Behold new footage of the coming update, just one week away on May the 17th. For those of you who have missed it, here's a quick catch-up on some of the features you can expect to revamp your blood-sucking experience.
BUILD EPIC CASTLES
With this update comes multi-level castles, the new territory system, and sweeping improvements to building and decorating your lair! Finally, you have the tools to make a mighty citadel worthy of your power.
A NEW WORLD
Vardoran has been reimagined! From beautiful new vistas that house terrifying and mystifying new threats to the cursed, choking mist that completely warps the Cursed Forest experience, you can discover the human-infested lands as if it's your first time again.
ENTER GLOOMROT
A massive new zone with two unique areas twisted in the pursuit of cruel science. Navigate polluted valleys and lightning-scorched highlands to face the mutated experiments and mechanical wonder spawned from the maddened imaginations of the Trancendum.
EVOLVED COMBAT
Confront these new threats with an ascended spell system that has been revamped to make each spell school feel unique, including the new Storm magic. Modify your magic with new spell jewels. Cut down waves of enemies with the sweeping strikes of the greatsword, or go for black powder devastation with the dual pistols.
HUNT NEW BOSSES
New powers roam the lands. Fight powerful new V Blood bosses all across the land of Vardoran and defeat them in epic showdowns so that you can drink their blood to gain their knowledge and abilities.
To get the latest information on V Rising and keep up with news from the crypts, follow us below!
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Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team
Official Server Maintenance
In preparation for Update #1: Secrets of Gloomrot, there is going to be server reorganization and maintenance taking place over the weekend leading up to the patch.
Servers will be CLOSED starting at 12 UTC on Friday, May 12, and will remain down until they come back up on May 17 fully reset and ready for you to explore Gloomrot.
IMPORTANT NOTE! Player-run servers will not be affected by this downtime.
Save Resets in the New Update
We'd like to take this time to remind you that with the new patch, players will have to play on a new save if they want to experience the content of the new patch, and all Official servers will be resetting and reconfiguring to new settings for the coming update.
If you wish to play on your old save with the old patch, there will be a Steam branch publicly available to run your server and preserve your progress, however, be advised that this save will not include any updates that come with our first major content patch.
To stay informed about V Rising, please check out our socials below.
V Rising Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/PlayVRising
V Rising Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VRisingGame
V Rising Twitter: https://twitter.com/VRisingGame V Rising Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vrisinggame/
Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team
Dev Update #19: Mood of Gloomrot
Well, hello there, my people of the night. It’s time for yet another update from the crypts at Stunlock Studios, and this night we uncover the toxic sludge-soaked lands of Gloomrot. Having gotten a little taste of what’s to come in our feature-rich website preview, let’s take this time to get to know our new neighbors from the artistic vision of some of the team that was able to bring them to life.
But first, a sneak peek at some juicy Gloomrot gameplay:
Gloomrot: For the Love of Knowledge
Gloomrot is a biome themed around science gone mad, the old and familiar ideas of unchecked ambition and arrogance in the face of the natural order. The group responsible for organizing these erudite efforts is called The Trancendum, a collection of psychopathically obsessive technologists on a mission to create the next stage of human evolution. This pathology dates back to the times of Dracula, when their still-living, seemingly ageless head-scientist Doctor Henry Blackbrew, originally founded this pursuit in an attempt to fight back against Dracula’s armies.
Over hundreds of years, the Trancendum has studied and advanced its studies through electrical and chemical engineering, inventing incredible technology and jealously hoarding their secrets for themselves. Their efforts are single-minded, sacrificing morality, their land, and even their very lives in an attempt to discover the next big breakthrough.
Concept art for the home of a lower-class Gloomrot resident.
As our 2D artist, Viktor Blomqvist, would say, life is cheap in Gloomrot. All that matters is knowledge and who provides those brilliant breakthroughs. So let us then talk about the most important, the most brilliant of them all, Doctor Henry Blackbrew.
The Good, The Bad, The Doctor
Concept artwork for the Doctor in his full regalia.
“Dr. Henry Blackbrew was once heralded as a savior of man.
When the hungry fangs of the great conqueror Dracula hung over the throat of man, poised to sink in, the scientific luminary was celebrated. Beloved. The last hope for humankind.
Then came the Light.
Suddenly, Dr. Blackbrew was a heretic, a madman with… ‘twisted, abominable methods.’ Yet, what is petty morality in the pursuit of human perfection? Of evolution? Of knowledge? Even as they came for him, torch and pitchfork in hand, he stood by his philosophies. Even as he was exiled in disgrace to the dangerous and hellish lands of Gloomrot, he KNEW he was correct.
… hundreds of years of a prolonged, unnatural life led to this moment.
This birth of something perfect.
The Monster.”
- From the notes of Callista Alchemica, Senior Electrostatician of the Trancendum
Final concept art for The Monster
As explained by our Art Director, Johan Wahlbäck, the region of Gloomrot was our first opportunity to model an entire zone after a central figure, so quite a bit of time went into trying to capture his visual essence. Doctor Henry Blackbrew is a character-driven by self-importance and hatred, and his influence can be felt all across the land as others are driven to follow his example. He has shaped this society to his philosophy, for his own whims. V Rising is a story told largely through visuals. It was important that even if in the game you don’t always get the word-for-word story we envision, you can feel it through the character, the world, and the little hints sprinkled throughout the words of the characters.
Some earlier potential ideas.
The final concept art for Henry Blackbrew.
The Gloom: Gloomrot North
Not an elegant design, but a powerful one.
The northern section of the zone is darker and has a richer color than its lower counterpart. A large part of the challenge of evoking the feel of a machine-ridden land in a fantasy world like Vardoran is striking the balance of how you represent the level of technology. It can be very easy to slip into the space of ‘sci-fi’.
These models felt a bit too modern before we went with a more “hand-made” route.
While this makes sense in our world, we ended up moving away from the human element being hidden inside these machines.
The technology of Gloomrot is supposed to be advanced well beyond the rest of Vardoran, but it shouldn’t feel like an entirely different setting. To achieve that feeling, we took what were initially very metal-heavy designs and used a few different techniques to downgrade them in a way that is intuitive. Much of the metal was replaced by wood, and the metal we kept was made to look and feel dangerously ramshackle. The people of Gloomrot hold little regard for their lives, so it makes sense that while they do have advanced weaponry and tools, those tools are barely held together. An advanced weapon may be just as likely to fall apart or eviscerate its users as they are to achieve its goal.
Our artists took inspiration from wooden dolls and manikins for their designs.
Final concept art for the Driller. This concept once had more protection involved and an interior section. This driller cuts into stone without so much as a guard to shield the operator’s body from debris.
A flamethrower held together with bandages. Hand-hammered, uncleanly fit metal bands. Filthy gas tubes with multiple patches.
The northern section is also quite alive and malevolent. The sky pours down rain, the winds are strong, and lightning constantly slams into the ground all around you, leaving scorched obliteration in its wake. The trees and rocks are angular, pointed, and twisting with few if any rounded edges so that it evokes that perilous feeling.
Industrial meets dark fantasy storybook.
The inspiration for Gloomrot North is rooted in a dark fairytale, and with the presence of gothic architecture seemingly infested with pipes and technology, we aim to seamlessly blend the old and the new into a cohesive place that tells its own story through its environment.
Old historic architecture is plagued by ugly, functional pipework.
Concept artwork for what an upper-class Gloomrot manor might look like. The fencing is bent inwards from mutants attempting to crawl inside.
The Rot: Gloomrot South
The process of constructing this key art piece of a Vampire discovering the sickly depths of the new area.
All of Gloomrot is washed out in its color, lending it closer to the black-and-white monster movie vibe we look to invoke with the general atmosphere. While we bring in the modern feel with bright pops of color, nowhere is that drained and pained palette more clear than in the southern portion of the biome.
This is where byproduct pollution from the experiments of the north wash down into the valleys, polluting its waterways with vibrant, toxic yellows and greens. This is a place soaked in poison and drained of all nutrients.
Inspirations for this place were drawn from all manner of visceral, disturbing imagery to evoke an unsettling feeling. Heavily polluted lakes that were so unnaturally discolored their waters were unrecognizable, cancerous growths, and real-life post-war images of land ripped apart by bombing runs were all referenced when trying to evoke the feeling of a place ravaged by mankind.
A concept paint-over with potential ideas for yellow pools in Gloomrot South. Exterminators fend off hungry, mutated experiments and wildlife.
The land is sick and fractured, its plant life littered with cancerous growths.
This is where the more common citizenry resides, locked away in their hovels and pouring their days into their experiments. They live in the hope that a discovery of their own will catapult them to a higher status within the Trancendum and earn them a place of more comfort and status.
Homes here are meant to look functional but are poorly constructed and dangerous. Electrical lines run directly against exposed dry wood. These people are not concerned for their own safety, and their only concern is having the proper equipment they need to continue to pursue evolution and technological progress.
The housing functions, if only barely. That’s enough for them.
Mutations and Notations
The mutants that wander the area are rarely anything like friendly, but it was important for us to design them with intent. These creatures may be horrors, but they did not come about because they were engineered to be weapons. They are as much a victim of this environment as the soil and the trees.
It was tempting to make mutants that were designed to just be ‘cool’ looking. Engineered bone weapons or simply masses of terrifying deadly flesh are fun to make and imagine but lacked the depth and storytelling we were looking to convey.
While we enjoyed this concept, it was too alien to fit the deeper theme of the area.
There are a lot of fun ideas here that didn’t fit in our vision for Gloomrot, which we may reuse in the future.
An older concept piece for the Mutated Spitter. This version of the design had a bone weapon, which we felt was too manufactured to fit the idea of the mutations.
It was important that the creatures, even the experiments, retained a bit of their shape and were recognizable as what they once were. The pollution, a lot like V Blood, enhances the qualities that already exist and evolves them, duplicating what is already there. These beings were not meant to be weapons, and in that way, you can still relate them to something you’re familiar with.
Final concept art for the Flesh Golem. Recognizing human forms within this monstrosity allows us to relate to the creature even if it is so different from us.
The animation team also worked to evoke the familiar wrongness of these creatures with some nice details. For instance, in one of the new units, the flesh golem, they added separate little toggles for each of the heads on the rig, as discussed by one of our animators, Olov Skiöld.
Our technical animator Albin Thunström also talked about their efforts, focusing on the wrongness of the creature’s movement in its collective, swimming tail movements.
It takes extra work to add these little limbs for animation, but our animators felt like it was worth the trouble.
There was also an effort to evoke the ‘hive mind’ feeling of the creature. As it swings its large arm in an attack, the smaller arms swing simultaneously, as if each part of the collective being is working in tandem with one other.
Aw, they’re helping!
Songs from the Poisoned Valley
The area of Gloomrot is split in two, with two very different and complimentary, and yet very distinct moods. The composer of the Original Soundtrack, Aleksandria Migova, spoke of how she tackled the four different tracks that span from South to North, and night and day.
“For Gloomrot South’s daytime theme, the most important elements that I’ve captured are struggle, sadness, and hope. When the sun goes down and as we enter the twilight zone, you hear the night sing and mourn for all the victims of the past through emotive, atonal instruments.”
She went on to talk about Gloomrot North, and how she made an effort to capture the darker, more evil vibe of mad science and the pained anguish of the failed experiments born of their ambitions.
Clips of all four tracks.
Invoking these unique feelings through music gives another avenue for our players to connect to the world, a way to feel the story emotionally. Aleksandria tapped into various techniques, for instance, employing pitching techniques to make the player feel the twisted nature of the fantastical biome.
Before We Go Back to Our Workshop
Mark the calendar with a claw tip as we grow ever closer to the release of our first big update on May 17th! We hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the mood of our new zone and a little bit of the feeling we’re looking to evoke from it. All of us have been working hard to realize our vision, and we truly do hope you enjoy its dire themes.
If you enjoyed that and want to keep an eye out for more V Rising news, there will be more to share between now and our patch release! We’ll be sharing more on all things V Rising now and into the foreseeable future down on all of our socials below, so make sure you’re keeping an eye on us!
V Rising Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/PlayVRising
V Rising Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VRisingGame
V Rising Twitter: https://twitter.com/VRisingGame V Rising Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vrisinggame/
Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team
Secrets of Gloomrot First Gameplay Trailer
Delve Into the Realm of the Brilliantly Insane
A little taste of what is to come this May 17th, when V Rising will be updating with its first major content patch. Leap into battle upon your vampiric steed to cut down your foes. Travel new lands harrowed by experiments and pollution. Face new foes with new tools at your disposal. Seize the power of lightning, and meet science with Vampire sword and sorcery when you tangle with the master of Gloomrot, Doctor Henry Blackbrew.
To get the latest information on V Rising and keep up with news from the crypts, follow us below!
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.stunlock.com/newsletter
Join The V Rising Discord Server: https://discord.gg/VRising
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V Rising Twitter: https://twitter.com/VRisingGame V Rising Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vrisinggame/
Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team
Secrets of Gloomrot - Big Reveal
On May 17th delve into Gloomrot, a land twisted by the tortured ambitions of a scientific genius and his legion of followers. Obsessed with the pursuit of evolution and progress above all other things, these exiles from the holy lands harness the terrible electrical storms of their highlands to produce brilliant machinery, dumping off the byproducts into their winding valleys until they’re warped by pollution.
Get a taste of what awaits you in V Rising’s first major update with our cinematic reveal!
In this Free Expansion:
A whole new biome with brand new dangers, technology, and magic.
Massive changes, additions, and reworks to the current biomes.
An overhaul to building, adding multiple floors and a wider variety of customization.
New types of equipment to enhance and tailor your gameplay experience including jewels that add effects to your spells, new weapon types, unique legendary weapons, and the electricity-based spell school: storm.
More V Blood Bosses, a new V Blood tracking system, and more enemy variety.
Updates to travel, inventory, vampire customization, sounds and voice, and more.
To get the latest information on V Rising and keep up with news from the crypts, follow us below!
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.stunlock.com/newsletter
Join The V Rising Discord Server: https://discord.gg/VRising
V Rising Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/PlayVRising
V Rising Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VRisingGame
V Rising Twitter: https://twitter.com/VRisingGame
V Rising Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vrisinggame/
Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team
Dev Update #18: Secrets of Gloomrot
Welcome, night kin, to another Dev Update.
Tonight we will discuss some details of the highly anticipated multi-floor castle improvements coming to V Rising in our first major content update, set for May. However, before we get into all of the new stuff, we’d like to ensure we’re all on the same page about the upcoming free expansion of the game and what you should expect.
Let’s have a look at what’s coming!
Update #1: Secrets of Gloomrot
The official name for our first content update and the new places to explore!
Enter Gloomrot, a land of equal parts filth, ambition, brilliance, and madness! Navigate polluted valleys and lightning-scorched highlands to face the uncontrollable horrors of the Trancendum’s mutated experiments alongside the mechanical wonders born of their twisted imaginations. Suck the blood of the brilliantly insane to gain their knowledge and enter a new age of technology.
This new biome will be almost the same size as Dunley Farmlands and is divided into two unique sections, Gloomrot South and Gloomrot North. Each area will bring a new wave of challenges, technologies, and enemies, both great and small, with plenty of space to stretch out and settle your multi-floor strongholds.
More on Gloomrot as it comes. It is, after all, The “Secrets” of Gloomrot.
Gloomrot: A place of mad evolution and poisoned valleys north of the great expanse of Dunley, between The Silverlight Highlands and The Cursed Forest.
Update #1: What do we know SO FAR? Content rundown!
In May, it will be one year since V Rising launched into Early Access, and we’ve been well in tune with the ever-growing chorus of voices that is our community. We have heard what you have been asking for.
You want content.
We’ve been making it.
Bubbling away.
This update is more than a big patch; it will be an expansion-level event and a wide-scale update of the complete current state of the game. We’ve been steadily unveiling more and more of what we’re planning to release. So far, you might recognize some coming features as…
The Jewel system, which will allow you to customize your spells.
Large overhaul to the entire spell system and spell schools to improve combat.
Legendary weapons.
Territories, a revamp on the land claiming system.
These are all features we plan to include in Update #1: Secrets of Gloomrot, when it launches in May.
There was a little confusion after the last blog, with some Vampires thinking they were only getting the spell updates mentioned last time, so we want to be clear that there’s a lot more coming. What we’ve shared so far is certainly not everything, either.
Update #1: Secrets of Gloomrot will be the first of three upcoming content updates planned for the foreseeable future. Update #2 will most likely be our full release and with every patch we aim to improve the vampire experience, getting the game closer to our grand vision.
Now let’s take a deeper look at our new castle-building features!
Your Tower Will Pierce the Heavens
Castles are getting taller than ever, and we’re delighted to bring you the tools to build them. Adding a new verticality to your Vampire lairs will open up a world of possibilities in opulence and strategy alike.
How will it work? Let’s talk about building in the new age of Vardoran.
We’ve updated the stairs to work a bit differently. No longer are they simply the staircase that it took you about twenty hours of playtime to realize could only be placed on ramps, but now they’re much more. These new, bigger pieces are gateways to your upper demesne. Placing one of several new staircases allows you to walk to a new level, and once on that level, you’ll start placing floors to build out the shape of your second story.
Ascend to new heights within your stronghold.
Build an outdoor altar.
Different stairways to suit your style.
These staircases are critical. Once built, they’ll be your link to the higher levels and are thus indestructible during a siege. So even if enemy vampires take down every other wall of your castle, the presence of your staircase will keep the rest of your building standing. Gravity is a trifle in the face of your powerful architectural Vampire magic, and your incredibly stable staircases will be able to hold up a castle up to three stories tall.
Witness your domain from above.
Your new castle also comes with sorcerous safety features. Using the same technology we currently use to draw those lovely blue lines when you place territory, your castle will detect where you’ll need a railing. Your castle will simply construct the railings for you, preventing clumsy Vampires from tumbling over the edge. Don’t worry; you’re still free to leap over the edge. The railings also have defensive capabilities and prevent any attacks from crossing between them. No throwing spears at Vampires on upper levels, nor combusting them with mystical assaults.
Roofing still works much the same in practicality, forming naturally wherever you’ve got four walls or archways enclosing flooring. You can create grand palisades, rooftop gardens, or balconies to act as an entrance and exit when you take to the skies. The layout of your castle is now far more your own, with plenty of ways to create a structure for your greatest aesthetic desire or convenience.
Of course, with all this space, it needs to get a bit more convenient to get around. For this purpose, we’re introducing castle teleporters! No, not the massive structures you can use to teleport throughout the world, but instead smaller, localized paired teleporters. After finding the appropriate recipe and learning to craft them, our clever little sorcerers can create these magical passageways, allowing them to instantly warp from one to their twin. Don’t rely on teleporters during a siege, though! When your castle is breached, it will lose its functionality.
Getting from the first floor to the third floor has never been easier. Or possible, really, but now it is also very easy.
Your Greatest Aesthetic Desire
When Secret of Gloomrot emerges this May, it will include a wide array of structures to make better, more organized outdoor areas. With Territories allowing us to capture areas as a whole, our Vampires will be freer to use their open space. We’ve seen what you’re all capable of in creating massive and sweeping incredible gardens, and now you’ll finally have the tools to do it properly!
We’re also experimenting with major quality-of-life building features and trying to improve the overall experience by leaps and bounds. Instead of having long lists you must scroll through, we’re looking to condense building into a modular design. That means there will be one item with color and style options that you can improve by adding other items to it. Much in the same way you can add a set of drapes to a window, you’ll be able to hang blood rose vines on a standing planter.
This should simplify navigating the UI and allow us to add even more color variations without worrying about overwhelming the player! So more options for diversity in your building pieces are accessed more easily.
Now in Vampire Pink.
Were It So Simple
Some of you enjoy getting a peak into the more technical aspects of our shadowy ritual work, so for all of you Vampires out there that like to get your hands dirty with the raw and gritty details, this section is for you. Let’s take a peak behind the curtain into the oft-obscured world of the challenges of breaking the reality of your game until it works just the way you like.
Adding more levels to castles on its face sounds like a completely reasonable challenge to overcome. V Rising isn’t a two-dimensional space, after all. They’re 3D models traveling up and down ramps, jumping off cliffs, and using felled trees to cross bottomless ravines. Anyone who’s snuck into the center of Vardoran and traversed the misty ruins within (shame on you, you rascal) may have discovered the pain of trying to jump their way out, only to get stuck on a cliff with no path downward. What’s a more 3D experience than that?
Well, allow me to lift the illusion! V Rising is an isometric game that behaves entirely on a 2D plane. The floor only appears to rise and fall due to illusions regarding how edges work and as a matter of perspective. If you’ve ever had the experience of jumping off a cliff and over another player or object, you’ve had the experience of becoming immaterial so that you could pass through them, with the artistic illusion that you’re leaping while doing it.
Think of the world of Vardoran as a thrall. The thrall only understands what we teach it to understand, so it doesn’t really have a concept of ‘3D’. It only understands things two-dimensionally, which is how it was built to think. So the challenge of making multiple levels work is describing an incredibly diverse, complex, fundamental principle to our little servant.
Look at Gerald. There is barely a thought in his empty little Thrall head.
To make multiple levels possible in V Rising, we had to build in that third dimension with a series of exceptions and tricks. To make the game work and behave logically meant a massive revamp of how the space within castles work– and so far, only within castles. To do it in the greater world would be a whole other bag of issues to tackle, so we limited our scope to just the player-buildable space for now.
One of our most complex systems is our “placement rules,” which determine how objects in the world can be placed. This determines where rocks, trees, and bushes can spawn, so it may, for instance, prevent a tree from sprouting up straight through the floor of your castle. It also restricts where you can place and dismantle objects, helping recognize how objects are related to each other, snap into one another, and how they’re related to the environment. This huge rule set had no concept of up and down or multiple overlapping layers.
2D collision map. Red tiles represent barriers, places you cannot walk.
3D collision map. See how they overlap?
The fog of war that prevents you from seeing past objects had no concept of height. That meant no matter where a wall was, above or below you, it would block your line of sight even if you weren’t sharing a floor with it. There were also plenty of technical adjustments to how fade-outs work and what objects, units, and players can be affected by fade-outs, which is pretty important in a top-down game where you need to see what you’re doing!
Let’s not forget to mention entirely new processes that had to be made whole cloth. One example is how walls weren’t designed to stack on top of each other, so they looked awfully weird when you did. New systems had to be designed to understand how all of these art objects fit together in a way that looks natural and stylish. It’s extremely important for your castle to be as good-looking as you are!
Placing floor tiles on a brand new second level. Work in progress.
These are just a few problems that scratch the surface of this huge undertaking, and one we did not take lightly or without risk. The complexity meant that there was some possibility that this task could prove too much to complete in a reasonable amount of time, but we’re proud to report that our warlocks have conquered the day!
And so we Stalk Ever Onward…
In only so many months, you’ll be able to sink your fangs into these new features we’ve been working so hard to bring you. Seeing what our kin do with these new tools will be worth the effort, as has been proven to us in the past. We have faith that you’ll make the most of the opportunity and showcase your most outstanding architectural achievements!
We hope you’ve enjoyed the summary of what to expect in “Secrets Of Gloomrot” and some deeper insight into the improved building and the challenges of piecing together a seamless world. If this blog didn’t cover what you were looking for, fear not! Plenty more information will be on the road to this update’s release.
Goodbye for now, Creatures of the Night!
To get the latest information on V Rising and keep up with news from the crypts, follow us below!
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.stunlock.com/newsletter
Join The V Rising Discord Server: https://discord.gg/VRising
V Rising Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/PlayVRising
V Rising Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VRisingGame
V Rising Twitter: https://twitter.com/VRisingGame
V Rising Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vrisinggame/
Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team
V Rising Update #1: Secrets of Gloomrot coming THIS MAY
Enter Gloomrot...
...a land of equal parts filth, ambition, brilliance, and madness! Navigate polluted valleys and lightning-scorched highlands to face the uncontrollable horrors of The Trancendum’s mutated experiments alongside the mechanical wonders born of their twisted imaginations. Suck the blood of the brilliantly insane to gain their knowledge and enter a new age of technology.
This new biome will be almost the same size as Dunley Farmlands and is divided into two unique sections, Gloomrot South and Gloomrot North. Each area will bring a new wave of challenges, technologies, and enemies, both great and small, with plenty of space to stretch out and settle your multi-floor strongholds.
Explore Gloomrot first-hand this MAY in V Rising's first major content update!
Dev Update #17: Dark Magic Designs
A ravishing new year to you all, my Vampires! It is our first check-in for the new spin around our most feared enemy, the Sun, and an ideal time to discuss our plans for the coming year. We at Stunlock Studios have been spending the most enjoyable endless Swedish nights preparing for the coming year, and what a year it will be.
Tonight, on this most thirsty of nights, we will share with you our visions of the future. We will unveil a massive overhaul to spellcasting and magic progression, as well as a few other things we’re experimenting with.
Be sure to check towards the bottom of the blog, where we discuss an experimental feature we’re working on. We want to know what you think about it, and this is another opportunity to directly affect the development of V Rising, so please give us your feedback in the survey toward the end of the blog!
Our Upcoming Free Expansion
Our next step on the road to full release is the Free Expansion, our first major content release in May.
This update will primarily be about strengthening our foundations with new ways to live out the Vampire fantasy. To us, this means enhancing the way you already play by giving you more of what you already love, but it also means adding more layers of depth and complexity to the world to masterfully tie things together. We’re taking this time to build the game out and prepare it for a satisfying endgame, where we can build up to an apex moment that lets you fully realize your potential.
That journey should be dense with memorable and diverse experiences. By creating new layers of enrichment, like Multiple Floors and Jewels, we’ll be able to build a game that creates more of those moments. The Free Expansion will let you build bigger and better lairs with more control than ever, wield new weapons and magic, explore new areas, and encounter new bosses and factions. Vardoran will get grander, darker, and deeper.
So to whet your appetite, Vampires, how about a little bit of magic?
Magic Schools, Jewels, and New Tools
Let’s talk sorcery.
Like many of our kin, you might remember that we’ve sent out a few feedback surveys between the beta tests and the period after the Early Access launch. One common theme that surfaced was that our ever-clever vampire community imagined a world of greater spell variety and more in-depth interactions between them.
Our aim is to update spells holistically, adding layers with stronger type identity, individual spell modification, and improving the connection between spell types to allow for many more combinations of techniques. With these changes, our kits should be more exciting and put the tools to create more unique, focused, and intentional builds in the hands of our most devious tacticians.
To begin, let’s talk about our most magical overhaul to date, starting with Jewels.
Introducing Jewels
Jewels are a new item type used to strengthen and modify spell powers individually. We want to give players the ability to specialize how they like but also get the opportunity to experiment and try out many different kit combinations. We want you to become the dark warlock of your dreams, whether that means turning your surroundings into hell frozen over, ripping the life essence out of anyone who dares to challenge you or moving through the battlefield shrouded in illusions like a phantom assassin.
To acquire Jewels in our current vision, they’re something Vampires will begin to find around the time they’re killing Clive the Firestarter and similar tiers of V Bloods. They can be dropped by standard units, V Bloods, and chests but will most often be found in the more extravagant treasure chests, which you can identify by their eye-catching gold detailing. When you loot a jewel from an area, it will be tailored to the progression level of that area, so you’ll only be finding jewels you can currently use or will be able to use soon. As you progress, the number of spells you can find jewels for will increase.
Give me your spell jewels, Clive!
While our original design had jewels slotting into weapons and magic sources, it was found to be inflexible to swap out different spells. It discouraged Vampires from being adaptive and from exploring all of the deadly possibilities afforded to them. It’s important to us that this system offers more freedom in spell choice and variety to satisfy your dark desires. For this reason, jewels now slot into each individual spell, and as long as they’re equipped, they cannot be dropped on death. You will only be able to equip one jewel for each ability. Still, not to worry, an extra spell jewel can always be a valuable bargaining chip with a potential ally or a gift for a less fortunate clanmate.
The modifications available on every jewel found will be randomized, and each spell has many different gameplay-altering options that can manifest in these magical treasures. Some effects are unique to that spell, but others will be shared between others of the same spell school. The earliest jewels you find will only have one modification on them, but in later areas, you’ll be finding ones infused with up to three different effects.
These changes to your spell will unlock a new level of customization and interaction between the various magical workings you can employ. With so many possibilities, we’ll be watching closely to see what kind of tweaks we’ll need to make the system as freeing and exciting as possible.
Values are still being adjusted.
My Villain Academia: Spell School ReVamp
We’re taking you Vampires back to school.
There are currently five prime schools of magic in V Rising: Blood, Unholy, Illusion, Chaos, and Frost. Not counted among those core magics are your Vampire Powers, abilities such as mind control to charm weakened humans and make them into servants, and your various shapeshifting abilities.
Each of the main spell subdivisions has been refocused to have a stronger identity. We’ve created better cohesion within specialized schools by adding debuffs that benefit from stacking. This will encourage leaning into the individual magical archetypes but shouldn’t be so beneficial that they discourage a smart Vampire from mixing techniques for other strategies. To act as an adjustable counterweight to balance out any overpowered debuff spamming, we’ll also be experimenting with diminishing returns on stacking debuffs to give us a tool to even them out if it’s too much.
The sheer amount of changes means that every individual spell has had some kind of tweak. Some have only had minor changes, like being rebalanced around the added debuff, while others are almost entirely redone. There are also a few who have been rebranded and moved into different categories where they now fit in better, with their visual effects and theme reconstructed to fit their new place in the new arcane taxonomy.
Placeholder animation for the newly rehomed illusionary mosquito.
Some recognizable archetypes have also been reworked, such as the various shield spells now having a recast to send out a projectile. For instance, Chaos Barrier now lets you toss a chaos bolt, Ward of the Damned sends out a wave of unholy energy, and Frost Barrier bursts out into a cone of cold. Overall, the number of abilities has increased, and each group now has five standard spells, one veil(movement ability), and two ultimate abilities.
We’ll also be seeing a brand new sixth spell school in the Free Expansion, but let’s leave you pondering that mystery a little while longer.
These are about to become a bit more important.
For All You Bloodsuckers Out There
Blood Magic has become the center of vampiric healing and represents a Vampire controlling raw life essence. Blood spells now inflict a leech effect on your enemies, allowing you to attack an afflicted foe and replenish your life force much like, well, a leech. Blood has acquired a little gift from the Unholy branch. The “area of effect” spell Purgatory, which sets down an explosive magic circle to heal your allies and harm your enemies, is now exactly where it belongs.
The Blood Magic page, still in development.
Let’s Raise Some Hell
We haven’t forgotten about the necromancers, of which there are many. More ways to summon an army of the undead is a frequent request, and we’re happy to deliver. The unique debuff for Unholy inflicts an effect that amplifies damage on the target but also has a ghoulish secondary effect. If an enemy dies under the effect of the Unholy amplify, a skeleton will rise from its corpse to aid you in battle for a short time. Unholy will be all about striking down bloodied enemies using their remains to serve you.
There will be other ways to get the most out of your undead army using the Jewel system, such as exploding skeletal minions or summoning up some of those aim-hacking skeletal mages.
Who wouldn’t want this handsome lad on their side?
Unholy emphasizes its summoning nature by conjuring up a trick from the Illusion school. Our favorite spinny fellow, the Spectral Assassin, has found a new home as the unholy Death Knight.
The Unholy Magic page, still in development.
Feel the Burn, Bring on the Chaos
Where else would you expect to dish out colossal damage than the home of our beloved friend, the Chaos Bolt? Chaos magic will be all about aggression, damage, and wreckage. The familiar ignite debuff is making a comeback as a staple of this branch of arcana, and some of the more supportive spells are going to be tweaked to focus on offensive stats instead of defensive ones.
There will be more focus on causing damage to large groups and increasing your ability to put enemies in a position to take a hit. For example, the area of effect spell Void no longer pushes enemies away but instead draws them towards the center.
The Chaos Magic page, still in development.
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t
Illusions are more elusive than ever, being reimagined to let you fulfill your fantasy of being a slippery trickster. This is the magical technique of support and defense and the only spell type so far imbued with two unique mechanics. This specialty will inflict a weakening effect on foes, making them deal less damage with their attacks.
Casting an Illusion won’t just cause a debuff. It will also provide a buff to the caster. The ‘Phantasm’ buff will stack with each cast. With each stack, it will increase your chance to bypass your standard spell cooldowns and give the user a free ability cast. This is similar to a benefit currently available from the scholar blood type. Upon getting this free cast, your Phantasm stacks will clear and begin the process again.
With Phantasm, your dedicated illusionist makes up for their defensive nature by casting more often, so don’t think that you'll have it easy just because you’ve run into a “support” themed Vampire. There will also be some new crowd control abilities, like a fear effect to scramble and punish an overly aggressive opponent.
In addition to these changes, Illusion has proven its playful nature by stealing not one but two spells from other specialties. Unholy’s Mosquito and Blood’s Crimson Aegis have been reworked to fit their new shrouded siblings.
The Illusion Magic page, still in development.
Batty, It’s Cold Outside
The spell school we all love to hate is being horrifically petrified by Frost Magic. There have been major changes to how the chilling debuff works, which no longer freezes outright. If you think you’ve escaped the freeze, think again! There will be methods of consuming the chilled debuff to freeze your foes; it will just require a bit of specialization with spell jewels.
Chill effects also now affect V Blood units, making the effect much stronger in boss fights.
The Frost magic page is still in development, and the text is inaccurate.
New Spell Looks For Your Spellbooks
As another small note, you may have noticed that we’ve made improvements to the spell book’s general look and layout to fit its new, more intricate needs better. Equipping spells, vampire techniques, and emotes have been updated to make each spell category easier to understand and make room for fitting jewels into your ability slots.
To Be Legendary
To add additional layers of depth and complexity to your spell kit and make your build unique, we’re experimenting with Legendary Weapons. Legendary Weapons will be rare weapons you can find in the world, and much like jewels will have randomized benefits related to your physical abilities. It may even include an additional way to implement some of the debuffs otherwise only accessible through spell schools, albeit in a more limited way.
Should it survive the fires of testing, we’ll be able to share a bit more on Legendary Weapons later on!
Experimental Feature: Territories
We’re going to be experimenting with a feature internally that we’re calling ‘Territories’ that allow Vampires to claim individual plots of land instead of placing a castle heart and expanding single tile by single tile.
In brief, the goals of this system are
To fit more players in the world in a more balanced way, which we believe will benefit the lifetime of a populated server.
Reduce player friction. This will prevent players from blocking each other’s bases from reaching the road, whether accidentally or intentionally. It will also prevent players from settling on the same ‘plateau’ or pre-defined space and learning eventually that they don’t have enough space to build properly.
Prevent various technical issues, like vampires being able to land on unclaimable ledges, clans building castles just to buffer their main castle, or building armies of servants to defend.
Will make detecting and communicating how full or active a server is easier.
This may also set the stage for us to build a lot of interesting systems much more easily. We’ve discussed using this to implement a mechanic to move your castle between two territories. This would open up possibilities for servant-to-player interactions and missions like infiltrations, invasions, and spy missions. There could be mechanics like PvE territory holders that you have to defeat to take over an area, preventing players from rushing the best spots on a new server. And more!
No matter what, we’re building bigger.
The drawback is that it will remove players’ ability to build freely in any location outside the currently restricted points of interest. To us, there is some debate over how much this tradeoff is worth it. In an open-world game, we’re trying to understand how important that feeling is compared to the benefits of the Territory system.
The only way to know how you feel is to ask. So we in the darkest crypts of Stunlock Studios would like to reach out to you, our beloved kin, to hear your opinions.
As we build away in our crypts at Stunlock Studios, we aim to see well beyond the next milestone. Black magic is in full effect, and we’ve got our attention focused well into the future. There are many roads forward, and it’s important to be ready to take a detour if needed, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to plan your adventure the best you can.
To clarify our current strategy, the future expansion of the game is not the full release of V Rising, as there will be more things we wish to improve on and more work to finalize our vision for the complete game, currently set for 2024.
Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, though! There’s still so much to know and prepare for right in front of our noses. In only some months' time, you will be drinking deep the fruits of our labors!
2023 is a glorious year to be a Vampire.
… with new mysteries to uncover.
We want to hear you out! What do you think of the new spell ability overhaul? What do you think about territories? What ARE legendary weapons? What is the mysterious glowing object?
Let us know on Twitter, Discord, and the Steam forums! We’re very curious to see where your imagination takes you. We’ve already seen some very prescient Vampires here and there. Maybe you’re one of them.
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Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Marketing Team
Patch 0.5.48238 | Patch Notes | Hotfix 17
Hey there, Vampires!
While we’re carving away at our projects for the Free Expansion later this year, we’ve decided to take the knife to a few bugs that we’ve been getting some complaints about on the live build. No longer will these pesky bugs and unintended interactions darken your doorstep.
We hope that this makes your Vampire journey a bit more to your liking and that you look forward to our new upcoming dev blog just around the corner, where we’ll be diving into some of the juicy details of what you’ll be sinking your fangs into later this year!
The hotfix will be going live on January 26th, 2023, at 11:30 UTC with the following changes:
Fixed an issue where using a dash spell sometimes caused unintended behavior, lengthening the movement and significantly lowering the cooldown.
Fixed an issue where timing a dash spell to interrupt a standard weapon attack would cause the dash spell’s on-hit effect to trigger both before and after the dash.
Adjusted the unstuck feature so that it now causes you to lose durability and triggers the respawn timer if done while in PvP combat.
Adjusted PvP protection so that it is instantly dropped by players that are present on territory that is breached during a raid.
Adjusted the range on ally buff spells so that they can no longer travel over very high distances under certain conditions.
REMINDER! You can report any issues after the patch here. Please include the patch number in the title so we can easily identify it.
ADDITIONAL REMINDER! Make sure to make backups of your server saves regularly! How to backup saves.
See you in Vardoran, Vampires!
//The V Rising Development Team
Dev Update #16: Experiments, Creations, and Dreams
Welcome, Vampires, to another peek inside the Stunlock Studios crypts! Today we drag to light a bit of what we’re working on and give you a taste of some of the patchwork creations we’re assembling for our first big content update, a free expansion that will be released in 2023. No date has been set, and we still have many months of work as some of these features require major re-works. We know your hunger for new blood and content is strong, and we want to thank everyone for being patient and believing in us. Your trust in V Rising will be well rewarded! Further down, we get into some game design talk, directly addressing some community suggestions we’ve observed over the Early Access so far.
Experiments and Creations
Keep in mind these are only going to be some of what we’re working on, not everything! Also, know that all of what you read is subject to change. We feel it’s crucial to remain flexible and have the ability to let go of our precious pet projects in favor of ones that will ultimately be better for the game and the players.
An idea bubbling away, hoping to be born.
Multiple Castle Floors
By far, the most requested feature in the game has been multiple floors. The vision of a dark silhouette on the cliff-side, tall and spearing the sky with towers, easily takes a Vampire’s imagination to an entire world of possibilities. One cannot help but dream of a mansion, a maze of rooms stacked atop a maze of rooms, opulent and seemingly endless.
A dream, certainly, but a difficult one to achieve in Vardoran! The technical limitations have proven challenging, and as a result, Vampires are confined to sprawling castles that get their height from building uphill, but it isn’t quite the same. The vertically challenged nature has also led to some design issues. If every castle needs to be spread flat and wide, they take up quite a lot of room. This makes it harder to fit more castles into the map and also populates the landscapes so that it’s more choked with castles.
If castles could be a bit taller instead of wider, it would allow more castles; or maybe it could let us set up castles to have a bit more distance between them, allowing them to feel more unique and secluded. This would better meet the vampire fantasy and allow players to grow just that much closer to making the stronghold of their dreams. It would allow for more creative building, variation, and ways to make your castle unique from your contemporaries. With this in mind, we’ve been dreaming of a future with a bit more verticality.
Or, well. We’ve been experimenting.
Those experiments have been… fruitful so far. Early prototyping of Castle floors.
It’s taken a lot of hard work, dark sorcery, human sacrifices, animal sacrifices, and the third kind of sacrifice that I am not legally allowed to disclose, but we’ve made a lot of progress in making this vision tangible.
The castle is such an important part of the V Rising experience and, in so many ways, reflects our journey in their quest to conquer Vardoran. Adding a new axis to this system offers a radical change to building and spending time in your dark domain. We’re excited to keep pushing the bounds of what we’re capable of in V Rising so that we can put it in your hands so you can unleash your creativity.
Will we see multiple floors in the upcoming expansion? That’s our goal, and we’re doing our best to make that happen! Even if it’s still a bit too early for promises, we’re now much more confident that you will be able to build the castle of your dark dreams in 2023.
The Growing World
Our vision of Vardoran is greater than its current incarnation, and there’s plenty to do in terms of expanding the current world and player journey. We’re excited to give some love to the areas you’re already familiar with, bringing them to life by adding things like new enemy types, visual updates, and interesting variations to the terrain.
Visual updates! The Quartz is shining stronger than ever.
New areas with heavy Quartz deposits.
Work in progress: A master glassmaker artisan in her shop.
We want the areas to feel more distinct and alive, and there’s plenty of room to keep iterating to make them better and more interesting in ways that are both cosmetic and tied to gameplay. On your journey to the new biome, you will also stumble into a couple of newly arrived and highly dangerous V Blood bosses in existing areas.
New V Blood to hunt! New powers to grow!
New mysterious enemies are luring behind the corner.
New challenges await. Concept of a new foe.
We’re making changes to the current zones, some in smaller ways, some very noticeable. One concept we’re working on and hoping to introduce is the “Marketplace,” which will be a series of trading stations present throughout the settled zones that serve as hubs for Vampires to spend their hard-earned coins.
A first idea and early concept of a Wagon Vendor.
Expanding on trade functionally and adding markets gives an option for players to be able to spend their coins on a host of ever-changing goods, allowing them to find other avenues for acquiring rare goods. This could be something as simple as gems that haven’t been dropping or something as rare and complicated as a weapon recipe. Or maybe you just really want drapes! Who doesn’t love a good drape?
While the function of these marketplaces serves the same purpose, you need to approach them differently as a creature of the night. In Farbane, nobody cares how strangely pale you are as long as you don’t start any trouble, while in Dunley, you need to disguise yourself to get a deal done.
Jewels
We’re also working on a very exciting system, currently called “Jewels,” to improve our gameplay depth and combat. Players will be able to find or craft Jewels to unlock new perks for their spells, making ability customization even more personal. Jewels will allow players to create stronger combos when pairing spells by allowing you to apply and consume various spell-school-specific effects into even stronger effects or triggering explosions, novas, forking projectiles, and more.
With the addition of jewels, we are also updating and working on all spell schools. Every school will have a unique effect that is more consistently tied to the school - Blood spells will be able to place a life-leech debuff, Unholy will allow you to summon more undead creatures in various ways, and so on.
You can expect updates and tweaks across the board on all spell schools. Our ambition is to create a more dynamic and varied spell system allowing for more combos and different play-styles while also adding a slice of randomization to new item types to make equipment more dynamic and varied - and thus creating more incentive for looting, trading, and raiding! Not only are we adding customization options for existing spells, but we’re also adding a brand new spell school, more about this in a future dev blog!
Work in progress Jewel system and UI updates!
Maybe you are more of an adventurous Vampire. Maybe you’re interested in exploring something totally new. Something unique that we’ve not even seen a hint of yet in Vardoran?
It’s coming!
……
…..
….
Power.
Knowledge.
Hidden secrets.
Through the wilderness, ways are being opened to new lands! In the expansion, we will be enlarging the world and giving you new soil to tread, unlike anything you’ve seen in the world of V Rising. Prepare to be tested in new ways, explore new technology, and tap into the blood memory of a whole new area to add to your vampiric repertoire of talents, magics, and so much more. We will reveal more about this region and its wicked secrets in the coming months!
A Goodie Bag of Improvements
V Rising is a large game with many overlaying systems. With a combination of player feedback and our observations, we’ve set sights on a plethora of improvements for the upcoming expansion. From quality of life to quality of unlife to raw gameplay, we’re doing our best to cover as much as possible, making sure this will be a massive update more than worth the wait.
There are still ideas and concepts we’re unsure will make it into the game. Some of these we’re taking steps towards implementing already, but others are still very much in the incubation stage. With that in mind, we’re more than happy to crack open our heads so you can get a little glimpse into what we’re thinking about…
One of the things we’re targeting is inventory and inventory management within your castle. There has been a lot of feedback regarding frustrations and ideas around what you can carry on you and how to efficiently store your goods, especially in relation to crafting stations. This is completely natural for a survival crafting game and a huge part of the gameplay.
I know I put my potions in one of these.
We’re now looking at a host of improvements! Still, it’s important that we not simplify or dumb down the sorting and organization of your inventory to the point of making it irrelevant. For many players, it feels great to arrange everything into the perfect place and create elaborate and extensive systems to organize it all.
We do have a long list of “wishlist features,” things we wish to resolve with time but not sure if it will make it into the first content patch. Things like seeing your clock in your coffin or giving more benefits to the coffin-like health recovery! Not being able to see through enemy walls with the fade-out system is on the fix list, as well as reworking the way servers tell time so that time can pass while your private servers aren’t running, allowing vampires to log off while their servants go on fetch missions.
There are also lots of smaller improvements on our wishlist to add to the immersion of the game, little feel-good things like being able to sit in chairs, turn your lights on and off, name your castle, place signs, and being able to interact with your servants in more casual ways. We also hope to look into fun things like interesting building diversity, secret doors, and passageways! There’s a heck of a list, and we’re adding to it all the time! We’re always looking for opportunities in production to slip them in where we can around the larger-scale content we’re focused on.
I will make you KNEEL, Gerald.
The Welcome Apocalypse
Everyone must understand that with such a massive swath of changes to the world of Vardoran, it will be impossible to update an old save with the upcoming patch and remain consistent. For this reason, we want to make sure it’s understood that to play on the newest version of V Rising after a huge content update like the one we’re planning for 2023, it will require being played on an entirely fresh world.
A New Dark Beginning.
This means that regardless of PvE or PvP, Official V Rising servers will have to wipe and reset to apply the new patch. Servers that did not wipe before will continue to only do so for major patches, but it needs to happen at least once to update the new map and all the changes that come with it. This will be the case for your private servers as well if you want to play on the latest version of the game.
The New Age Is Coming
We hope you enjoyed a little taste of what’s in the works and planning for the future. With multiple floors revolutionizing the way building work in the game, a new and expansive biome to explore, improvements and new experiences in every region, a horde of new enemies to slay, more weapons and abilities to master, and more systems to enhance and advance the way you play, 2023 is looking like an excellent year to be a Vampire!
Let us know what you think about what’s coming, as your feedback has been essential to fine-tuning our vision for the future of V Rising. To keep up to date with V Rising and our ongoing development, as well as share your thoughts with us, follow us on our socials below!
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