Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue is available on GOG.com. You can see it here
Vagrus is an award-winning roleplaying game with a narrative focus, open-world exploration, and strong elements of strategy. The player takes the role of a vagrus - a caravan leader who strives to survive in a stra...
Vagrus - The Riven Realms: Prologue is available on GOG.com. You can see it here
Vagrus is an award-winning roleplaying game with a narrative focus, open-world exploration, and strong elements of strategy. The player takes the role of a vagrus - a caravan leader who strives to survive in a strange and dangerous dark fantasy world by leading a traveling company on all kinds of ventures.
A vast realm is yours to explore, filled with unique locations, strange factions, and a colorful cast of characters. In order to punish the Empire for its sins, the Elder Gods unleashed their power a thousand years ago that ended up devastating the realms. The continent is now a wasteland, riddled with arcane anomalies, swarming with twisted monsters, and haunted by roaming undead even after long centuries of rebuilding.
A large selection of stories make up the game’s narrative in the form of events and quests. The choices you make in these often affect your companions and the world around you. Pick your background from trader, mercenary, or explorer; work for factions, follow rumors and trading opportunities; acquire wealth, gain fame, and discover hidden knowledge.
Engage in turn-based, tactical combat that involves your companions and a large variety of enemies, both humanoid and monstrous. Use a wide range of character skills as well as your own leadership-related abilities to succeed. Positioning and support skills are of paramount importance in these challenging engagements.
Journeys have to be planned and prepared for carefully, lest they end in disaster. Manage your supplies, morale, and your crew’s vigor effectively to survive. Haul cargo and valuables across the wasteland or take it from others. Your crew of workers, fighters, scouts, and slaves have to be managed well to optimize their effectiveness.
A wide variety of companions can work for you in versatile caravan roles, such as scoutmaster, guard captain, treasure hunter, or beast handler. Each companion comes with unique combat skills, background stories, and personal quest lines that can upgrade them further when you complete them.
Ally yourself with mighty factions that shape the Riven Realms with their influence on commerce, brutal wars, and constant scheming. From prosperous Trading Houses to criminal syndicates and religious organizations, these groups offer powerful rewards and boons to those loyal to their cause. But take heed - befriending a faction will more than likely antagonize others.
I like the Dark Sun esque setting and the story so far. The interface isn't smooth, esp. in tutorial when frequently text blocks things I need to click. There is a lot of resource management and with the interface issues (buttons don't always click when pressed and I have to hover a lot until they activate) I've "oopsed" a lot. An "Undo" function would be helpful, or , failing that, a way to save, even in the tutorial so you can back out of a choice that went wrong. It's gritty, so rather unforgiving of a wrong purchase or small differences in resources, so some way to back up just a little and try again would go a long way. For the same reason better tools to understand where resources are going. It's minor but given the granularity of attention to resources used, the limitations on cargo being so coarse is frustrating sometimes.
Despite that I'm having a good time exploring and figuring things out.
"Get Sunless Sea/Skies formula and crank lore, word count, trading, exploration and companion complexity to 11."
Above would be still an inaccurate definition for Vagrus. This is by no means an easy game and that is why the game developers provided a demo.
First and foremost you play as a Vagrus which can be a mercenary, a shrewd trader or an explorer...and a real successful Vagrus will be all of them. There are several questlines for factions, companions and some of them are independent contractors which may lead to quite unexpected outcomes. The world itself resembles the old Dark Sun games but with somewhat of Roman Empire and post-apocalyptic twist.
Of course trading is the bread and butter for a Vagrus and the economy of the game is important to your survival. At first figuring out the proper routes can be intimidating but to ease that you can start building capital via doing delivery jobs for established factions. If you feel up to it, you can fight at arenas of large settlements and if you get beefy enough you can undertake dangerous quests that require a small army. If you are bored with the usual gameplay, you can always follow through detailed companion and faction quests that will take you all around the playable area.
Note that also there is lots of reading involved in the game because the game has its roots on a homebrew tabletop game which developers played for decades. So it is painstakingly detailed in descriptions at times and to be honest apparently a labor of love.
This game is a true oasis hidden in the depths of gameworld desert.
This is the closest I've ever come to a pen-and-paper resource management game, which is a compliment. If you enjoy paying close attention to your resources and the stress of not knowing if you'll make it to your next stop, this game will make you very pleased indeed.
The storytelling elements are thoroughly enjoyable, and make for an imminently replayable adventure. I'm very impressed with their work, and would expect that many people who aren't necessarily fans of the play style will find that they enjoy this game more than they anticipated.
This is a very beautiful game, obviously a labour of love. It takes time getting used to being a vagrus, ie. planning your expeditions and making a profit out of it. It can at first divert you from delving into the story, but things fall into place and then there's a fascinating and deep world to explore. The writing is sumptuous. I had no idea I would enjoy my journey so much with this game! It's like a "choose-your-own-adventure" book.
As a sidenote, the OST is incredible & the illustrations are superb.
Astounding world-building, spellbinding writing, fascinating caravan management, BUT - the combat stinks. Please devs, improve the combat system, it is horrible beyond belief !
