Vagrus: The Riven Realms - Devlog #61

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Redglyph spotted devlog #61 for Vagrus: The Riven Realms:

Devlog #61 | Feature Request Update & New Features

A devlog post about planned features

Hello All,

Back in October, when we published the game, we opened up a pinned discussion on our Steam Community Hub where our players were encouraged to post improvement ideas. The topic received 82 posts containing hundreds of ideas. We've been monitoring them but between managing a steady supply of ad hoc issues, hiring new Pilgrims, and creating and publishing the Vorax DLC, we didn't have much time to give the matter the attention it deserves - until recently!

After combing through these posts, we then further consolidated repeated requests and related ones, eventually arriving at the list of 48 suggestions shown below. From there, we were able to discuss, debate, and eventually categorize everything to a point where we could move forward with development for those features.

After examining and considering various suggestions, it quickly became clear that the most talked-about improvements were pertaining to map movement, camping, and scouting. As a result, we ended up focusing on the first two of these, and we will be releasing a new build with a variety of additional features that correspond to the requests made in the near future. In this post, we would like to discuss a few of those features.

New Features

Automarch and Quick Camp

Quick Camp and Automarch will make exploring the Wasteland easier and more efficient. While they will be turned off by default, you will be able to turn them on in the Options menu under Game Settings.

Toggling Automarch on will make it so that when you choose to travel beyond your normal Movement Points (MP) limit, your comitatus will proceed forward and expend March Points automatically. With this feature toggled off, you will instead automatically stop moving when you run out of MPs.

Multiple quality of life changes have been made to camping, too. First off, you will no longer need to go to a node before deciding to camp, you may now also simply click the normal camp icon at your destination node, and when you get there, the camp UI will pop up automatically.

Quick Camp, on the other hand, is an entirely new feature. When toggled on through Game Settings, it will give you an additional option from the radial menu when you travel, which allows you to instantly camp, ending the day without the usual camp UI popping up. Quick Camp will use all the settings you have locked in from your previous regular camp, such as how much you wish to pay your crew or how many rations you want to give them.

The below image shows exactly how these features will look: the top left tent icon will make your camp UI pop up when you reach that destination, while the colored tent icon is for Quick Camp.

Daytime Supply Acquisition

As an alternative to acquiring supplies when you camp and end the day, you will be able to also acquire supplies during the day! This can often be useful, as the node you choose to hunt or forage on may have a significant impact on the results.

In almost all cases, this will cost 2 Movement Points (MP). If you do not have any remaining MP, it will instead cost 1 Vigor. You can send out multiple hunting and foraging expeditions during a day, though these will face increasing penalties depending on the outcome of previous attempts.

Supply Auto-acquisition settings

You might also notice that we have renamed the whole process to 'Acquire Supplies', partly because of another new feature we will be integrating, namely, 'Auto-acquire Supplies'. This feature functions just how it sounds: it allows the player to set predetermined conditions that will automatically get your workers, scouts, and slaves to the task of hunting and foraging, provided that the node you occupy meets those conditions.

In the example below you can see the new feature in action; the top slider below each category represents the minimum chance of success for that action to be triggered when you next strike camp. Here, the auto-action requires an average base chance of success of 48% for hunting and 30% for foraging, respectively. Below that, we can see another slider that represents the minimum average supply yield from a node, which can function as an independent condition or together with the above slider, simply by toggling the two buttons that sit between them.


That's all for today. We will be releasing our new build shortly (probably next week), and are currently developing a large piece of free DLC content: The Sunken Tower.
A teaser about the Tower and its associated knowledge victory questline is coming very soon.

Until then - as always - stay safe and conquer the wasteland!
The Lost Pilgrims Team
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Did anyone try this? I've got this sitting in my backlog and wonder how it is after cooking for some time.
 
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Did anyone try this? I've got this sitting in my backlog and wonder how it is after cooking for some time.

I played only a little so far, about 20-25 hours. I like it but I need to be in the right mood to start this game. Last time I played was in autumn.

On the negative side, the tutorial is not great and frustrating at times, the combat is very badly explained if at all, I had to guess what most numbers meant or how they were used (for ex, even the way the RNG is shown is not standard and counter-intuitive for me - I asked the devs what it meant but never got any reply). It's just the learning curve, I would advise you to watch a couple of tutorial videos. There are information in the dev's blog too, check the past posts on Steam but be aware they changed the system during the development, so read it all.

I don't like the combat itself but that's just a personal preference about the presentation and the balance, perhaps the latter has changed since then.

It's also very harsh so you have to like that. Unfortunately in the prologue you can't save when you want for some obscure reason, it's checkpoint-based and old saves are erased, so I had to redo an entire section twice (looks like an oversight but I never had any response from the devs on that). I would recommend to start with the prologue anyway, I think that's exactly the same as the demo or maybe longer (again, I asked the devs but never got any answer).

On the plus side, the mechanics and the game flow are interesting, including the character build and the economy. The way the story is told, the companions and the characters in general are very good, I could play an adventure game presented like that. The English is not perfect but it didn't shock me, it's usually quite fine.
 
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