V Rising? More like 'V Grinding' ...

[Yonix]

The title may be a little 'click bait-y', but I want to share some thoughts, positive and negative, on the game, after playing it for nearly 8 hours.

First off, the concept really drew my attention. A ‘survival ARPG’ with a vampire theme? Yes please! The game looks good, and the esthetics are awesome. So, the first couple of hours had me hooked, and I was really digging it. Combat is fun, even though the controls can get some getting used to, and the game performs very well – it’s not that demanding.

However ...

After progressing more and more, and entering the stage of the game where the emphasis is being put on building your castle (which is early on), the frustration sets in.

Here a couple of these frustrations:
- You can’t build straight out of storage, but you need to put the required resources in your inventory. They need to be ‘active’ for some reason. This results in lots of walking and clicking. Those are some unnecessary actions.
- The crafting of items takes so (!!) long. Most of my played hours is just me waiting for the grinder or wood chipper to be done, so that I can finally place that castle wall ...
- The cost of building seems high, and don’t justify the long crafting time.
- You apparently can’t teleport whilst holding resources in your inventory. Why?
- Talking about the inventory: why on earth is the storage space so fricking limited, especially in the early stages of the game. Luckily I have 20 of those small chests that give me the storage space I need! /r
- Tutorials are non-existent. I needed to google most of the things that I came across during my hours in the game. Why can’t I teleport? Google. What’s a ‘Blood Moon’? Google. How does the map work? Google.
- Building mostly consists of rearranging your interior every time you want to place a bigger object. The menu doesn’t tell you how big it is, there’s no grid or something. Want to build a stairs? Just get rid of these 20 small chests first!
- Done building your stairs? Time to find out you can’t place a floor tile on the 1st floor, because it’s outside your perimeter. Rinse and repeat.
- You can’t simply delete a wall or other building structure, but you need to ‘decompose’ the structure surrounding it. For example: breaking down a wall consists of first deleting the columns (which were part of the wall in the first place?), and then the wall.

Next to the above, the gameplay loop really sets in very early on, because you need to expand your castle in the early stages of the game to get the upgrades you need – to level up, craft better gear, take on higher enemies etc. To me the pace is really off in ‘V Rising’. The first couple of hours are fun: you wake up, defeat some enemies, start your castle, and grow stronger. You (literally) hit the wall when you need to start upgrading your castle. That’s when the grinding starts, and you're really taken out of the flow.

Now, this post needs a disclaimer: I am playing solo, on a private server, at the ‘normal’ (as meant to be played) difficulty. I haven’t adjusted the server modifiers, because I had no idea what they did when I started playing this game. It’s too bad I had to find out that I could adjust certain things that could make my playthrough a little more pleasant from the start, but is it really worth it to start a new game after nearly 8 hours – and the frustration that came with it?

Maybe the game is meant to be played PvP. Maybe the crafting becomes less tedious when it goes on in the background after exiting a public server? I don’t know, but playing is casually and solo isn’t giving me the fun I thought it would have.

Question for all of you: are these valid points or am I really missing something here? I’m wondering how all of you are experiencing the game, especially since this is the v1.0. Maybe some of the things have been changed since EA, and the developers are still changing / patching stuff that all would benefit the QoL.

Anyhow, thanks for reading!

[Styles]

Skill issue.

[Shobrun the Explorer]

the grinding aspect can be adjusted on server settings, the teleport w/ material can also be adjusted.
you can change existing save/server by picking load and edit server. hope this helps you enjoy the game more

[Suzaku]

1. Yeah, lots of people want crafting from chests.
   
2. Crafting and refinement times can be greatly reduced in server settings.
   
3. Stack size can be increased in server settings, and you can unlock and craft bags to get more inventory slots.
   
4. Crafting and building costs can be reduced in server settings.
   
5. Teleporting with resources is a server setting.
   
6. Larger storage chests are unlocked with progression.
   
7. The quest in the top left teaches you everything you need to learn. Anything else is shown right on screen. Resources tell you which ones can't teleport when you mouse over them. The blood moon gives you a buff on your UI that tells you what it does. The map is a map; that one's on you.
   
8. Poor planning.
   
9. Also poor planning.
   
10. The wall is deleted first, then the pillars. This is because the pillars are often part of another wall.

You do not need to start over. At the main menu, select Load Game, select your server, and then Edit Settings.

[Glyph]

You should adjust your private game settings to something more reasonable for solo play. Enable teleport with items, increase loot, decrease crafting timers, etc.

[Mikail]

7h in? You did only tutorial or?

You complain on ez start when you got like 30 items, endgame will not be for you my man.
Prob wrong game, you should look what are you buying, its survival game.
You can edit your world so it can be ez for you, but you complain about basic stuff.
You need to plan your base, your rooms and everything, building system is nice and its ez to build.

[gyaru enjoyer]

I ain't reading all that

[Mikail]

Originally posted by 𝔇𝔯𝔞𝔠𝔲𝔩𝔬:

I ain't reading all that

Long story short, game is hard i dont know how to do stuff.

[Senzoba]

you actually don't need to start over all you do is go to load, click on your save,then click on edit settings and adjust any modifiers you want

[Nerevar]

imagine sitting at the crafting stations watching a FULLY automated crafting process instead of you know : DOING SOMETHING ELSE while the thing does its job. god forbird that. modern instant gratification crowd cannot handle that.

people like should just not play survival crafting games AT ALL. they arent meant for the instant reward crowd. you arent the target audience of such games. stop buying them and ask them to change.

[Terminal Desolation]

so the game isn't really meant to be played by small groups or solo at least on the default settings

you can, but you'll spend waaaaaaaaaaay more time running around and doing trivial tasks instead of actually, you know, playing the game and having fun

the timers for crafting are based around the server being always online, 24/7, so you can set up crafting 400 Iron Ingots and go to work or whatever and then come back once it's all done, but this obviously does not work when the timers only count down while you have the game up

definitely adjust the server settings, reduce the crafting timers, whatever you need to do, but the core game play is overall very enjoyable even if there are some really odd design decisions that I disagree with

you can tweak the settings until you find something that works for you, my friend and I just play co op on this and we've heavily customized the settings so that it isn't nearly as much of a grind and we enjoy things quite a bit

the game is fine but the "grind" aspect really is balanced around full servers always online with PvP so you can kill people to steal their resources (which reduces your grind at the cost of increasing theirs), so if you're trying to play it as a single player / private experience you will need to make some adjustments... fortunately the devs do allow you to tweak almost every setting, so it may take some time to find what's "right" for you but it is doable

[Tanyon]

Honestly I have 585 hours in this game and agree the grind can be a bit much. I'd suggest increasing gathering to 3x stack sizes 3x and crafting speed at least 3x if not 5x. You should feel better with those.

[Thauan]

You can literally change how much material you gather and how much time it takes to craft and refine stuff. And you don't need to start a new game, you can find your private game config file to tweak the variables, don't remember where exactly because I use a dedicated server, but should be on your appdata folder somewhere.

[UdderJuice]

Originally posted by Styles:

Skill issue.

These kinds of responses are so useless.

As someone else said there are very robust settings that allow you to adjust literally every single aspect of the game and make it as hard/easy, grindy/or not as your personal tastes desire. And you don't have to start a new game. You can adjust them at any time. You should definitely check them out.

[Yonix]

Thanks for the responses everyone. I didn’t know that you could alter server settings after creating the server, I will definitely look into that tonight.

And it does make sense that the core gameplay mechanics are centered around the PvP / Online side of the game. It just bothered me that the game doesn’t inform the solo / new player to the genre that well.

Luckily we still have Steam Forums. :)

[crzyfsh123]

I felt that grind. Go to load screen reset everything to max.