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!

[Timur]

I play it solo, so I simply increased the size of stacks, the ressource yield and refinement rates. It doesn't make the fights easier, but it cuts down on the grinding aspect a lot.

[[Lord] Vader]

I, too, started on Normal w/ default settings to experience the intended experience. Well as intended as it can be playing solo I suppose. Over time, either annoyed w/ the grind or frustrated at certain boss battles (f-ing adds), I've switched to Relaxed and adjusted server settings to make things more enjoyable (for me). Don't be stubborn. Just tweak things to your liking and have (more) fun!

Overall, I've enjoyed my time w/ the game (post settings tweaks). I just wish it was more open without the chokepoints in gear development/V Blood targeting that happen at the end of each biome. But as others have said, that is kinda how these games usually work.

[KeeperOfTheSoul]

I would like to see a more nuanced initial start page. Something more like the System Shock remake, where instead of a single difficult option, it has individual difficulties for different elements. I know you can customise that in the advanced settings but I don't think many new players will know what options they need to get a good solo experience.

It might be worth having a second set of rules tailored for solo play (as a simple check box in the new game menu) without a dedicated server. Offer the same difficult options of relaxed/normal/brutal, but with tweaked defaults for carry amounts, crafting times, resource gathering, etc.

[R4SO]

you can still change the settings and you should when playing alone

[Xan84]

Agree with some things, like the damn clicking on chests, I should not have to do that. More so, at least the chests should share space. So If I put on the 3th floor 3 chests of the same type, I can get items from them from the chest in the first floor. It looks so bad to have all those chests just "there". I want to hid them away as much as possible.
The build aspect, yeah, it has issues. I wanted to move stairs and to do that I had to remove the entire floor to do so, crazy ♥♥♥♥. I guess you can also place another stair but that has another space issue to have where to place it. Lucky for me I was just building the upper floor so it did not take much time to remove it but its still stupid like dude, just let me remove the stairs and then I will place it back 1 m to the left. Also and yes, poor planing but plans change, you want to make some modifications and what not,its fun to build!

My biggest issues are with server stability, building from chest and no way to save my house (like save it and get a blue print to remake it later).

[Nihil]

Originally posted by The God Ghetto Holy:

V Rising is a PVP/PVE /ONLINE/ game where replication is an important factor. Gathering resources is done by a clan, not a single person. You end up with multiple facilities churning away at resource production. People build and play together.

Singleplayer requires you to tailor the game to your expectations as a single person. This is typical of this genre of games. If you wish to do things faster, tune it.

I'm a solo player who is playing sometimes with 1 other friend and totally agree.
The devs are awesome enough to let us give the possibility open to tweak and change the game settings to our liking even after we created our game. And solo players should simply adjust values like resource gathering multiplier or inventory stack multiplier ect accordingly.