A Diablo-type of game with a vampire theme was sure to climb to the top of my favorite games, but as it turned out, V Rising left a bad taste of garlic in my virtual vampire’s mouth.
I had pre-ordered and initially played it on Early Access, solo, in a private game. In typical PvE survival fashion, you start by punching trees and rocks, gathering some materials to start building a shelter. It all begins with a Castle Heart, which powers your territory and structures. It requires blood essence as “fuel”, which is easily obtained by killing any creatures and using a blood press to drain their hearts.
Lacking in tutorial and with only simple prompts to go on towards my next goal, I felt very lost. The game gives you some kind of guideline that appears on the top left corner, and that’s about it. It’s up to you to figure out the rest. Once you complete whatever pending goal, you click the “Claim” button and another appears. Some goals are fairly straightforward, others not so much as they require you to unlock crafting structures and recipes, plus finding the right materials to make them, wherever in the world they may be.
Progression was definitely not what I expected. This was not a Diablo situation where we kill, get experience, level up, improve skills. You only level up through your equipment score, so the better the gear, the higher your level. To progress, you use the Blood Altar to track down bosses, which unlock structures, recipes and new skills. You can literally track the blood through the map, since it shows as a red swirly trail that points you in the right direction, but it’s not constant and it’s bound to cause some serious disorientation in twisty paths around cliffs. It’s an interesting mechanic to have as a compass, but somewhat flawed.
Boss fights revolve around ranged attacks, stuns, summoning adds and copious amounts of AE spells/skills. Most are not fun when solo but a few of them are doable and offer a good challenge when you prepare potions in advance, choose the best weapon for the job and swap your skills around. Others are absolute horror, and a reflection of how V Rising is intended to be played in co-op with 2 to 4 players. You will find yourself stranded and unable to progress at some point due to the escalting difficulty not having the required materials, structures to craft higher tier items or skills to kill something.
The hotkey controls are not ideal, even when customizing, since while using keyboard and mouse you’re bound to WASD for movement, 1-9 for weapons/consumables, and whatever other keys for skills activation. Clumsy process, and there’s no controller support.
Furthermore, Stunlock decided to “copy” boss mechanics from their previous games, Battlerite and Bloodline Champions, and basically skin the characters to match the gothic vampire theme. Unimaginative and lazy. I mean, one of them is literally the same, Jade, which is also the same Gunner from Bloodline…
Once you defeat a boss, you can drain its V blood to learn the respective special skill. This is meant to be done in order, as you’ll need boss 1’s skill to help you defeat boss 2, and so on and so forth.
One of the biggest annoyances in V Rising is the fact that you can’t teleport with anything other than consumables and your equipment. Not even between your own teleporters inside your own castle grounds. There are large areas not covered by waypoints, and the cave system is one-way only, which can be convenient, but at the same time, not. You can have horses, but they control like crap and you’re dismounted if you get hit once. You’d figure at least you’d be able to swing a sword while on horseback or something, but I guess these vampires aren’t prone to multitasking.
Also annoying, after all this time, every time you log on, the skills and build menus will keep telling you there’s something “new” when there isn’t. After a few weeks, you’d figure there would have been a fix for this.
It’s not all bad though. I do like the blood/power mechanic, but like most of the game, it didn’t come with a proper tutorial. You drain creatures and humans, gaining the properties of their blood type and whatever percentage they have. Instinctively, I assumed that feeding on several of the same type in a row would increase my percentage (or reserves, if you will) of said blood, but no. Whenever you feed on something, it replaces the previous type/amount of blood you had. Weird. But ok, I can work with that. You become frail without blood, and you NEED it, since you use it over time, as you fight and use skills, and without blood, you start losing health.
This is where cages come in handy. If you’re lucky to find someone with a high percentage blood, charm them with Dominating Presence and Kiss of the Vampire, carefully bring them home avoiding all combat since they will be at low health, and keep them as a hostage. You can then drain their blood and feed when you need. But you also need to keep the prisoner alive by feeding it fish. Yes, there’s fishing. Some types of fish are used as prisoner food to increase health and lower misery (another way of saying keep them “happy”), others are used as resources for summons and alchemy.
Charmed humans can be placed in servant coffins and “baked” until ready. You will then be able to gear them up with armor, weapons and accessories, and send them out on expeditions to the areas you have discovered. Servants have “perks” that make them more efficient for gathering resources in areas that match their symbols. Pay attention to these, as well as their power level and probability of success to optimize loot and prevent injuries/recovery time. A little bonus that I found pretty funny, some servants will have curious messages when returning injured, such as “I was stabbed with a pitchfork in my eye”.
There are a few other interesting aspects to the vampire life, such as taking damage from being in holy territory, taking extra damage when in proximity to garlic by getting a debuff that stacks up to 100, townspeople who will sound the alarm and run off to get help, and a couple of vampire hunter NPCs patrolling the roads who can make your life hell. And the best: taking damage from sunlight. You can be out during the day and won’t take damage long as you move in the shadows, which is pretty cool.
What I really disliked was the PvP experience, and before you criticize and say “but you’re playing a PvP game!”, yes, I expected to be killed randomly, and I have been a few times. However, the toxic community is the problem. High levels are constantly stalking and killing the same lower level players across the map for hours. There should be a level min-max range for attacking someone else to make the fights fair. Frequently two or more against one. People who only attack you just as you engage a boss because that’s how they can get the upper hand. The consequences are loss of inventory and loss of item durability, and repairing gear can be costly, especially when you’re being stalked all the time that you don’t have the chance to replenish resources. This free for all needs to be less “free”, so that new players have a chance to get started. And I wasn’t even playing on a full loot server, because in those, you drop EVERYTHING including your own equipped gear.
But the biggest issue are the offline castle raids, with NO LOG of what happened anywhere. At least in ARK, we could see what happened in the tribe log, and that eventually got an offline protection system due to abuse. In V Rising, I had the displeasure of logging on to a partly destroyed castle, with all materials gone overnight, and no indication of anything happening upon logging on. That’s just poor planning. Sure, there are specific times where the server opens up for castle raiding, but no clue when that is, as I have clearly never been online for it. But if we get system messages when our servants return, why not system messages of who attacked and when upon logging on?
This happened every single day for a week, always when I was offline. Every day, I was coming back to destroyed walls, repairing, healing servants. I gave up. The server I played on was fairly low populated, with about 8 people online on a busy night, at best. We traded, we gathered to help with bosses when someone was having trouble progressing, and killed each other on occasion for shits and giggles in hilarious ways. We’d leave the victim’s loot untouched. We were respectful of letting them pick up their stuff.
Suddenly, it was up to about 30 people, with chaos all over, verbal harassment, repeated killing/raiding without a chance to recover, and some group boasting being so righteous for ridding the server of the larger castles. You can’t possibly expect people to be logged on 24/7, so I assume PvP is reserved for those who literally have no life outside the game. Needless to say, I gave up on that and moved on to single-player so I could continue to explore as I felt like it.
The best thing has to be base building. It’s a lot of work, a lot of resources, crafting, and progression, but you can build the castle of your dreams when you have all the tools in place. You can customize floors, wallpapers, place some furniture (albeit limited), paintings, statues. Improve your workshops production by using the respective floor tiles. Create a herb garden and plant trees, provided you find the seeds, and you will have a steady supply of alchemy materials and wood. Decorate an impressive throne room, a cosy crypt with flower urns and candles for ambiance, a jail with prisoners, an art gallery, the Hogwarts dining room with floating candles… I really loved this aspect of the game.
After Stunlock basically abandoned V Rising for nearly a year, some future DLC is in the works that will allow you to build a second floor, and some angry mob mechanics where citizens attack your castle. There is no date in sight for this content but complete server wipes coming along with it, so for now, I can’t even justify playing online only to eventually lose it all. Hopefully they’ll fix the disconnecting, lag and rubber-banding issues, which were bad on a nearly empty server, let alone online with 30+…
V Rising has some interesting features that fit well with the vampire theme and a robust base building going for it. For this reason, I’d recommend the single-player experience or a dedicated closed co-op game with friends only, and staying far, far away from the toxic, abusive, foul-mouthed and often immature PvP player base. Unless you yourself are one of those players, and in that case, have at it, bloodsucker.