Rise from your grave after centuries-long sleep, thirsty for blood and hungry to regain your former glory. Play

As a vampire, you need to hunt for blood in nearby settlements to regain your strength and quench your thirst. Build and customize your castle, invite friends to join your clan, and convert humans to vampires to grow your empire. Engage in real-time combat and compete for world domination with PvP and PvE challenges.

Make allies online, fend off holy soldiers, and wage war against other players in a world of conflict.

Claim your throne and live the fantasy of becoming the next Dracula!

Stunlock Studios have rev ealed new details about V Rising’s first major content update that will be released in 2023.

This free expansion will include (but will not be limited to) a new biome, multiple castle floors, terrain variations, new enemies, new locations and a new crafting system to customize your abilities, as well as general quality of life improvements.

While the brand new biome and the dramatically improved castle building are the highlights of the expansion, the team is also planning to add greater variety to some of the existing areas within the world of Vardoran. Players can look forward to new bosses to encounter and marketplace areas that can be used to acquire rare goods, but you may need to disguise yourself to get a deal done.

Given the wide range of changes that the update will bring, the content update will require players to start a fresh world, and all official V Rising servers will wipe and reset to update the new map.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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!

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!

Key Features:

• SURVIVE AS A VAMPIRE. Play as a newly-awakened vampire, stripped from your dark powers. Feed on blood and evade the scorching sun to survive. 
• BUILD YOUR CASTLE. Become lord of your castle as you build and personalize your domain. Fortify and strengthen your base to combat the rising threat from other players.
• CONVERT THE HUMANS. Prey on your victims from the shadows or seduce them to be your vampire servants to assist in your nefarious deeds, laboring at your crafting stations.
• EXPLORE AN OPEN-WORLD. Embark on a blood-soaked journey in a vast open-world inhabited by other players, hostile humans, and supernatural creatures.
• PLAY SOLO OR CO-OP. Play solo or create a clan with friends as you roam the night. 
• RISE IN POWER. Expand your castle, learn unholy abilities, and forge an arsenal of mighty weapons and armor as you rise in power and conquer the realm. 

Currently available through Steam Early Access, V Rising is in development to PC (Steam).