I struggled with V Rising to begin with. On a surface level, it sounded great: a vampire survival fantasy where you awaken after a centuries-long sleep to eat your way through a world. It has castle building, thematic survival systems like staying out of the sun and drinking people’s blood, and you can transform into animals and wield magic. On top of that, it plays a bit like a Diablo or Hades. Great – I’m here for all of that. What I’m not here for – and what nearly staked my vampire fantasy in the heart before it began – is tedious resource gathering and crafting donkey work. I hacked trees and mined ore and carted them across maps, then I waited and waited for materials to process. It seemed every few steps of progress I made was interrupted by a grind I couldn’t escape, and my enthusiasm drained like blood from a jugular because of it. A dozen or so hours in, I was nearly defeated.
But then it all changed. The unexpected catalyst was playing online on a player versus player server, which is not usually my kind of thing. Note, finding an online home can be hit and miss as there are so many servers, official and otherwise. I tried a PvE server first that was so short on space for building I was pushed into a perilous part of the world I kept dying trying to return to, which wasn’t fun. But this PvP server was a miracle. Not only were the players uniformly helpful and informative, but the game itself was changed, the rules altered. Resources were gathered in double the quantities and their processing times were reduced. Limitations on teleporting while carrying materials were removed. All the things that had exacerbated my standard experience of V Rising were addressed. It was a revelation – the grind faded and the good stuff came forward. I wish I’d left the confines of my own private server – or tinkered with the rules there – earlier, because played this way V Rising is great.
In V Rising, as in many other crafting survival games, progression and base building are intertwined. The game uses a Gear Score system to determine your level, so your progression through the game depends on your ability to craft better equipment and raise that score, in order for you to take on increasingly difficult foes. However, you cannot freely make new kinds of equipment. Nearly always, the crafting capabilities you need are held by boss characters in the game, so in order to move on, you need to venture out into the world to defeat them. This is the core loop of the game: craft what you can and then seek out the bosses who have what you need to go further. Fortunately, this loop is also one of the star attractions in the game.
