V Rising Early Impressions. Anyone else check this survival crafting game out?

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BladeOfCreation

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I know what you're thinking. Yet another co-op/PvP survival crafting game in an early access state?! Yes. It's one of those.

This time, you're a vampire. Set in a dark fantasy world in which vampires ruled for centuries before being overthrown and imprisoned, your character wakes up and chooses bloody violence. This one is a bit different from other survival crafting games: the camera view is isometric. The camera is a little wonky during combat, but manageable if you're familiar with Diablo and its cousins. This game very much doesn't play like Diablo. It is much slower than that.

Your character starts with two abilities and the knowledge to craft simple bone weapons. The different weapon types are useful for gathering different resources. Swords for vegetation (plant fiber), axes for trees (lumber), hammers for minerals (stone/ore), and spears for creatures (bones/hides). The weapons do the same amount of damage as every other weapon of the same level. It doesn't look like enemies have specific weapons types they are weaker to, and you can use any weapon to gather any resource type. It will just take longer to cut down a tree with a spear than with an axe.

There are two types of character progression. Your level is your gear level; you don't get XP for killing enemies. There are powerful named enemies that you can track. Killing them grants your character a power, as well as new crafting blueprints. I had to kill one of these enemies in order to unlock the building that let me turn animal hides into leather. That enemy kept kicking my ass, so I tracked down another enemy that granted the blueprint for the crossbow, which I then used to take this other enemy out.

As is common in these games, I've run into resource bottlenecks. The basic resources are readily available and respawn. But I've now spent a couple of hours hunting down a single item I need to construct a building that will then let me utilize a bunch of other resources.

Enemies of your level or higher can be tough. This game is definitely balanced for co-op. There is a day/night cycle. You can stay in the shade or sleep during the day. Direct sunlight will eventually damage you. It will kill you quickly if you don't move into shade. The way the blood/health mechanic works is pretty neat; feeding on different enemy types gives you a different blood type that affects your passive stats. As is befitting a game with such a title, the architecture and aesthetic of your castle is decidedly Gothic.

I'm about 8 hours in and I am enjoying it for the most part. Is anyone else checking this out?

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Hismeowjisty

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I’ve been diving into it too, a bit tough to find a server unless you know someone hosting one online. But even in solo play or with some buddies hopping on in a local one it’s a good time

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Ares42

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Put in about 8 hours as well before I had my fill. I have two major issues with the game, and they're both very central to the game. Firstly, the building system is simplistic and boring. You build floors, you build walls, you build some crafting stations, that's it. I know you can unlock more decoration stuff as you go, but there's not really much potential there.

Secondly, the blood hunting is tedious. You're asked to go to specific points around the map to kill "bosses", and unless your castle is just perfectly positioned it's gonna be a hike to get there most of the time. If you're lucky there's a teleport spot nearby (or you've put the time in to create teleporters all over the map), but even then literally every resource item in the game stops you from using the teleport, so you're gonna be hiking back to base.

I tried jumping back in a couple of times, but every time the prospect of going on another blood hunt just made me log off instead. The game has been compared a lot to Valheim, and both of these issues are very stark differences between the games.

Maybe the game is fun if you're playing on an active PvP server, and it's all about scrounging whatever you can before you have to fight for your life, but even then the combat is far from good enough to create a fullfilling PvP experience.

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chaser324

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#4 chaser324  Moderator

I've played a couple of hours. It definitely has potential, but it's not quite polished or novel enough to hit the highs of when Valheim hit early access.

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BladeOfCreation

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@ares42: I agree that the distances the game wants you to travel and the inability to teleport crafting items combine to form a major nuisance. In my Valheim game I play with a friend, we use a mod that allows us to teleporr metal. I get why such a game is designed with these limitations in place. I just think it's annoying as hell.

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rorie

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Not a huge fan of this thus far! I was expecting something more Diablo-y, but it looks like this is just another crafter/base-building thing and I'm already pretty tired of that whole genre. Never found Valheim very compelling and I'm not sure how far I'll get with this but maybe we can try a stream of it sometime!

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cmaki

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Honestly, I haven't played it yet but I've seen the features of this game. In my personal opinion, this game has a good concept when it comes to characters and animations. Another thing I noticed here is the map -- its vital to survival games like this.

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BladeOfCreation

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I've put more time into this game and while I'm enjoying the overall experience, the base difficulty is punishingly brutal if you play solo. Not just challenging; it's straight-up not fun. One of the main gameplay loops of this genre is that you gain access to a new crafting material, but have to beat a difficult boss in order to turn that material into items. In this case, the jump from copper weapons to iron weapons is significant. The problem is that there is a pretty hard limit on just how powerful your gear can be at any given level. When you host a private server, the game allows you to heavily modify things like resource cost, starting tech level, enemy health and damage, and other aspects of the game. There doesn't seem to be a way to change this once you've started a server.

I'm familiar enough with this genre to understand that the difficulty is designed to get you to play with other people. I'm also familiar enough with games in 2022 to understand that scaling difficulty based on the number of people in a game is possible. The devs just did a hotfix today that allows you to modify the health of enemies with console commands. I'm gonna be using that.