V Rising is a new survival game from Swedish developers Stunlock Studios, and it’s doing rather well for itself. Since launching in Early Access, as is traditional for survival games, the game about Dracula becoming a lumberjack to get enough wood to rebuild a castle shot up the Steam charts. It’s number seven at time of writing, and has earned a user review rating of Very Positive.
One recurring complaint, however, has been about the necessity of an internet connection. Though the Steam page says you’ll be able to “Make allies or enemies online or play solo offline,” you currently have to be online even if you’re playing alone on a server of one. Stunlock has responded to questions about offline play on Discord, saying, “We’ve prioritized making this available as soon as possible.”
The developers go on to say, “For those of you who can’t play now because of this due to inconsistent internet connections or something along those lines, we apologize for the inconvenience this will cause. It’s our estimation that offline play should be available some time in the next couple of days, but may be earlier.”
In many ways V Rising feels more complete than other Early Access games, with offline mode one of few things that’s lacking. It doesn’t seem like there’s a huge amount to do once you’ve crafted the perfect lair and hunted all the bosses, though there are quite a lot of those and presumably PvP is supposed to fill the endgame gap.
Players have already started griefing each other even on PvE servers, of course, blocking the entrances to castles and deleting new players’ buildings (the latter is only possible if you haven’t got any blood essence in your castle heart, so keep it topped up to make sure it’s safe).