Live your dream of being a landlord and handyman, that also happens to be a vampire in V Rising.
Stunlock Studios has plenty of action experience, having previously released the MOBA Battlerite back in 2016. That title focused directly on team fights rather than destroying objectives or farming NPCs. The Swedish developer has been working on V Rising for several years. The game came out in early access in May 2022. Now, two years later the full release includes new progression systems and challenging foes. But, the game is so fundamentally different that old player data is being deleted.
For centuries vampires ruled the lands of Vardoran. But, human armies eventually banded together and arose up against the immortal creatures. Many vampires were killed, but some were banished into a deep slumber. You were one of those survivors, and only now have you awoken to reclaim your lost home. Similar to Valheim, you start with nothing and must craft everything from weapons to a impressive castle.
There is some limited customization to your vampire avatar. You can pick a masculine or feminine body, though this locks in a gendered voice. You can also select skin tone and hair from a large variety. There are a few facial options, along with accessories like earrings and glasses.
Your V Rising character is tied to a server, which can fundamentally change how you progress. The server types are PvE and PvP, with recommended clan sizes and adventuring groups. Around 10-60 players can enter a server at the same time. Everyone is vying for the available land, which is finite and static on every map; there is no random seeding. PvP not only has area control but you can be attacked at any point by other online players with no direct means of prevention.
The first main objective is to establish your castle base. The starting Farbane Woods area can support around 20 structures. If you are on a very active server you may have few options and are left with the scraps. These may be plots that are harder to defend or have high-level monsters spawning inside them.
To claim territory you must forge a “Castle Heart” using the blood essence of living creatures. This begins with simple vermin, but you can soon suck the life essence from humans, wolves, and all kinds of magical creatures. As long as the castle is supplied with blood you and your clan mates will retain control. For initial castles, they can hold a little over two days’ worth of blood essence. If the blood supply is at zero for too long, the base will crumble and become overgrown with vegetation even during PvE.
This creates a sort of daily pressure to keep playing V Rising. It would be disheartening if your intricate building decomposed due to time away and its materials were ransacked. However, some players may want to eventually move their castle entirely. More northern territory holds rarer materials and stronger bosses. By relocating it can lower travel time and shorten spawn point distances.
Building mode is easy and very intuitive. It allows for the quick creation of fortifications and living space. If you make a mistake, you can refund all of the used materials by holding down the spacebar when close by. You can also move any placed object without the need for deconstruction.
Creating a secure shelter is very important as you don’t leave the world when logging off. Your character remains in their current position, making them susceptible to roaming enemies and hazards. Other people can drag your body; possibly to help you, but they can also send you into danger when off-line. It is best to always log out while inside your castle and sleeping in a coffin. You should manually close your front door to keep out vandals.
There is a fast travel system in V Rising, allowing teleportation to already-visited locations. This can sometimes be handy to reclaim lost loot or continue a quest. However, carrying “certain” items disables fast travel, though V Rising doesn’t list what you need to store or drop. You have to personally inspect your entire inventory to see which goods can’t be teleported.
V Rising runs on a day-night cycle: 8 hours of sunlight and 16 in darkness. Being a vampire, the sun is extremely deadly and will quickly deal ongoing damage. Ducking into even the lightest shadows will prevent this debuff. This can make exploring in the daytime a harrowing experience, as you need to constantly weave past the sun. This gets even trickier in a fight, as most enemies are not affected by the light, even if they are part vampires.
As a vampire, you must also feed by biting creatures. You can retain a certain amount of blood, and when it hits zero you will rapidly lose hitpoints, until finally dying. Each creature has a level of blood quality and bonus effects when drinking from them. For example, a tier one animal might increase your movement speed, while a tier three worker will allow you to quickly destroy resource nodes.
The majority of gear is not found or purchased (although some merchants do have wares). Instead, most items are crafted from basic materials like stone, wood, bones, and cloth. Swords are used to cut bushes, axes chop trees, maces smash minerals, and finally, spears deal bonus damage to flesh-based creatures. Rarer nodes tend to be concentrated in enemy strongholds which link grinding with combat. The progression treadmill is to farm the materials to make better tools, then use said tool to farm the next material tier.
While you’ll be collecting raw materials, more refined goods can be automated at production and crafting stations in V Rising. This includes sawmills that cut wooden planks, or nest lures that attract wildlife. You only need to load the materials and come back once they are processed.
Outside of basic construction, more intricate recipes are unlocked by drinking “V Blood”. These are essentially world bosses that offer challenging fights by using quicker attacks, stuns, or summon allies. You can track these adversaries when they are close in gear level, but you can also encounter them by freely traveling.
V Blood bosses are given a short text blurb explaining their background. This may detail why they are an adversary or have greater connections to the vampire lore. However, this is as much narrative as delivered in V Rising. You might be left confused about the overall story or lack the motivation to go further.
Rewards for defeating and gorging on bosses can include new weapon types, like the ranged crossbow. You might also be able to learn leather tanning, vampiric transformations, or research magic. Each target has a specific affinity to an element, which allows upgrading the associated magic school.
Combat in V Rising is mouse target-focused; making it important to always hover over the specific enemy you want to attack. Even if you are running in a direction with the typical WASD setup, your character may pivot if your cursor is elsewhere on the screen. This becomes even more complex as you unlock more spells and moves that have different targeting, range, and area of effect.
The castle base and V blood tracking become the major two gameplay loops that feed off each other. You need stronger crafts to beat bosses, and defeated bosses improve your ability to construct said buildings. You will likely spend around 50% of your time inside your dwelling, 30% gathering up loot in the wild, and the final 20% fighting the next big threat.
With the persistent online nature, it can be a huge investment to keep your territory thriving, especially if solo. Without perpetually tending the castle, there is a risk that your lands will be destroyed and seized. And while Stunlock Studios doesn’t have immediate plans to delete data after the release of 1.0, wipes will eventually come with later patches.
The developers of V Rising offer two solutions: private matches and third-party servers. Stunlock Studios mainly suggests purchasing a server from their trusted partner at GPortal. They have different monthly subscriptions, depending on the player’s amount. The most basic 10-person sever is around $13 a month, while a 60-person is $52 a month. This can get costly if you are the sole administrator with no other contributors.
The other method is to directly host a world, essentially making your computer work overtime as a server. This isn’t without some flaws, as you still wind up pinging yourself by both sending and receiving data. You also have to remain online to let others play; as soon as you quit out everyone else on your server will be booted off and unable to progress their current character.
Newcomers should approach V Rising with the same mindset as another massive survival game: Rust. The games contain all sorts of tools to make a great experience, but what matters is the players on specific servers and their interactions with each other. You may prefer to treat V Rising as a toy to temporarily goof around with friends or a larger community you already belong to.
V Rising has some minor bugs with its interface. The game appears to support PlayStation controllers but still lacks the correct assets from Sony. Instead of those specific buttons appearing on the screen, broken lines of code will display and cause menus to overlap.
V Rising can be a fantastic vampire survival simulation, as long as you arrive with trusted friends and no long-term goals. It is a great choice for an existing gaming clan to jump into, or to stream content to an audience. But, entering into a wild and established server can be a crapshoot with housing crises and hostile neighbors.
