Despite a slight delay, recently Stunlock Studios new indie game V Rising successfully moved into early access, opening its doors to players willing to part with a small amount of their hard-earned cash. Now we have considered all the chips and features of the game, let’s see what it is.
V Rising is an isometric RPG about a vampire waking up from a 100-year slumber. Extremely weakened, he tries to find enough food in the nearby settlements, rebuilds his castle, and also tries to build an entire empire to declare himself the next Dracula. Players will find a huge open world where you can hunt monsters, bandits and civilians of the village, a castle building mode, as well as the ability to play both alone and together with other players – both cooperating with them and fighting against them.
It also became known that in just three days since the release in early access, the survival simulator V Rising was purchased 500 thousand times. Now the developers have proudly announced a new achievement – 1 million copies sold. Such an impressive result was achieved in eight days.
V Rising became the best-selling game of the week. The project from Stunlock Studios managed to bypass another novelty, the shooter Arma Reforger, as well as the third-person action game Elden Ring, which had a foothold in the top, which dropped to fourth place. Online in V Rising also continues to grow. If just four days ago there were 100,000 users in the game at the same time, now this number has increased to 150,000. And on May 31, the game passed the mark of 1.5 million copies sold.
This project is a really great example of a Valheim-type prepper, but it’s a lot more fun and you don’t have to cook and wait for items to be crafted. Instead, the game forces you to go hunting to earn a living, look for resources, and maintain your castle.
Your main task will be to justify your own habitat in the form of your own castle. At the same time, the scale of construction can become truly enormous. Construction in the game captivates with its ease, and the extraction of resources does not take much time and effort, you will always find everything you need practically under your feet. And machines will be engaged in the construction of blocks and the manufacture of wood, although this requires an essence, which, by the way, is always knocked out of your enemies.
Key points about V Rising
Let’s start with the simplest – this is an MMO. It is expressed in the fact that before you start diving into a new fascinating world, you need to choose one of the many servers. All of them are divided by type – official\unofficial, focus – PvE, PvP, hardcore PvP with full loot and “Rules” (server settings).
Once a character is created, it is bound to the selected server and cannot be transferred to another. It should be noted right away that the total capacity of official servers is 40 players, and the maximum possible is 60.
If, for some reason, you do not want to play on “foreign” servers, you can create a private server through the appropriate option in the main menu or raise your local server through a separate “client” (automatically installed with the game). It is important to note that, in fact, both options allow you to create your own server, but in the first case, if you want to change the “rules”, you won’t be able to.
Survival and blood
Since you play as a vampire in V Rising, the process of survival is quite simple, it comes down to keeping an eye on two things – the sun and quenching your eternal thirst. Due to the day-night changing system in the game, your most dangerous enemy is daylight and sunlight, because, as you know, under the influence of vampires, vampires quickly turn into a pile of burning ash.
From a game point of view, this feature looks like this: as soon as the character is in an open area during the daytime, a golden beam falls on him from the sky and begins to gradually increase. After a short delay, it reaches full strength, and only after that the character’s health quickly disappears every second. Fortunately, by default, with full HP, the player has a couple of seconds to hide in the shadows, which in turn are constantly changing, simulating the effect of the sun on various objects.
With a thirst for blood, everything is both a little simpler and more complicated. Firstly, a vampire, as a special creature, is forced to periodically feed on blood in order to replenish his reserves and, so to speak, “not die”, from a game point of view, as soon as the reserve reaches 0, the character begins to receive periodic damage. Secondly, blood acts as the easiest way to restore health, and trust me, you will use this opportunity quite often.
There are two ways to replenish the supply of blood: suck it out of any living creature or eat hearts that constantly fall out of opponents. However, if you choose one of the methods, you will face the difficulty mentioned above – after drinking any blood, the character receives special buffs depending on its type and quality (hearts have a neutral blood group, without any effects).
At the time of writing, there are only 6 types of blood in the game with the following properties, and the quality of the blood (it is determined randomly for each opponent) determines what level of the property you get (there are 5 in total).
- Worker – affects the amount of resources received, the damage of resources and gives a small chance to instantly destroy the resource.
- Creature – Increases movement speed, increases sun resistance, reduces incoming damage, and increases health regeneration rate.
- Warrior – Improves everything related to melee damage and weapon ability damage.
- Brute – Adds an HP recovery effect to the main attack, increases attack speed and a few more combat-related properties.
- Rogue – Improves everything related to weapon critical damage, reduces dash cooldown, and adds a 100% chance to deal critical damage.
- Scholar – Improves everything damage related abilities and gives them the HP recovery effect.
Note: Level 5 always increases the effectiveness of all previous levels by 30%.
World
The world of V Rising is divided into 5 different regions and is quite large, especially for 40-60 players. Regions differ from each other in biome, resources and, most importantly, opponents.
For example: in the first starting biome, you will encounter normal creatures, undead, bandits and law enforcement armed with basic melee weapons and bows. In the upper left biome, you will already find mythical harpies, knights wearing heavy armor, and soldiers with guns.
Also, some biomes have very interesting features that must be taken into account in the process of exploring the location. For example, in the already mentioned top left biome, you can stumble upon houses surrounded by garlic – a stacking debuff hangs on it, churches surrounded by a holy aura that deals damage over time, and corrupted mines struck by mysterious green energy.
From the point of view of the mechanics of interaction with the environment, there are not so many of them yet, but there are interesting things, such as: a character can jump from rocks, opponents destroy objects with their attacks and cause damage to allies, ordinary opponents or mine bosses patrol the roads, opponents can attack each other if they belong to a hostile faction (humans attack the undead).
Gathering resources
Since V Rising is a survival game, the most important aspect of the gameplay is the collection of resources, performed almost according to the standard scheme, but with a number of sometimes very pleasant features. Firstly, the developers moved away from the standard system “To collect ore, the player needs a pickaxe” and allowed to collect resources with any weapon of a suitable grade. For example, sulfite can only be mined with copper weapons, and iron ore can only be mined with “advanced” copper weapons.
Although there are still some “tools” in the game in the form of a special property like “Weapon deals additional damage by type of resources XX”. However, I did some tests on the example of a mace with the effect of increasing damage to minerals and it turned out that it only speeds up the mining process itself, and the total amount of resources is about the same. In general, except for one small detail, it doesn’t matter how you get resources. An exception to the above is the fishing rod.
Secondly, some basic and even advanced resources can be obtained not only by collecting resources or processing, but simply as loot. The developers stuffed various resources into loot from opponents and settlements scattered around the world with a certain list of possible resources. So if at a certain point in time the player gets tired of collecting ore, flowers, chopping down trees and he remembers that he is playing for an immortal vampire, if desired, you can safely cut out several mortal villages for the sake of valuable loot.
It is important to note that loot in the villages is contained in almost all destructible objects, ordinary and gold chests. The latter store the most valuable items, but they also open with a delay, which, of course, plays a special role on PvP servers.
Equipment
So we come to the first RPG element. In V Rising, characters do not have levels, instead their combat potential reflects the average level of equipment, this figure is displayed to the left of the HP of the character and opponents. Basically it shows how dangerous the enemy is, and affects the damage taken / dealt based on the difference. Apparently, the maximum possible GS of a character is 78, and the strongest opponent is 80.
The process of improving equipment is carried out according to a simple and standard scheme – they created a basic set of equipment, then opened a new one and switched to it (sometimes one improves into another). But all this is related to the overall progress of character development, which we will talk about a little later, but for now we will study the process of improving equipment, from basic to endgame:
- Bone weapons and Boneguard equipment.
- Reinforced Bone weapons and Plate Boneguard equipment.
- Copper weapons and Nightstalker equipment.
- Merciless Copper weapons and Merciless Nightstalker equipment.
- Iron weapons and Hollowfang equipment.
- Merciless Iron weapons and Merciless Hollowfang equipment.
- Dark Silver weapons and Dawnthorn equipment.
- Sanguine weapons and Bloodmoon equipment.
There are only 8 items of equipment. Almost all of them are graduated from white to purple, and with the exception of the rings, they have very simple effects (bonuses are sometimes set) and a margin of safety (this is the smallest detail), periodically requiring repairs.
- Weapon – does not fit directly into the equipment interface, but is located on the quick access panel, which is why in battle, if desired, you can switch between all available types of weapons.
At the time of writing, weapons are divided into 7 archetypes – sword, axes, mace, spear, bow, scythe, twin blades (like BloodRayne). The last 3 are available starting with iron weapons.
- Cape.
- Ring.
- bib
- Pants.
- Gloves.
- The helmet is a decorative item and does not provide any stats.
Skills
The second element of RPG is expressed in two simple things – weapon abilities and character abilities. Like the process of upgrading equipment, they play a huge role in the development of your character, although in my opinion one is much more significant than the second.
Each weapon archetype, with the exception of the basic attack, has 2 special abilities, they cannot be changed, mixed with each other and, most importantly, unlocked at the very beginning. This is due to the fact that they are tied to a certain stage of development: Copper weapons unlock 1 ability, and Iron weapons unlock the second.
With the abilities of the character, everything is already much more interesting, they are divided into 5 different areas (schools) and special vampire ones. In battle, a character can use a dash, two active abilities, an ult, and each school has its own version of a dash, 2 ult options, from 4 to 5 active abilities. Accordingly, they provide a choice of 38 abilities that can interfere with each other in any way.
The process of unlocking the character’s abilities is extremely simple – during the training, they give out a drawing of the “Blood Altar” building, which contains a list of all mini-bosses. Each such boss comes with one of the school’s abilities or a vampire one, you just need to defeat the boss and then drink his blood.
As for vampire abilities, this is a set of unique, mostly non-combat, but extremely useful skills. For example, the ability to hypnotize opponents, then turn them into faithful slaves or a living bag of blood, the ability to turn into various animals or people.
Perhaps the most useful of these abilities is bat transformation, which allows you to fly over the map, but alas, on all official servers, the option is enabled by default to prevent teleporting / activating the mouse from if the character has resources in his backpack.
Character development
This item includes one already standard common game mechanic and one unique one, both determine the overall progress of the character development. The first is a standard research table that allows you to unlock new “things” in 3 categories: base buildings, equipment, weapons, rings, and consumables.
To open “things”, the player needs to get a book with a recipe for this thing or collect a certain number of knowledge items to unlock a random “thing”. There are three such tables in the game and each is tied to its own stage of general progress, and each of them uses its own subject-knowledge in a certain amount: the first will require 50 sheets of paper, the second – 75 scrolls, the third – 100 schemes and so on.
The second unique mechanic is the same “Altar of Blood”, because in addition to their abilities, some of them also have special buildings for the base, recipes for “things”, alternative ways to craft advanced resources, and so on.
For example, to unlock the basic processing machine of the Tannery at the very beginning, you will have to kill the archer to unlock the Iron equipment – the bandit king, etc.
Building
No Survival title is complete without a building system, and V Rising is no exception to these rules, besides, every self-respecting vampire should have his own castle. This feature plays a huge role in the gameplay because you can’t get advanced resources, accessories, access to new things, and so on.
The creation of a castle or one’s own base begins with the formation of a core (heart), its link can be located in almost any part of the world, outside of the extremely obvious places where cities of people or unusual terrain originate. On the official server with standard energy sources 1, the player can create two bases, and the maximum possible number is 5.
After creating the core, it is necessary to activate its blood (drops from all opponents) and it is necessary to feed the process. This is necessary to protect against other players even on PvE servers. Fortunately, the blood is collected quite simply, for example, it is enough for me for about a month of protection.
Since the rest of the assignment is simple, I will describe the basics briefly:
- The territory around the core is expanding due to a special “border” structure. You can only place a certain number of borders at the core level.
- Various structures are placed inside the base: a coffin (resurrection point), crafting stations for basic and advanced resources, workbenches for creating basic and advanced equipment, a chest for dismantling equipment, research tables, monster spawn points (for collecting resources), a container for storing things, etc.
- I would include human cages to turn them into living blood sources and teleport points (returning to the need for multiple bases) as dedicated base structures.
- In the later stages of the game, minion coffins are opened to turn people into loyal slaves. They will guard your base, but the most interesting thing is that they can be sent to extract resources. However, first you need to equip them with good equipment to increase the chance of success.
Final goal
Unfortunately, I was not able to fully test the main goal, but based on the available information, it is as follows. There are 3 special relics on the map called “Soul Shard”, guarded by the most dangerous bosses. If you can kill the guard, grab the relic, and move it to the base, a new structure will automatically open, allowing you to get a powerful 2-hour buff. Actually, 3 relics = 3 powerful buffs.
Depending on the rules of the server, one or more players can take possession of the relics, but the idea itself is ideally suited exclusively for PvP servers.
V Rising is a decent multiplayer survival sim. The game definitely deserves your attention. For a small amount, you can get a large amount of content, which is already superior to the same Valheim at the moment. It will take more than a dozen hours to complete the game, but this is only the beginning. I’ve been enjoying the game for a huge amount of time.
Similar to: Valheim
