Video Game / Vigor

Vigor is a free-to-play Looter Shooter on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch by Bohemia Interactive (of ARMA and DayZ fame) that pits up to 12 players against each other in slow-paced, tactical engagements called "Encounters" over large, sprawling maps. Players who make it out of an Encounter alive get to keep whatever they looted for use in their next match, or to upgrade their shelter to produce resources for them. Players who don't make it out alive end up losing everything on their character, including any weapons and equipment brought into battle, making each Encounter a balance between risk and reward.

The game is set in an Alternate Universe where a nuclear war occurred in 1991, rendering most of the Earth uninhabitable with the exception of Norway. Outlanders, the remnants of humanity, fight for survival amongst what's left of this post-apocalyptic Earth.

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• Abandoned Camp Ruins: Several maps have the ruins of small campsites as points of interest, many of which are marked on an Outlander's map once discovered. While most of these isolated areas are completely ransacked and not really worth making a detour to pillage they can occasionally be looted for useful supplies and may be worth checking out if the player is passing through on a nearby path.
• Actionized Sequel: Season 3 added two new game modes, Shootout and Elimination, that are both a far cry from the normal Encounter gameplay. Shootout, as its name might imply, pits Outlanders in a free-for-all shootout in a small section of a given map with respawning enabled. Elimination is a team-based 5 vs. 5 mode without respawns, similar to some of the Tom Clancy games (particularly Ghost Recon Wildlands and Ghost Recon Breakpoint's "Ghost War" mode, as well as Rainbow Six Siege).
• Advancing Wall of Doom:
  • Radioactive dust starts sweeping the map from a pre-determined starting point after an Encounter has dragged on for around 10 to 15 minutes. Players who are still lingering in the area by then are subject to increasingly worse Maximum HP Reduction until they simply drop dead.
  • Players can create a makeshift Wall of Doom with the use of Radiation Grenades, especially if they back their opponents into a corner.
• After the End: The game takes place in an alternate version of the 1990's where a global nuclear war ravaged and destroyed most of the world. Norway seems to have made it out relatively okay but still suffers from occasional radiation storms and seems to have devolved into a violent "every man for himself" style wasteland filled with hostile Outlanders.
• A Homeowner Is You: Players are given their own house at the beginning of the game to serve as a base of operations where they can gather resources, craft equipment and open crates. It starts out as a worn down old shack and slowly becomes a place worth living in as the player makes upgrades to it.
• A.K.A.-47: Some firearms have either an obfuscated name or generic descriptor, presumably to avoid copyright problems. For instance, the AK-47 is named the A74-K.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Cosmetic items such as hats, masks, jackets and backpacks can be acquired from loot crates or as seasonal rewards.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Players can upgrade their homes with various useful improvements such as a garden or transmission tower with resources they bring back. Completing special refurbishment milestones also improves the overall look of the house, transforming it from a worn broken down mess into a proper living area.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Players are always compensated with some amount of crafting materials upon dying, scaling with how valuable their loot was on death. There's also the option of buying insurance for 60 Crowns per Encounter, which allows players to retain their loadout and any loot (minus the airdrop) if they die. A portion of the XP that would've been awarded for extracting the loot also gets awarded.
  • Locked chests with combination padlocks used to only give clues to the correct combo either through extremely delayed controller vibration or a clicking noise while turning the tumblers that's barely any different from the regular one, forcing players to take their time and pay attention. After Locked Containers were introduced (huge cargo crates which generally have more than one combination padlock), the tumblers also briefly flash a faint green when passing over the correct number with no delay, making it vastly easier to unlock them. Failing that, players can just [[Shoot Out the Lock shoot the locks off].
  • Radiation normally kills players if its Maximum HP Reduction brings their health all the way down to zero. The sole exception to this is if a player is standing in an exit area as this happens, where players will instead be a One-Hit-Point Wonder until the extraction timer finishes.
  • Season 8: Trappers added Legacy Seasons to the game, allowing people who missed out on past Rewards Passes to progress on the paid rewards track at a discounted price (330 Crowns versus the usual 690). Progress on Legacy Seasons doesn't expire between seasons, letting players grind at their own pace (although only on one Legacy Season of their choosing at a time), and players who previously had levels in the season in question will instead get Loot Boxes of varying rarity, so veteran players at least have some reason to start over. Lastly, Legacy Seasons are also affected by Experience Boosters obtained from the current season, if players choose to purchase both passes.
  • Season 13: Deliverance made several quality-of-life changes to the game, including a rebalancing of shelter upgrade effectiveness and resource costs, a reworked challenge system that includes long-term seasonal challenges and the option to reroll any challenge for a few Crowns, and a slight buff to loot boosters applied to airdrops.
• Apocalyptic Log: Season 10: Vengeance added cassette tapes for the player to unlock that chronicles a group of Outlanders in the aftermath of the war that destroyed the world.
• Artificial Limbs: One of the new cosmetics added in the Season 17: Malediction battle pass is an outfit called "Project Rebirth" that gives the player Outlander a mechanical prosthetic leg.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Knives. While their attacks have little startup, they take about a second and a half to recover, and players need to hit their target four times for a kill (or three with The John), leaving a large window of opportunity for retaliation. The associated "Kill X players with a knife" daily challenge rewards players with a high-tier crate to compensate for its difficulty.
• Bear Trap: Season 14 Chronicles: Reckoning added in bear trap consumable items that damage outlanders that set them off and also slows them down afterwards. What makes them especially dangerous is that they're classified as uncommon (green tier) loot, which means any player can easily get their hands on a few even if they didn't pack any before heading into the match. Makes for a really nasty surprise to players that are caught unaware when they least expect it.
• Berserk Board Barricade: One of the random special locations that Outlanders can find while exploring the map is a Barred House containing a locked safe. The safe can easily be cracked in about a minute or two without the use of switches but first the player will need to disassemble all the wooden boards sealing off the entrance, a process that when combined with the aforementioned wait while cracking the safe makes it one of the more dangerous types of loot event to go for as most other nearby Outlanders will probably have the same idea and make a beeline for the Barred House as soon as the round starts.
• Blade Enthusiast: Knives are the only available melee weapon to be found in the game so far. Though they come in many different shapes and rarities they all tend to have very similar (mediocre) stats... save for The John, an ultra rare combat knife that does slightly more damage than its many counterparts.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Rare guns and weapon skins often feature this design aesthetic with gold/silver plating, intricate engravings and other blinged out attachments. Players can even get bling knives.
• Bling of War: Season 11 added some pretty fancy viking armor for players to unlock along with some matching decorative viking skins for their guns in the upgraded rewards pass.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows: Some maps have small churches that tend to draw a lot of action from nearby Outlanders due to serving as large item hotspots that commonly provide high quantities of rare and valuable goods such as medicine, collectables, secondary airdrops and comms stations.
• Booby Trap: Contact Bombs are essentially these, especially if they're placed inside a lootable container.
  • It should be noted that the game includes an item literally named Booby Trap that players can use against each other in the Outlands.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • "Plentiful" rarity guns like the A-KM assault rifle, Silver Pigeon shotgun, or Luger pistol are common recommendations for both new and veteran players alike due to their above average performance in battle despite their low rarity and their extremely cheap crafting costs.
  • Going in unarmed to an Encounter can be a surprisingly effective method to build up loot, given enough skill at evading conflict and perhaps a little luck. Players who do this are forced into a Pacifist Run (unless weapons are found) since there are no unarmed melee attacks, but this is offset by a faster movement speed due to carrying nothing. Lastly, such players have nothing to lose aside from the loot they've picked up. At worst, every match ends in a net gain because of compensation materials.
• Bulletproof Vest: Season 6 added armor plates as a consumable. While they're stackable in the inventory, they only protect against one body shot per plate regardless of caliber, averting Body Armor as Hit Points. They also don't protect anything they don't cover, meaning headshots are still fair game.
• Collection Sidequest:
  • Players can find rare collectables such as lighters and troll dolls while exploring the various maps.
  • Season 6: Junkers added vinyl records to the list of collectibles. The same update also added a record player in the Outlander's shelter - and yes, the vinyls can be played on them.^note A playlist of the vinyl songs can be found here on YouTube.
  • Season 11: Perseverance adds a new set of audio cassette tapes that can be found and looted in the Outlands along with making the cassette tapes from the previous season available to people who failed to complete their rewards pass.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Uses the usual World of Warcraft color scheme: white for common, green for uncommon, blue for rare, purple for "Military-grade" loot, and yellow for "Special Issue" items. There's additionally a gray "Plentiful" loot tier for incredibly common weapons.
• Creepy Crows: Veteran Outlanders have learned to listen for the telltale caw of these guys while making their way towards an exit as their screeching is an audio cue warning that another player is in the nearby area.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Downplayed. There is no hard weight threshold that makes your character completely stop moving, but carrying enough heavy items in the inventory results in a generally slower movement speed, increased stamina consumption, and even maximum stamina reduction at the extreme end of the scale.
• Crouch and Prone: Encouraged for the best possible first shot accuracy. With most guns that aren't shotguns, going prone results in pinpoint accuracy - doing so right in front of an enemy Outlander who's spraying their gun just might be lifesaving.
• Creator Provincialism: The game's premium currency is called Crowns, which happens to be the English translation of both Norway's currency, krone, as well as that of the Czech Republic, koruna. The developers, Bohemia Interactive, are headquartered in the latter country.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Most obvious with the various buildings and interiors, several of which are copied perfectly right down to the garbage and debris strewn about their insides. Some maps are also reused entirely with aesthetic changes such a snowy variant of a lush green forest.
• Darker and Edgier: While the game was never super lighthearted to begin with Season 17: Malediction is notably much more grim than any other season that came before it, rather fitting for an update that dropped just before Halloween. Instead of the mundane survival gear and army uniforms of previous seasons its rewards pass includes things like slasher outfits, mad scientist clothes, body horror cosmetics and even some straight up occultism in its designs.
• Death from Above: Season 7 added mortar strikes as a item that players can use to call down bombardment upon a small area of the map. Given the extremely limited amount of players per map its mostly just used to deal with campers and making sure the exits are clear before leaving.
• Duel to the Death: Players can initiate a "Phone Duel" by interacting with a red-painted rotary phone or phone booth. The first interaction with any of these phones by any player gets the rest of them ringing. If another player picks up a ringing phone in the next few minutes, these two players are periodically marked to each other constantly until one of them dies or exits the map. Despite the name, the "duelling" players aren't obligated to kill each other (although it nets more experience than regular kills), and progress towards "Win X Phone Duels" challenges are awarded even if a third party kills one of the duelling players.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Heavily enforced in this game, as moving or simply even standing straight while firing results in comically low accuracy. Additionally, aiming while moving causes the player's movement speed to slow to a crawl, forcing players into fight-or-flight situations during an engagement. Accuracy from hip firing is even worse and generally ill-advised. On the other hand, players can sprint slightly faster than normal when their weapon is holstered.
• Easy Logistics: Crafting is abstracted into requiring nothing but nebulous "materials", which are represented by generic shapes in the inventory. Its official render (seen when pulling materials from a crate) is a mishmash of just about every type of material in the game.
• Excuse Plot: The only real story to the game is that it takes place in post-apocalyptic Norway and... that's about all there is to it. Season 10 onwards fleshes out this setting a little bit through the lens of Apocalyptic Log casette tapes from survivors, but they don't elaborate on how exactly World War III came about.
• Fingore: Hand cosmetics seem to have gotten progressively more nasty and brutal in recent seasons with modifications that can give the player things like bloodied hands, hands wrapped with barbed wire, broken fingers and even stitched back together fingers. Ouch.
• Freemium Timer: Shelter upgrades work this way, costing increasing amounts of real time to complete. The premium currency-generating Antenna upgrade is the worst of these, starting at six hours for its first upgrade level and only going up from there. Item Crafting mechanics also work in this manner, with the exception of crafting weapons and consumables from their respective parts, which happens instantly.
• Frigid Water Is Harmless: Subverted in keeping with the realistic tone of the game. Hopping into the water on any snow covered map will quickly freeze the player until they step out or die of exposure.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The game's hit detection is notoriously buggy, a problem that's exacerbated by the game's emphasis on stealth and well-placed shots. This often results in headshots that aren't headshots, amongst other oddities.
• Ghost Town: Several maps such as Grontheim Valley have small abandoned towns and villages that usually serve as a hotspot for item spawns.
• Goodies in the Toilets: Bathrooms frequently contain medium to good amounts of decent quality loot such as medicine or, much more commonly, fertilizer.
• Hand Cannon: The SW-SH 629, a .44 caliber magnum that can kill Outlanders in one hit.
• Hammerspace: Zigzagged. Most loot in the game is either shown on the Outlander themselves (weapons) or generally small enough that they should reasonably fit into a decently-sized backpack in large quantities (food and all materials that are uncommon or lower). This really only starts getting played straight when the player has a small backpack equipped (all of them are cosmetic) and are carrying larger objects, like the airdrop crate and several stacks of gallon-sized fuel and chemical containers.
• Hard Mode Perks: Solo players can enable Lone Wolf mode before starting to matchmake, pitting themselves against Encounters full of teams of two or three. Lone Wolf players get 50% more experience ponts for their troubles.
• Hazmat Suit: Many of the premium tier cosmetics are different variants of hazmat suits.
• Heal Thyself: There are a number of medical consumables in the game with varying effects. Disinfectants and bandages restore health instantly at the cost of its application time, antibiotics slowly restores health over time, painkillers give a temporary health boost, and iodine temporarily pauses radiation-induced Maximum HP Reduction.
• Holiday Mode:
  • Player houses are covered in festive decorations and snow during the holiday season while the airdrop is replaced by Santa's sleigh.
  • The main player house and a few other locations in the Outlands will be decorated with stacks of pumpkins during Halloween.
• Horny Vikings: The main aesthetic theme of Season 11: Perseverance which includes horned helmets, viking style outfits and viking weapon skins for some of the guns.
• Idle Game: The Shelter has elements of an idle game. Once players start upgrading the Shelter with materials brought back from Encounters, its facilities start producing crafting materials, food and Crowns once every hour, capping out at one, three, or seven days' worth of these things depending on the facility.
• Item Crafting: Once an Outlander makes the appropriate upgrades to their shelter and gathers all the proper materials they can craft various consumables, ammo and weapons from the comfort of their own home between matches. All construction is done in real time and usually requires the player to wait several minutes or hours before their new item becomes finished and available.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": One of the new consumable items added in season 11 is the military grade Improvised Mine made from a creepy cymbal-banging monkey toy. It probably won't kill a player directly but its concussive effect will leave them dazed long enough to make them easy prey for any other nearby Outlanders to come in and finish off.
• Lighthouse Point: The snowy island map Anikken features a towering lighthouse in one corner where players can find a comms station to alter the airdrop with.
• Lockpicking Minigame: Most larger containers in the game will have some sort of lock on them that outlanders will need to bypass to open them up. This usually takes the form of a simple 3-4 digit number that only takes a couple seconds to solve while locked safes function a bit differently. To open them players typically need to either find and activate a set of nearby switches or complete a timed lock on the safe itself. The time lock is by far the easiest method to perform but requires waiting for a minute or two in real time while the lock finishes opening, all the while other players will be closing in hoping to grab the loot for themselves.
• Loot Boxes: Crates hold various weapons, weapon blueprints, and crafting materials. They can be looted from airdrops, buried treasure caches, or as weekly rewards for donating food to less fortunate Norwegians.
• Lost in the Maize: Season 18: Isolation added in a new map called Eikevjen whose main distinguishing landmark is a large maze made entirely out of stacks of hay and some wooden planks. It was apparently primarily designed as a close-quarters area with tight spaces and passages to give a small boost to melee and midrange weapons and make them a just a little bit more viable in shootouts and encounters.
• Lumber Mill Mayhem: The Sagbruk map is one big sawmill area located deep in the woods.
• Mini-Game:
  • In case one ever gets bored of the shooting range, players can play with a Rubik's Cube found near the shelter's basement entrance.
  • Season 6: Junkers added a few more distractions to the shelter: an arcade minigame that plays like gomoku as well as a playable guitar.
• Must Have Caffeine: While the Player Character isn't generally a caffeine junkie, they might certainly look like it if you have to down a whole bottle or two of caffeine supplements for long-distance running or preserving stamina while carrying a heavy load.
• Play Every Day: Players get 100 XP simply for logging in, and daily challenges don't reset until they're completed or skipped over, encouraging players to consistently log in and do either of those. The game's Microtransaction store also rotates daily, again encouraging players to log in daily to check if the store has a particular crafting blueprint or cosmetic they want.
• Post-Apocalyptic Gas Mask: Some of Vigors most common and widely used clothing items are various gas masks of any conceivable shape, size and design. Most seasons include a few new types as unlockables and nearly all matches will feature at least one or two Outlanders wearing different gas masks.
• Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: Maps such as Brodalen Bridges and Fiske Fabrikk feature large stretches of crashed and abandoned vehicles that can be looted by players. Many contain valuable resources such as fuel or metal parts but about a quarter of them also contain active car alarms that will alert other nearby players if triggered.
• Random Drop Booster: Players can spend 30 Crowns to boost the map's randomly generated loot quantity and rarity by 50%, stacking with other players' boosts. The same can be done for the airdrop's loot rarity. The catch is that these boosters can potentially benefit everyone in the Encounter, so other players who haven't spent a dime can still make off with the boosted loot.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: Players can build several food-generating structures back at their home base, most of which take the form of rat traps placed around the house.
• Rewards Pass: A season pass was introduced with the Preppers update (1.2), which runs the gamut from cosmetics to weapons and crafting blueprints. The paid rewards track often includes fancier cosmetics plus higher-tier weapons and the blueprints to craft them.
• Robbing the Dead: This is a core gameplay mechanic since players are only allowed to keep the loot that actually reaches the exit with them and killed players drop all of their scavenged goods upon death. One of the biggest problems players have to deal with in this game are sneaky opportunistic campers who spend most of the match holed up near an exit, waiting patiently for some poor scavenger to come within sniping distance...
• Sackhead Slasher: Season 17: Malediction added some ghoulish new cosmetics that allow for this look as part of its seasonal battle pass. Of course, since knifes are currently the only melee weapon in the game and nowhere near as useful as the guns this outfit is more for intimidation and sheer coolness than anything else.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: Vigor includes the classic double barrel variant as one of the many guns players can acquire in the Outlands. It definitely isn't the worst gun in the game but there are quite a few that outclass it.
• Scary Stitches: Some of the new cosmetic items included in Season 17: Malediction are gruesome stitch patterns for the face and hands, including reattached severed fingers and patchwork lines to suggest the flesh was put together piece by piece. Definitely something that will draw the attention of fellow Outlanders during encounters.
• Scenery Porn: Post-apocalyptic Norway still looks pretty good for a violent irradiated hellhole. Certain maps like Grontheim Valley and Fjellkanten in particular seemed to have been designed to look as majestic and visually stunning as possible. It's almost easy to forget you're exploring a dangerous abandoned wasteland. Almost.
• Shooting Gallery: Players have a fairly large one installed at their house that can be used to test the various weapons they've recovered from their expeditions into the Outlands. Occasionally, players will even get a daily mission requiring them to try it out for some quick and easy rewards such as XP and consumables.
• Sniper Duel: Sniper rifles and similar long ranged weapons are highly favored to the point where roughly half the players in an encounter can be expected to be carrying one, even if only as a backup weapon. As a result these sorts of exchanges are extremely common and prone to happening at least once or twice a match. The presence of dozens or possibly hundreds of excellent sniping spots on each map only encourages this further.
• Sniper Scope Glint: Every scoped weapon in the game does this, lending some credence to using unscoped rifles in combat over their rarer counterparts. There also exists a "Fake Glint" consumable (a set of small mirrors on a stand) to fool players relying on this trope to find easy targets.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Some containers have locks that can be shot off if the player has a gun on them. It's a bit quicker than actually solving the lock normally but comes with the downside of making a lot of noise and potentially drawing other nearby players to the shooters location.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Hunters Season Pass has a number of Rambo-inspired cosmetics, as well as a blueprint for a serrated survival knife called "The John". The eponymous protagonist uses a similar knife.
  • Halloween 2021 included a few limited-time cosmetics that are clearly based on A Nightmare on Elm Street and, to a lesser extent, Friday the 13th.
    • Speaking of Halloween there is also a "Game Master" facepaint cosmetic and what is unambiguously a facehugger mask. (The later was even used in the official title screen for Season 17: Malediction.)
  • Challenge names occasionally pay homage to something:
    • The seasonal challenge for Random Drop Booster and Experience Booster use is named "You Raise Me Up".
    • "I've Become So Numb" is a daily challenge related to painkiller consumption.
    • A seasonal challenge requiring players to get a 10 kill streak in a Shootout is named "Beyond Godlike!".
    • Players who kill an entire enemy team in Elimination are awarded credit for the challenge "Fine, I'll Do It Myself".
    • Dealing enough damage and taking none yourself in a single Elimination round completes the "Terminator" challenge.
    • Potential seasonal objectives include "Doctor Strangelove" for crafting 10 Radiation Grenades and "Iron Man" for crafting 10 Armor Plates.
  • One of the more obscure and under the radar cosmetic items is a bright red "Sandiago" Fedora.
• Survivalist Stash: Found everywhere from isolated rural campsites to abandoned towns. Each map also has at least a few large locked containers that typically contain high quality weapons, an assortment of ammo and some valuable supplies such as medicine or traps.
• Timed Mission: From the moment an encounter starts the players are racing each other to loot a small area that is mere minutes away from being hit by a massive incoming radiation cloud. (Perceptive players will even notice that their Outlander avatar sets an egg timer as part of their start up animation at the very beginning of each encounter before the game actually starts. That ringing sound they hear after the radiation begins moving in is their set timer going off and telling them to get the hell out of dodge before they become a puddle of glowing green goop.)
• Too Awesome to Use: Yellow rarity "Special Issue" weapons and consumables can fall under this, especially for newer players. Sure, they may have higher damage per second or attachments that lower rarity weapons don't have, but they're extremely rare and simply having one may cause more attentive players in a match to target them for their rare loot.
• Trick Bomb:
  • The Chronicles: Vengeance update added the M84 Flash Grenade. Predictably, it blinds and deafens players who are nearby when it detonates.
  • Season 12: Absolution added the Radiation Grenade, which is a homemade bomb crafted out of a coffee thermos containing radioactive material and a stick of dynamite that coats a small portion of the map in fallout which behaves similarly to the radioactive cloud that sweeps in at the end of each encounter. Since radiation causes maximum HP reduction this makes them great as both a method of area denial and a sneaky way to trap enemies who don't pay very close attention to their surroundings.
  • Season 18: Isolation finally gives players their highly requested Smoke Grenade consumable to help them set up (or escape from) ambushes and confuse their opponents in encounters. Said item appears to be made from an aerosol can of some type and some duct tape and will blanket the nearby area with a thick cloud that slowly dissipates over time.
• Treasure Map: Occasionally outlanders will come across photographs that highlight a remote area of the map where a large stash of loot can be found. Trekking across the map to actually get to this location and then finding the tiny mound the stash is buried in can be pretty difficult, especially with the time limit imposed by the impending radiation cloud. There's also usually more than one copy of the photo on the map, meaning there might be competition at the stash. On the other hand, luckier players can just randomly stumble upon it uncontested without ever picking up a photo. Regardless of how one gets there, players who find this cache will find nearly an entire backpack's worth of valuable loot... that they'll now need to get to the nearest exit without being vaporized by the rads or shot apart by other fleeing outlanders.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: A mysterious, unnamed woman gives Outlanders survival advice over their radio. She's the only known Non-Player Character in the game.
• Wall of Weapons: Each player house has a large weapons cellar with walls displaying the various guns they've acquired in their travels.
• Weird Currency: Unlike most other Survival Sandbox games, food isn't used to stave off hunger, instead being used as a currency to "buy" Loot Boxes via donating food to the poor. The game's UI even labels food as a currency.

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Radiation is coming. Don't stay too much longer.