A Review of 2024 and Happy 2025
[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
