You might think given the last few pieces I’ve written that I might have a thing for vampires. I vehemently deny this. It is pure coincidence that I recently purchased the Freeblood race in EverQuest II, and that my main in Elder Scrolls Online is a vampire. Pure coincidence. I’ll accept no insinuations to the contrary. And if you come at me with glitter and affinity for the name Edward, we are going to have a problem.
Anyway, after previewing (and loving) V Rising 1.0 ahead of its PC launch back in May, I had the opportunity to play a pre-release version of V Rising on PlayStation 5 before its console launch this week. I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast the game versions and see how much different they are. Plus, in the meantime I’ve put another 30ish hours into the PC version of the game since I wrote my first impressions piece, and now I have a bit more to say.
So alas, here I am again, writing about vampires.
The good news is that if you liked V Rising on PC or thought it was your jam, there is virtually no functional difference between the PC and PS5 versions of the game.
PlayStation 5
So prior to jumping into the PS5 version, I spent a combined 50 hours in the new 1.0 version of the game, and what I experienced of the PS5 version was the same. I didn’t spend as much time with this version of the game as I did with the pre-release of the PC version, but it was enough to for me feel confident in saying it’s the same game.
While the core game was the same, the biggest differences were – you guessed it – controls. Despite owning a PS5, I don’t play console games all that often, and holding a controller can be awkward at the best of times for me. Despite that, I found most of the controls on the controller to be logical – they just made sense. The controls that I struggled with were related to the camera, aiming spells, and building.
On PC, changing the camera is as simple as right-click and hold and swivel around as if you’re on the tilt-a-whirl at your hometown carnival. On PS5, you move the camera by holding the left trigger, and then rotating with the right joystick. It worked OK; I frequently overshot where I wanted to see and spent a lot of time panning back and forth over the same little section trying to get the angle I wanted. I assume it gets easier as you play more, but coming from PC, I found it a bit of a struggle.
Aiming spells was not great. PS5 players use the same right joystick and one of the right trigger buttons to aim spells. This came with the same finickiness as the camera, except with a smaller target and a cooldown. I missed with spells more often than I hit, and it wasn’t close. I can imagine how frustrating it would be to use an ultimate spell with a 2-minute cooldown and missing because the joystick was finicky.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, controlling block spells was delightfully easy. I could hold down the trigger for the blocking spell until just the right second and release without the finger gymnastics that come with a keyboard. I made up for my terrible spell aiming with blocking far more effectively than I did on PC.
Building was frustrating too; it’s like the awkward love child of camera and spell aiming, with the addition of my being being able to run around while screwing with the camera and trying to aim to place the walls where you want them. Then add in the fact that I started building a smidge too close to a golem and had to keep running away, plus building my super tiny base with wooden palisade walls had me twitching in annoyance. While I’m sure that it will get better as I get more used to it, using a keyboard and mouse on a PC to build was the superior experience, hands down. I can imagine my building-induced rage at trying to use the controller to create a more intricate, involved castle.
I did notice a few stutters randomly in my time playing. It wasn’t often enough that I thought it negatively impacted my gameplay, but it was enough that it stuck out in my head. On PC, V Rising can be greedy with system resources, so I wasn’t particularly surprised that it stuttered on PS5, but I think it goes to show that the game still has room for more optimization on both platforms.
Advancing through the Acts
I enjoyed V Rising enough during my pre-release playtime that as soon as 1.0 launched, I rolled on a selfhosted server with my gaming group and played all the same bits of the game again. Since the PS5 version and the PC versions are the same, I thought I would talk about my further impressions since my last impressions piece, in addition to the PS5 impressions. That’s a lot of impressions, I know. But I have faith in me.
I wrote in my first piece about the awkward transition from Act I to Act II, and even on my second playthrough, it still felt awkward even though I knew what to expect. That feeling of weird pacing continues through the rest of Act II as well. It’s not that it’s bad; it’s just very different from Act I. Act I flowed beautifully, but Act II had multiple periods of starts and stops in progression. The gates are much more rigid in Act II. In Act I, I could get lucky and beat bosses while wearing little more than undergarments. But in Act II, there were several bosses I was beating my head against even when I was heavily overgeared.
Part of this is that later-game bosses are much more proscriptive in how you approach them. While Act I bosses left room for different styles of play, bosses in Act II limit playstyles because their mechanics significantly disadvantage one playstyle or another. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I call it out only because it is different from the experience of Act I.
Here’s another thing that my friends and I discovered: Bosses will scale up exponentially based on the number of players engaged with them. So with two Vampires going after a boss, the boss is exponentially more difficult than if you were to do it alone. Bosses we were easily able to take out by ourselves became virtually impossible when we tried to help our other friends down them.
Unfortunately, this scaling discouraged group play to fight the bosses. Instead, whenever someone needed help, one person would go in and engage the boss and the other would hang back. When the first of us was almost dead, the second Vamp would jump in and engage the boss before it reset and was able to down it, and both of us would get credit for the kill. This wasn’t what the developers intended, but it worked far better than trying to attack as a group.
Technology unlocks get a little weird through Act II and Act II as well. You’ll get a new building or reagent from defeating a boss, only to find out you can’t make the ingredients for the building or reagent until you defeat another boss several levels above you. You still have a chance of finding the ingredients as the world drops, but they are few and far between. This left me feeling a little tricked; I’d see a cool thing to build or craft, then down the boss to unlock only to discover I couldn’t do the crafting because I needed to kill another boss later.
Overall, though, Act II is still fun. It incrementally steps up the difficulty and is mostly challenging without being punishing, though I will say General Cassius is a jerk, and Octavian can just bleep right off. Ahem. Anyway. You unlock more weapons, and more spells, and can juice up your vampire even more. Act III is a lot more of the same, just with a big jump in mob difficulty, though the bosses that I did in Act III were a little less punishing than Act II bosses.
I spent a lot of time building in Act II as well. My puny few foundations with wooden walls transformed into a huge, three-story castle with sprawling gardens out in front. I found building to be a lot of fun as I unlocked more. The number of resources felt significant but not excessive, so I was able to do a fair amount of building with relatively few resources. If you decide to build gardens, just keep in mind you’ll need plant fiber. Lots and lots of plant fiber. A whole Mesopotamia’s worth of plant fiber. You’ve been warned.
I can say that despite some weird transitions and pacing, V Rising has become one of my favorite games. It’s not perfect, but what’s there is just fun. There’s enough variation of things to do in the game that I never felt forced into anything. Of course, I still haven’t defeated Dracula, but I’m notorious for not finishing games, so this tracks.
