I was pleasantly surprised to see how well this mechanic works. As the sun travels across the sky, the dynamic shadows serve as fleeting moments of relief from the scorching rays. Players aren't strictly beholden to this loop, though. Once the sun goes down, you can carry out a new round of hunting and looting under the safety of moonlight.
You can use this respite to check in on your material refinement production lines, build additional rooms for your base, and craft better gear to improve your combat level. With a few specific structures at your base and roofing (once your base is built out more), it's a safe place to seek refuge from the scorching sun. Playing as a vampire in a game with a day-night cycle, it's a theme that lends itself naturally to this sort of gameplay loop. None of this is spelled out, but it becomes obvious when you hit certain building roadblocks that require some exploitation and grinding before you can more easily mass-produce that resource.Īgain, none of this is revolutionary for the genre, but what kept me coming back for more was the natural loop: fight, loot, return home, and craft. To complete the building, I needed to explore the map and loot nearby bandit camps to acquire the material. For instance, one of the things I was tasked with building early on required a material I had no way of creating. These start with something as simple as "swing your sword" in the beginning but eventually lead into missions that require some exploration and discovery. Instead, drip-feed tutorials introduce another level of complexity. I didn't feel lost in a world of ambiguity that required a second monitor with wiki guides to figure out what was needed to build a base. On paper, V Rising brings little innovation to the genre, but the way that it guides you through the opening hours is essential to getting its hooks into someone like me, who always shied away from survival crafters.
From there, you chop trees to make a workbench, which opens up the possibility to create additional tools and build additional material refinement structures. It starts with an ax, as it always does in games of the survival crafting genre.