercenary Tasks, the next larger addition.



Important Note: Considering the extent of these 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 inbuild reporting tool (F1 button), forums, and our Discord server.



Now let's jump into the details:
[h2]Patch 0.5.30 - Codename: Brimstone and Bones[/h2]

[h3]New Content :gift:[/h3]

• The Smolderbone region is finally open, as well as a new part of the Searing Plains. They include five new points of interest: the city of Avernum, Omphalat Outpost, as well as the tribal settlements Vitrar and Utvorar, plus the dreaded Writhing Oasis.
  
• A number of stories and quests that lead to this zone continue, and a lot of new ones begin here, too.
  
• A new companion, the veteran warrior and former kingpin Skornar can be recruited in Avernum.

[h3]New/Updated Features :shiny:[/h3]

• Defender, Diehard, and Marksman Perks implemented.
  
• Skill dependencies implemented for Burrow, Eviscerate, and a number of other enemy Skills. In some instances, these Skills appear as new (like Eviscerate) but mostly they got more restricted in their use by the tweaks.
  
• Considerable changes to market prices.
  
• A number of fixes/design changes to Trade Offers.
  
• Enemy Mounts and Beasts gained through Crew Combat are now turned into supplies when your comitatus uses the Yrg beast type.
  
• Enemy combat resistances nerfed all across the board.

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

• Most Event UI crashes/bugs fixed - not all of them, though
  
• Various smaller fixes and Event script tweaks

Known Issues:

• Skornar's Guard Stance retaliation attack upon successful block may not always trigger. We are investigating the reason.
  
• Load times are getting higher and higher. We plan to address the issue closer to the final release.
  

'Is Vagrus properly balanced now?' - Nope. 'Was it a step in the right direction?' - We think so. Please let us know how you find it.

[h3]Coming Up Next:[/h3]
Mercenary Tasks, along with a focus on spicing up Companion Combat.

Stay tuned, stay alive, conquer the wasteland!
- The Lost Pilgrims Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660?utm_source=steam&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=website&utm_content=footer
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Wanna see the full game released as early as possible with even more content? Please share our pages and posts with your friends through your favorite social media channel(s). Appreciate it!

Fig | Website | Youtube | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Patreon | Discord