Not only will it obliterate you in seconds if you stand in it, it also makes you skulk in the shadows like a cruel headmaster if you find yourself stranded in the wild at sun-up. Instead you’ll need to go kill humans and raid their settlements and hope they drop what you need. Early on some of the crafting is frustrating, when the game says you need a certain reagent to make a certain refinery, and the refinery in question is the only way to get that reagent. Scarfing them down is like drinking textbooks, and you’ll receive new abilities and crafting recipes. This is a game designed for that, but the rewards in endgame are apparently more evenly distributed.Ĭontrastingly, in PvE your focus is on surviving the world and hunting named NPCs whose special blood will bestow properties and knowledge upon you. If you’re heading into a PvP server be prepared to fight a lot and be griefed a lot. Think Ark: Survival Evolved only with no dinosaurs and eighty-seven wolves to every human being.
In a PvP server it’s every drac for themselves, and other players can attack you, destroy your castle, or even take ownership of it completely. You’ll always be in the world even if you’re offline, see, and logging out while you’re anywhere but in your coffin means the persistent world can still mess with you. If you find them sleeping you can also drag them around, presumably so you can get them under shade if they logged off or got disconnected in an exposed area.
Even if you opt to play a PvE server, other vampires will be there and you can group up with them if you choose to. Right away you’re told to pitch your castle somewhere, thought half the battle is finding somewhere that isn’t already someone’s summer home. Through the early hours you’ll chop trees, break rocks, harvest gems and animal parts, reagents and materials. No self-respecting vampire would keep silver in the house. Then you’ll progress through the standard gauntlet of leather, copper, iron and so on. You can be killed, but cannot die, and even burning away to a crisp in the sunlight will see you respawn at the nearest coffin to continue your reign of terror.īeing a Survival game first and foremost, you’ll begin by killing skeletons to craft crude weapons and armour from bone. It’s an RPG without character levels, instead focusing on Gear Level and unlockable abilities that come from hunting what amounts to repeatable bosses. It leans fully into the Vampire mythos, eschewing the trappings of Christian dogma that latched onto the legends over the years and presenting your vampire as a veritable force of nature. The game enters its Early Access phase on May 17, and from what I’ve played I’ve a feeling it’s going to turn some heads. I’ve had access for around five days at the time of writing, having jumped into a pre-Early Access beta. You’ll kill people, you’ll turn into various animals, build a castle, tussle with vampire hunters, and strip-mine several hundred acres of verdant woodland to build that new armoire with matching end table you’ve had your eye on. The onus is on becoming as powerful as you can, either alone or in a Clan of four. The latest venture into the macabre world of the bloodsucker is V Rising from Stunlock Studios, a Survival RPG with a lot of big ideas.Ĭasting you as a customisable neck-nibbler, V Rising begins when you awaken from centuries of sleep with a grumbling belly and a taste for the red stuff. The Blood Omen franchise is a gaming touchstone, for example, while Vampire: The Masquerade continues to release a new game roughly every eleven and a half minutes whether we play them or not. And by and large games that let you play as a Vampire are rarely “bad”, and often present innovations purely by the grace of developers putting their own spin on the mythos. There’s an effortless credence in the concept – suave, sexy, sultry, powerful, timeless. Despite the valiant efforts of Morbius, Twilight, and every Underworld film except the first one (well, maybe that one as well), vampires are still cool.