Vagrus: The Riven Realms - Patch 1.015 "Wasted"
 

Vagrus: The Riven Realms Realms got a new patch:

More information.

That's likely the next game I'll play, at least a first run to get familiar with how it works. :)

https://i.ibb.co/16GgLGp/image.png

He's just joking, right? :lol:

That made me wonder whether voice-acting would be a great option or not. I'd love it, but that would take more time to play, and from the comments on Encased, not everybody likes voice-acting for the narrative part.

Maybe just for the important stories, if such a distinction exists in the game? (I'm only in the tutorial) Currently, interactive stories are almost like reading a book, so that would be almost like listening to an audio book.

Never understood why they add voice-overs after the game gets released. Anyway yeah I'm not to keen on voice-overs in certain RPGs as they just don't fit most of the time.

Budget constraints, I'd say.

It's rhetorical anyway, I think. They clearly said they were not planning to do so. Just wondering what if…

What do you mean "they just don't fit"?

Basically the voices don't fit the characters in your mind. It was one of the reasons why past RPGs didn't voice the main protagonist you play as. You just picked text choices.

On the other-hand other genres that are not RPG's I have no problem with voice-overs.

The voices are for the NPCs (and the narrator), their personality is already defined by the story, so there's no mismatch I can think of. You can choose how their class attributes evolve with experience, but IMO it doesn't impact the personality or the voice.

I don't think voice acting would be a good fit for Vagrus at all. You are frequently seeing the same text as you revisit locations for the second, tenth, or twentieth time. Easy enough to skip/skim over that when you're reading it, insanely irritating if it's spoken aloud. Voice acting also doesn't work well for long stretches of text. Most of it would be narration, very little of it dialogue.

Does anyone knows how Vagrus shows the check results? For example it says "test fail (80 to 66)", which is obscure to me. What do those values represent? Does it mean it had 80 / (80 + 66) chances of success? or of failure?

EDIT: the same check that succeeded shows "test success (17 to 66)"… it's even weirder. So the first value seems to change, maybe it's the random value, but it fails when it's larger than the 2nd one, and succeeds when it's lower. Maybe random values are 0-100 and must be lower than the 2nd value to succeed?

I don't know for sure, but I would guess the latter. 66 representing a 66% chance of success, and a 17 representing a roll within that range of values from 1-66.

No idea. It seems the right number changes sometimes too, in combat.

I really like the storytelling, the choices and many other aspects of the game: the lore, the map, the trading side of the game, the codex, …, awesome. But it is obscure, badly explained, has a very bad UI and I have the impression of playing blindly without having been told the rules.

The fact the tutorial disables a lot of features doesn't help, for example for a long time it's not possible to see the character's sheet; some of the companions were wounded in a combat but I don't now how much. Nor how fast they heal.

The combat system is probably the worst. It's cumbersome and the rules are poorly explained once again. There's a log of the "rolls" and so on, but again, those are unexplained numbers and acronyms which mostly don't make any sense to me. One or two are briefly mentioned in the tutorial. Once you get to finally see the character sheet you can see the usual Dexterity, Might, and so on, but the tooltip says it's not directly used in combat, so it's not intuitive at all.

There are icons to access information at the base of each character during combat, but some of them are masked by other characters rendered in front of them. x_x It's a complete mess. Not that they show much information anyway.

It could be a great game, but it doesn't look finished, and it definitely needs an improvement in the UI to make the information more accessible. We have good examples how complex rulesets are made easy with the UI, with Pathfinder, Encased, D:OS, Solasta, and so on. Windows are even cut with buttons barely accessible, text partially masked, relevant UI parts hidden by the tutorial window…

Yet I'll go on playing and I suppose I'll finally get to understand it all, but it's a frustrating start. I think the game is harsh enough without having to put up with all that.

It's not that I wouldn't recommend the game, it has potential. But brace yourself, it has many rough edges. It's mostly only about information for someone who starts playing, not the actual content.

Yeah, from what I've played, the combat seemed kind of simplistic and sort off felt tacked-on. Also, while the art is good, it's barely animated. Still, I think it's serviceable, and the game is deep enough in other ways that the combat not being great isn't really a big deal.

I agree, and it doesn't bother me, I'm more annoyed by the opacity. I think it's temporary, and after a while one gets to understand the rules better but they should really work on making the information more available to the player.

There is a tutorial mode, so it's a good start. It's the same as the prologue from what I saw when I briefly played the demo, but maybe longer.

Were you tempted by the game after playing the demo?

Well, yeah. There wouldn't always be a 66% chance of success…

Yeah, I'll definitely pick up the full game when I'm in the mood for something like that. I've been craving more action-oriented stuff lately.

In other games I've seen this it's the check is the second number and you need to be below it to succeed.

So a 30 means 25/30 succeeds. Essentially saying you have a 30 percent success chance.

The reason they show it this way is to keep the success chance showing.

If they did it the other way people would wonder why 30 is actually a 70 percent success chance.

I mean, sometimes it tells it's a critical with the right number at zero, which seems reversed. Or this value changes for similar actions but you're right, it could change because of parameters I don't see.

Well, the 3 of us seem to have the same conclusion, except I wasn't sure at all when I saw those results. Thanks for confirming! :)

Now I just have to understand where those values are coming from. The game doesn't seem too fixated on numbers for the rules, like a D&D or Pathfinder. Or D:OS, or for that matter PoE, and so on. Some tests just say "you have a good chance of success" and that's it, no need for those numbers all the time. I suppose it's the spirit anyway, but it's strange when on the other way there's a trading system, stock of food and wages to manage.

25/30 isn't that 83% success?

The first number is the dice roll :)

Haha. That was a joke, of course, building on the meme going around with Chris Pratt voicing every single game on the planet..twice. :D

We do not think a full voice-over would fit Vagrus well, not that it was ever even a remote possibility. With the 1 million+ word count it would probably cost 3-4 times the complete budget of the game. :D

If we ever got to record voices for the characters, that would be for the companion combat. Grunts, groans, and perhaps a bit of combat banter. Even the chances of that are slim given the cost vs available budget.

Hope this explains, thanks, cheers!