Vagrus: The Revisited Realms

"And Hell was so cold

All the vases are so broken

And the roses tear our hands open

Mother Mary miscarry but we pray just like insects

And the world is so ugly now "

 

Marilyn Manson - Great Big White World

 

 

I suppose it's as good as any a marker of a game's nerdiness (and concomitantly of your own) when you start spotting Sindarin in-jokes among its nomenclature. Upon reinstalling that-game-that-misspelled-my-name-in-its-preorder-credits (a.k.a. Vagrus: The Riven Realms) I decided to start a new playthrough but stick to my usual chaotic neutral elvish wizard/druid routine.

One of my first lore pages informed me we half-elves (full-blooded elves being unavailable as PCs in this setting) are also known as "pereldin" which tidbit I'd missed the first time around. As in half-elda, from the same root word as periannath. So yeah, if the gratuitous Latin wasn't enough for you, have some Elvish. Wanna sneak some Klingon in there for the full wedgie trifecta?

Oh, I've missed you, Vagrus. To the point your name came up in other conversations.

Intriguing enough to preorder, captivating enough at launch, encompassing most angles of good strategy/RPGs and charmingly dedicated to its setting's immersiveness where most developers tend to play the too cool for school card, Vagrus nevertheless suffered initially from some odd misconceptions about its basic design.

 

The first one's an oldie: a time limit on your campaign, an issue the entire industry should have learned to beware following its unpopularity in the original Fallout, to the point Black Isle had to patch it out of the game. Now Lost Pilgrims also had to go back and patch it out of Vagrus, not that it affected me much since I hit the freeplay option anyway. Steeped in fantasy and RPGs are the devs obviously are, they should've realized that while individual quest deadlines can be great, the hero's journey as a whole must center on the hero and not on external constraints. (Or at least not obviously on external constraints.) Also, there's not much point in buying freeform exploration only to race through an optimized linear sequence to the finish line.

Relatedly, development started in the wake of the survival craze kicked off by the likes of Banished and Amnesia, but getting randomly killed by overpowered events plays out very differently in a long RPG campaign. I can handle disasters changing/defeating my game plan in a five-hour Frostpunk game, but losing anything irreplaceable (like companions) during a fifty or hundred-hour RPG campaign is generally a big no-no. Killing off characters, even if it don't get your legs broke by Kathy Bates, should still be handled with commensurate decorum. If resulting from a momentous quest decision (e.g. me tossing Shadowheart to her reverend mother or turning against my party at the end of Dragonfall) sure, it can make for a memorable moral quandary, but permanently, meaninglessly losing your plucky band to random crits merely prompts reloads. Not to mention it'd lock you out of most quests (which as a rule involve a companion combat step along the way) plus the question of utility:

In contrast to most RPGs with a dozen henchmen overflowing only five slots, where letting one die would still leave you with a full party and you'd only really miss out on its personal quest, Vagrus' companions can also fill one or two strategic support roles ("deputies" to you, pahtnah) boosting your economic / strategic efficiency. There do technically exist placeholders (specialists from House Oquo at Drusian Quarry) for some of these roles, but especially on a first playthrough, not having tested the full extent of their availability, not knowing whether you can support them financially, having painstakingly scraped together a stable caravan size and not knowing how much efficiency you can lose before losing viability, not even knowing what viability means for coming challenges, once again strictly equates losing a companion to forcing a reload.

Lost Pilgrims did address this issue in part. Either I'm making better choices or companions' loyalty/favor currying minigame appears more lenient now, as the pissy little whiners haven't been ditching me like they used to. (I do have to wonder why Vagrus didn't just imitate Mount&Blade: Warband's system where companions could be re-recruited after some time in random taverns.) Also, the addition of Vorax in a truly well-traveled location helps with the crippling early-game scarcity. He's rather useless in combat except to soak damage, but while a meat shield doesn't make companion combat any more interesting, at least it makes it less frustratingly reload-prone.

I'm seeing a decrease in other gratuitous punishments hurled at the player. Highway tax events, while still present enough to remind you to favor off-roading when viable, are less frequent. The "crowded camps" morale debuff for a large caravan which so annoyed me has either been lifted or lifted to a much higher headcount threshold. Basically, I criticized Vagrus at launch as a freeform game with a torque wrench fixed idea for how you should progress (especially early on) which is to say the developers presumed they could read their customers' minds but misread us repeatedly. Most changes I'm seeing two years on unfortunately fall into making the game generally easier, but also necessarily acknowledge the old pitfall of putting players through their paces instead of enabling them to actually... y'know... play! Inelegant, but workable.

 

Elegance lies in the writing and in managing trade routes. The Riven Realms wouldn't stand out for basic fantasy set pieces: fireballs, dragons, zombies, demons, the usual Tolkienish races with unfortunately trite modern feel good spins like orcs as noble tribal warriors, and a generically Romanesque empire. But it excels in actually fleshing out these gimmicks, diving into Latin terminology for the empire's culture, playing up the postapocalyptic setting not merely for pathos but for the new culture's adaptations to current conditions, lending each town you visit its own personality whether via inhabitants or geography or major institutions, and managing the rare feat of acting genre-conscious but not jaded at even the most hopelessly re-trod material.

"They turned into ghouls" would read the lazy blurb for such a location as Tectum Kelvar in most other games. (I assume I'm not spoiling much, given you have to fight said ghouls on your way down.) But as blasé as we've justifiably become about zombies, rare are the writers still willing and able to recall the old creeping dread inherent in the infection itself, in the gradual loss of humanity, in the collapse of the cannibalism taboo and of a society not merely instantly breaking down into biters and raiders, but struggling hopelessly as best it can against the inevitable.

 

I'm edging into mid-game now.

I've also raised Criftaa, Gor'Goro and Finndurarth to level 3 and Renkailon to level 2*, allowing me to begin diving farther into the lore, as at Tectum Kelvar. So far I must say my favorite aspect of Vagrus is how well its RP/expository side blends into a core loop more literal than most. Paying your crew by the day you can never afford to stand still, and the name of the game is multitasking to get the most out of each trip. Tour nearby towns, buy low, sell high, balancing supplies vs. profit margins, balancing passengers and pack beasts vs. upkeep costs over your planned travel range. As you level up, become more cost-efficient, amass more cash to finance longer trips, you begin moving in ever wider circles, and every expedition becomes an opportunity to complete some long-standing quest or another.

 

Back when Civilization was still new on the market, many grew fascinated by "one more turn" syndrome, where you keep telling yourself you'll set just this one more thing to rights, finish this one more battle, build this one more courthouse, until you find yourself ninety turns later at 3 a.m. It's gradually been explained by a mix of short and long-term goals, the turn-by-turn resource and unit management feeding into the greater campaign goal of WOWRLD DOMAHNAYSHUN!!! so that one feels neither stuck nor aimless, but constantly, verifiably, reassuringly, validatingly advancing toward success.

 

RPGs accomplish much the same by mixing long-distance quests with opportunistic flower-picking or gear upgrades. Mount&Blade laid out a particularly clear pattern: move in a wide circuit taking advantage of towns' price differences for different trade goods while also maximizing the number of quests you can complete at varying distances and passing through warzones while also giving your army a chance to recover. Due to its more stringent caravan maintenance requirements, Vagrus does an even better job of pacing your outward spiral and interspersing it with plot-based content. You never lose the impetus to stock up on some salt or mushroom beer for sale at the next town; your focus merely shifts toward feeding the profit from salty shrooms toward a long-term accomplishment, rewarding forward planning.

 

So to advance Nedir's quest I'm still short a couple of spectral residues. Maybe It's time I tried that exorcism in Deven... and if I'm headed to Deven I may as well detour through Auguros Work Camp... and if I'm doing that maybe I'll try the valley of sleepers, see what that's about. Ooooh, looks like Tenebvitris currently offers lots of faction quests for Lumen/Arken though. And if I'm detouring west, I may as well set out light, grab that manticore skeleton for the boners over at Ioscian, angle through Drusian then pick up a larger crew in Larnak/Arken, load up on trade goods and maybe detour back through the Shelter or through the Crimson Gate or rush straight to Auguros depending on fetch quest availability. Beer, obsidian, crystal, marble, metal/salt... oooh, maybe a stack of dried fruit on the way back for the bugs? Remember to pick up another book! And if I do eventually hit Avernum for Nedir, I may as well continue through the Sadirar lands and try to finish off their quest chain, then some skullduggery in Larnak I'll likely be ill-suited to, and then? Who knows?

 

Look, it's a simple fifty-seven step plan...

 

And at every step there awaits not just some perfunctory dopamine-boosting LEVEL UP! reward stimulus or trash loot, but another immersively written foray into the cataclysmic world your character inhabits, a lovable little lost waif to escort back to her uncle, a demonic portal to scout, a tragic tale of another lost settlement, a strange new world or new civil-eye-zation. Rewarding both long-term plans and flexible opportunism, both freeform exploration and page-turning lore delving, arithmetic and spatial orientation, self-conscious in its nerdy appeal, poetic yet rarely self-indulgent, vast yet well-paced, I would say Vagrus should kick off a whole new fad in game design... but decades watching this industry repeatedly collapse onto the lowest common denominator leave me instead merely content to number myself among its dedicated, if small, following.

 

Bite ya later, vagri. I've got a caravan to load.

__________________________________

 

* Technically, leveling up your companions from your own XP pool is a good mechanic, laying more burden of choice on the player to prioritize and rewarding a complex game plan. Intellectually, I approve. Viscerally, I hate it. Feels like I'm lending them my underwear.

 

edit 20204/04/25:

Oh, come on, Kadaath in the outer realms? Seriously? And the elf-like race of Ithil? That's Klingon enough for me. Pants' em.