V Rising - Vampire Factory in two shifts

If you take a quick look at the game industry, you're immediately sad. There are remastered, remake, second-rate sequels, third-rate threequels, and, at best, works inspired by someone else's success. Original projects have become rarities. That's why there is so much interest in games with their own face.

And although V Rising uses the successful achievements of colleagues, the game cannot be blamed for the lack of original ideas. At the same time, you realize that to walk off the beaten path, to take note of everything that works and remove the clumsy, not only easier, but also helps to avoid making new mistakes. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...

New in an old wrapper

What happens when you make Diablo III into a full-fledged MMORPG based on Survival mechanics a la Valheim? You get V Rising, but with a number of caveats. MMORPG - a genre where nothing much changes from game to game. Some MMORPG focus on economics, in others - on large-scale raids, in others - on the variability of pumping, but the essence never changes - you kill monsters, pumping levels and gradually collecting his killer. The same goes for Diablo, which over time has departed from its gothic, almost origins of horror and went to the endless grind in a cartoon wrapper. But in my memory, there isn't a single MMORPG where hero levels and weapons aren't an end in themselves.

V Rising is a fresh idea right away, before it starts:

Play in V Rising you can both alone and on public servers with a ban on players to attack each other, or recall the old days in Rust, when hours to build your fortress, diligently sorting items into chests, and the morning you go to the server and see in place of his house ruins.

V Rising is not forced to compete with the players on the server, you want to arrange a lamplight, vampire corner on a private server - please, the content will be as much, you will not miss anything. Want to swing through the pain and tears, but then go off on the same poor guys that you were yourself a while ago - please.

The settings are flexible. Unlike many MMORPGs, in V Rising PvP is purely for the sake of challange, as a kind of appendage to the main campaign. And the difficulty curve grows very smoothly: here we create our own vampire, here we follow the prompts and master the basic mechanics. And here we are released in an open fantasy world, living according to the laws of the classic movies about vampires and werewolves: the devil is afraid of garlic, holy water, silver and aspen stakes.

V Rising doesn't reveal itself right away. For the hundredth time you beat wood and stone for resources and think about lodging, for the hundredth time you secure territory for yourself, for the hundredth time you build walls and ceilings - nothing special...it would seem.

But once you open the mini-map, you immediately realize that you can't build a vampire castle anywhere, that in multiplayer for free lands sometimes local conflicts break out. And God forbid you built a castle originally small with the idea that later you will build a larger one in more favorable places. If the server is not new and you play in multiplayer - you can not build.

But the most interesting thing begins at the moment when you reveal to yourself the nuances, in them lies the reason for the popularity of V Rising.

In a new sauce

As you mine your first handful of resources and build your first castle, V Rising is more of a pushover than a compelling game. You take apart hundreds of items of incomprehensible purpose, trying to figure out what all those branches, crystals, and dice are for. 

The first suspicion that you're not quite in the usual Survival game arises the moment morning arrives in the game. It turns out that daylight hours work on the principle of "lava" between the plates - sun-drenched areas of land turn a terrible vampire into a handful of ashes in a matter of seconds. You can escape only in the shadow, but the shadow of the objects in V Rising is not scripted, everything is as in life - early morning shadows are long, when as at noon there are almost no shadows, you have to hide in the bushes, under the small stones, under the awnings or under the roof. The daylight hours in V Rising are a kind of analog of the ejection from S.T.A.L.K.E.R., only death comes not almost instantly, but long and agonizing. Farming resources and hunting in such conditions is difficult, but necessary.

But the sun is not the only problem during the day. During the day patrols of guards scurry around the location, life in the towns and villages is booming. If you try to feed on people's blood, you'll get a whole squad of Van Helsings on minimum wage. In addition, in the local woods the animals obey not pre-written routes, there is a prescribed simulation of life for the game. To die at the hands of a hungry bear, awakened from hibernation somewhere in the bushes is a common story for V Rising.

The situation is turned upside down as the sun goes down - the bad guys crawl out. The protagonist is constantly tormented by the bloodlust - a waning scale at the bottom of the screen. Thirst for blood is not implemented as an alternative to hunger, you also need to drink blood for passive and active skills. Thus Stunlock Studios creatively played a combination of survival games and MMORPG mechanics:

Thus blood becomes the main motivator, the main expendable. Not levels, not resources, but blood - this is something new for MMORPG. The player is obliged to think about blood throughout the session, live off the blood, heal wounds with it. You can also feed on a rat, but this sacrifice is of little use - a couple of percent to the running speed and soak the worm. The passive style of play is possible only in single player, in multiplayer game any player you meet will be faster, stronger and smarter than you, and if he also defeated a couple of bosses, then you won't escape from your enemy.

Boring

Even though V Rising sounds like a vampire saga, where you play a powerful vampire, in fact, the game is full of the same type of farming items and crafting. Items are created in machines not instantly, but with a delay, so a couple of bars of plywood can be created twenty minutes, and to create a sensible set of armor can take a day.

The more goes on V Rising, the longer the creation timers become, the more the progress curve breaks. At high levels, farming the things you need to progress becomes a multi-hour routine. At the same time the game at high levels does not change fundamentally: we are still in eternal search of blood, "vacuuming" locations and hunting down bosses. The only difference is that if in the first hours of the game bosses seemed formidable opponents, then some 20 hours later the entire gameplay is exhaustively described by the sequence: went out of the castle, drank the blood, collected the loot, returned to the castle and half an hour sorting found, take away from the workbench created and start crafting new items.

Teleports are another problem for V Rising. If in Valheim, for example, without dancing with beads through the teleporter could take everything but the metal, but V Rising teleport to his castle with the loot in general can not, every time you have to waddle home on foot.

Is it worth it?

V Rising is worth watching, but as it is the first game of its kind, the developers made a lot of mistakes. A lot of fresh ideas implemented to "excellent", but the root mechanics sooner or later slips into repetitive. Construction in the game is implemented impermissibly faded, albeit aesthetically, but most unpleasant - it is an artificial stretching of gameplay. Forever waiting to create items and their multi-level crafting takes hours. At the same time it is impossible to achieve full automation, at least one player must always be present at the vampire factory. If you're playing alone, the chores will have to deal with yourself, if a PvE server - it's better to arrange production, but if you venture into PvP - prepare for the fact that your vampire plant will also need a guard, an experienced player can besiege your castle and take all the honestly earned money.