V Rising: Hitting the Hemoglobin

Ever want to play a vampire who hides from the sun in the castle they have built to protect their riches from other vampires? Then this is literally the game for you. If you’re more in the mood for a PvE survival game, though… have you heard the good news about Valheim?

Team Spode has been playing V Rising for a couple of months and I have not written about it until now. I’m not even sure if I’ve mentioned it on social media. I’ve been trying to answer the question for myself of why I am not enthusiastic about this game?

V Rising is, at its core, a Diablo-esque action RPG. The perspective is fixed overhead. Combat is real time and reactive, with a few key abilities chosen from among all those you’ve unlocked at your call, each with their timeout.

Villagers are your prey. Bosses, known as V Bloods, are your enemies. Everything will attack you on sight, save only other wolves when you are in wolf form. Hapless villagers and their protectors aren’t the only dangers — other vampires can sniff you out and invade your castle and perhaps kill you while you sleep. (This is possible even in PvE servers as you can drag offline vampires into the sun to kill them. Sleeping in coffins prevents this.)

The living and the undead aren’t your only enemies. The environment itself will try to kill you. Stay in the sun for more than a few seconds and you will catch on fire. Stepping into holy ground will weaken you. Holding silver will drain your health. Sniffing garlic will give you a long-lasting debuff. It’s not easy, being a vampire. You even have to watch what sort of blood you drink.

Drinking mortal blood gives you some of the abilities of the being you drank — Creature, Worker, Warrior, Scholar, Rogue and so on. Better blood — on a scale of 1% to 100% — determines how many of their abilities and of what strength you now possess. You don’t have them forever, though. Using vampire powers drains the blood — healing drains it fastest of all, but even sitting doing nothing will drain it slowly. You can imprison humans with the blood you desire and try to keep them healthy by feeding them fish. You can keep a human on ice this way for quite a long time, but at some point you will need to go out and hunt again.

Dying and coming back to life will give you half blood back and at a 0% “Frail” power. Eating hearts will do the same, but is fine if you’re just working on the castle and don’t want to take the time to hunt.

Balancing these disadvantages are your servants, charmed humans who have been forced to do your bidding. They will protect your castle while you sleep, and gather resources while you’re away. Although they have no vampire powers of their own, they do have the powers they possessed before you dominated their will, and they have the gear you provide them, gear which can be as powerful as the gear you wear.

This is V Rising’s core gameplay loot. You, the vampire, hunt V Bloods in order to unlock new powers, crafting machines, castle parts and recipes. (Papers, scrolls and schematics, all of which can be dropped or crafted, can be studied to provide even more recipes).

You build your castle, add defenses, and set your servants to protect the heart of your castle, the key to your demonic demesne. Other vampires can craft keys to invade your castle and destroy or take control of your castle heart, adding your possessions to theirs. You can join a clan and have fellow vampires ready to protect you as well. In the end game, the vampire clans battle over control of Soul Shards that grant powerful abilities to those that control them.

The problem with PvP games where you have to level up and grind for better gear (as opposed to match-style games where everyone starts each match from zero) is that new players are at a disadvantage. They can’t defend themselves against higher level vampires with better gear — they can’t even touch them. And their weaker castles will be easy prey.

V Rising does the best job it can hiding your information from other players. It will show your clanmates on the map, but it won’t show enemies. It won’t show anyone else’s castle you haven’t discovered. Vampire teams could decide between themselves to start in the east or the west and split the map between them for the early game to give people a chance to grow.

In theory. In practice?

We run a PvE server, so most of the game is locked away — we’re not invading each other’s castles or hunting down other players are they sleep. What’s left to us is taking on the V Bloods and working through the plot that initially pits us against a bandit king, but then later sends us against the powers of church and nature itself.

Each V Blood is unique — each fight is carefully crafted. Each will require the vampire to bring specific powers and buffs (usually via crafted potion) and their best weapons and armor. And also their best bloods — blood that may not be available to newer players.

The V Blood fights scale with the number of players and what looks to be the average equipment level. A fight that might be fairly straightforward solo might become incredibly epic if taken on with a group. In last week’s run, we took on a wandering vampire hunter that we had taken on before with a smaller group and lost — twice — in battles that had a lot of deaths (on our part) and took the better part of an hour.

Valheim does the same, to an extent, but Valheim has just five bosses. Here, with players of all skill levels and gear levels, it just becomes impossible to progress as a group.

More than a month in, most people are only playing minimally. I’m just in it once every day or two to order my servants around and put more resources in to cook. I actually have all the resources I need to equip my six servants with gear equal to my own, but there’s no point to it really. If the servants could accompany me on V Blood hunts, then… then that would be cool. Might make things a little bit too easy, though.

This is my biggest gripe about V Rising, though — the control scheme. It’s WASD, and you look where your mouse happens to be. It’s no secret that I prefer controllers over keyboards for my videogames. I can deal with WASD… but the mouse. With all the lights and colors and explosions everywhere during fights, it is super easy to lose track of the mouse that is so important for aiming. This game needs a better method of targeting — at least a choice between free aim and a locked target.

The game also adds mechanics meant to make your life outside of your castle perilous. The default server settings prevent using the fixed or player-constructed waypoints — fast travel points — if you are carrying any resource, or if you are bringing a charmed human back to your base. If you accidentally picked up a piece of paper from the ground, welcome to walking. The only exception is for blood bonded gear, which is your worn pieces and your weapons. Blood bonded gear also remains with you when you die, while everything else is dropped where you died.

The upshot here is to discourage you, the player, from hunting, and instead just sending out your servants in your place, as they don’t move normally in the world (although they can receive simulated injuries as if they were). All those of us who are still playing are doing just that; logging in to maintain their castle and send out their servants.

Since we have a player who finished the game and has all the crafting machines unlocked to their highest levels, there’s not really a need to do more than that. And that means there’s not really a need to log in at all.

V Rising was a lot of fun at the beginning, back when we were building our castles for the first time and exploring the world. Now the world is explored, we have the best gear, the castles are build and… we finished? Without the PvP aspect, once you’ve gotten to a certain level, there’s just no more to do. At least with Valheim, you can build towns and cities and explore. V Rising doesn’t give the same building experience. Castle pieces come in square pieces, and having to have crafting machines in enclosed rooms with certain floors lends a certain sameness to every castle.

It was worth $20, for sure, but like the Friendly Necromancer, I’m pretty much done. Almost nobody logs in anymore. For Team Spode, I honestly think MMOs are a better match for our playstyles than survival games. The problem then is, which MMO? It’s impossible to get everyone to agree on something like that 🙂 Especially since subscription fees are a non-starter for a lot of people.