I’m done with V Rising after about 56 hours.

I technically did not “beat” the game, but I am done. All bosses have been defeated aside from the last two: Adam and Dracula. I have maxed my gear and spells, acquired a Legendary weapon, and was otherwise facing down 5-6 additional hours of “gitting gud” before seeing… I don’t think there’s even credits screen here. There have been tough bosses leading up to this point, but these last two have multiple phases and Adam even requires the crafting of a special consumable to even access him for an hour. I think I could eventually take down Adam by investing in crafting a different endgame weapon, or swapping out spells during a fight transition, but honestly fuck that.

Overall, I stand by my earlier assessment of the game, e.g. it’s OK. I did develop a deeper appreciation of the visuals though and the overall art direction. Running around the map during daytime became an interesting game unto itself, as you tried collecting resources or fighting mobs only to have the shading tree collapse from an errand attack. The sound that accompanied increasing exposure to sunlight was also very satisfying (if not deadly). The moment-to-moment gameplay was satisfying.

What is less satisfying is the grind on the macro level. As stated before, there is no XP here, and mobs themselves rarely drop anything of value, so there’s really no point to combat. The whole vampire fantasy takes a bit of a hit when you rush from house to house rummaging through dressers for bits of cloth and paper. A lot of that has to do with some of the absurd recipes.

Here is an example of what I’m taking about. I need Power Cores to craft an item. Crafting them requires 18 Radium Bars + 9 Charged Batteries for 2 Power Cores. I’m just going to ignore the Charged Batteries, because you basically just farm Depleted Batteries from certain enemies and then have to juice them up out in the world. The Radium Bars on the other hand… oh boy.

• Power Core x2 = 18 Radium Bars + 9 Charged Batteries
  • Radium Bars x4 = 135 Tech Scrap + 9 Sulfur + 3 Sludge-Filled Container
    • Tech Scrap = mob drop and/or mining resource
    • Sulfur x1 = Sulfur Ore x45
    • Sludge-Filled Container x1 = 9 Glass + 9 Mutant Grease + 3 Iron Ingot
      • Glass x1 = 45 Quartz
      • Mutant Grease = mob drop*
      • Iron Ingot x1 = 45 Iron Ore

Again, all of that for two (2) Power Cores. You need 9 Power Cores to craft the highest tier of necklace. So that’s 90 Radium Bars. Which might not have been as bad as it felt if there was a reliable way of farming for Radium Bars directly. Instead, at best you are running around 1-2 areas breaking all the boxes in a desperate hope that you can get 5-10 Radium Bars from drops. That shit immediately reminded me of Warframe, and it feels outrageously dumb for the same reasons. I can sorta maybe get behind mining for ore as a fledgling vampire, but endgame Dracula-esque vampire overlord reduced to breaking open boxes for loot is too much. Farming enemies? Good. Breaking background clutter? Bad.

One thing that made it better/worse were servants. These are people you capture and then turn into vampires, who then can be sent on resource-gathering missions. While it takes a bit to set them up – they have to basically be equipped with the same gear you have, which means grinding some more – they can return fantastic amounts of resources on a real-time basis. To a point. There are several time increments you can dispatch servants on, such as 4h, 8h, 16h, and 24h, but the difference between 8h and 16h is not 2x the loot. Which means you are better off logging on, dispatching servants for 4h or 8h, then logging off. Sometimes they get injured, so they cannot be immediately be sent back out.

So, anyway, there I was, logging onto V Rising three times a day to dispatch servants because I no longer wanted to spend time manually farm resources. And remember, I’m already on +100% global loot. Once I realized that I could only play more of the parts of the game I enjoyed by playing it less… I did so. And then discovered that the other games I was playing instead were actually kind of fun and rewarded me for playing them more. Imagine that!

Arguably, none of this is how V Rising is “meant” to be played in the first place. You’re supposed to be out in the world with your chums, farming some mobs, attacking (or being attacked by) other vampires and stealing their loot, defending your castle from destruction, and so on. Theoretically, it would feel like less of a grind if there was more grind, insofar as you wouldn’t be hitting the endgame wall as early. Or something. But by the time I got there, I kept asking myself: why this over Diablo 4 or whatever? At least there I had something to potentially look forward to from killing all these random mobs.

That’s V Rising. I give it props for melding the survival crafting and ARPG genres in an innovative way, and overall being a very slick game. I can see how other people might play it for hundreds of hours with friends and/or internet strangers. But it doesn’t really deliver a better experience in any individual one of the categories compared to other offerings. And while it does offer most of the trappings of a good vampire fantasy, it shrivels up in the sweaty heat of an unnecessarily grindy endgame.