Video Gamers Podcast - V is for V-Rising - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

Gaming Vampires Paul, Michael and Josh are back with another amazing gaming Deep Dive. Join us as we rise from the night and hide from the sun as we break down all that is the hot new release called V-Rising. V-Rising is a vampire based survival, combat, exploration, crafting… well, it pretty much mixes a lot of the gaming genre’s. We bring you all the info you could want on V-Rising and then tell you whether it’s worth your time and money in this awesome episode! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crikey, look at this little guy here. It's funny, family friendly, filled with amazing gaming news, game reviews, and the best hosts. You can tell by the awesome content this little fella is called the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. Now, naturally, some podcasts exist to annoy you and to talk about just about everything but gaming, but not this beaut right here. Now, we're gonna let it go, but remember, when you come across a truly magnificent species like this one do your part and support it over at multiplayer squad.com now go on little fella back to your podcast go on you're safe now oh look at that i think he's gonna do it, here he goes. The moon is rising. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Multiplayer

Gaming Podcast. We are a group of three dads who are lifelong gamers, and we are so excited to be talking about V Rising today. If you've not already done so, please take a couple seconds and rate our show five stars and leave us a written review on Apple podcasts. If you have been enjoying the show, please consider helping support us through Patreon. We are funded by our listeners and you will unlock some awesome content like the squad cast, which is a podcast feed of bonus episodes only available to supporters,

and that releases twice a month. To see our Patreon page, you can visit MultiplayerSquad.com. I am your host, Paul, and I am joined here today by my two vampires in crime. Coming up first, he is reeking of garlic after raiding the Dunley farmlands. It's Josh. Dude, Dunley Farms is where it's at, let me tell you. Except for that stupid garlic. Also, Paul, may I compliment you on your professionalism? Yes.

Because Michael and I... There's a lot going on that cannot be seen by our listeners. Complete and total idiots. Every time you do the intro to the show and you do not waver one bit. Never. No. Yeah. One would say it's buffoonery.

It's a lot of buffoonery that's happening. Yeah. I wasn't sure if you were going for like a thriller vibe. You were clearly vampires, but yeah. It was like a vampire that morphed into a T-Rex and then Michael running around his room. There were some T-Rex arms going there. Props to you, Paul. Oh, very nice.

And coming in second, you just heard his voice there. He has not been scared this much of the sun since playing Super Mario Brothers 3 on the NES in his youth. It's Michael. I'm actually surprisingly frightened of the sun like it's i am i am very very very translucent colored white skin like it is so bad that i don't tan i only burn so that's kind of true like i kind of i relate to vampires like because when the sun is out i'm like i need to stick to the shadows we call that fish fish belly pale michael was the correct is that for that is that what i can see it i can see correct term for that? Is that what? I can see it.

I can see a catfish in just that belly. That translucent white. That's an apt description. It makes sense. I think Michael and I have too much of that northern European DNA. I do not tan either, Michael. Nope. Ten minutes out in the sun and I already sunburned, so I'm with you.

I've been preparing for V Rising my whole life by running into the shade it's real life it doesn't even have to it doesn't have to role play it it's just real life yes exactly all right so before we jump into v rising we have a little bit of housekeeping we do want to give a very special thank you to a new epic supporter that we have on patreon so we owe a shout out here to, I'm just going to go ahead and say Papa Bear. I'm assuming is how he would say it out loud, but it is P-X-P-A underscore bear. And they have been in our Discord for quite a while on common status, but just upgraded a couple of days ago. So thank you so much for the support. Thanks, Papa Bear. That's the best kind of housekeeping ever is when we get to talk about our friends that we love.

100%. We really do appreciate it. I got to say, I love the Discord. Everybody's chatty and stuff in there. But when you see our tiers, our support tiers are color-coded. So when you join a tier, you get a colored name that goes along with that. And it's kind of like a badge of honor. But it's really cool to see that epic purple or that legendary gold pop up in chat when

it's a name that you don't recognize as much. Or maybe that name was the common level and is now a higher level. It's just a cool thing, man. Everybody celebrates. It's not just us, which is really cool. The community is actually like, hey, Papa Bear, you're epic. Yeah. Yeah. No, I realize. Yeah, that's true. Now that you pointed that out, people do get excited about other people go on to those levels. That's awesome. Yeah, it's very, very cool. So thank you so much. And then Josh, you got any reviews here to read for us i know we got a

lot to talk about the rising style so i just picked one for today but this one comes in from phil g o phil phil go phil g zero i that's how it's spelled so i'm just gonna go phil go because i think that sounds cooler and it's titled. I don't usually do this. Ooh. It says, what's up guys. I've been listening for a while from the rust in peace episode. I started with no actual expectations that this would be a good listen.

I was just looking for a gaming podcast that could hold my attention while at work. Like I said above, I don't usually rate podcasts, but you guys have been badgering me for years. So here you go. It's a great podcast. Keep up the good work and congratulations on the growth of it.

Oh, thank you. I believe the Rust in Peace episode is number four. Maybe number three. It's one or the other. I'm calling Philgo an OG. Yeah. But this is a perfect example. Number one, thank you, Phil go for the awesome review. But number two, we mentioned it all the time. These reviews are a massive help to the show. If you could care less about the Discord server,

if you could care less about supporting the show, if you just love listening to us three buffoons talk games all the time. That's awesome. But you can still help out and do your part by leaving a review because guess what? When people are looking for gaming podcasts, what's the first thing they look at, right? Number one, the artwork. Hey, our artwork is awesome. Let's be honest. And then number two is the reviews. Because if people are like, oh, a bunch of one-star reviews, I'm not going to waste my time. Or they see a podcast that has a ton of five-star reviews and great write-ups from the listeners. It really, really helps. So that's one way that you can definitely help support the show. And thank you, Phil Goh, for doing your part.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Phil Goh. It really does mean the world to us. And everyone that leaves reviews, thank you so much. Phil Goh got called out on this episode for being awesome. But really, it's so helpful so much. Philgo got called out on this episode for being awesome. But really, it's so helpful to us. And if you like the show, just, you know, obviously, please write us a review and write us five stars. Yeah. Be like Philgo. Be like Philgo. And unfortunately, Philgo, even though you have left a review, you're still going to hear us badger everybody else.

That is true. You're still going to hear it every show. All right. Well, guys, we have so much to every show. All right. Well, guys, we have so much to talk to. As you had said, Josh, I think we want to get into this as soon as we can. So the sun has gone down. The moon has come up. I think it's safe to venture out now. Let's deep dive V Rising. I totally started singing the cake song, Paul. I know, I know. The sun has gone down. The moon has come up.

The moon has gone up. And long ago, somebody left with the cup. Yes! Yeah. Wow. I couldn't let that go without just saying something, man. Sorry. No, it's all good.

And I do want to say right here at the top that I don't think this game can really be spoiled. There is no storyline at all to V Rising, but if you want to avoid us talking about some recipes that unlock, or maybe some different abilities or spells that you unlock, then you might want to come back to this episode later. But honestly, I do not think anything we talk about is going to diminish your experience in the game. So normally we give spoiler warnings if they are needed. This one I think is kind of immune, if that makes sense. Okay, so V Rising is a game that just recently released as Early Access on May 17th, 2022, and it currently goes for $20 on Steam.

It is brought to us by Stunlock Studios, a Swedish developer, and here's the description from Steam. Awaken as a vampire. Hunt for blood in nearby settlements to regain your strength and evade the scorching sun to survive. Raise your castle and thrive in an ever-changing open world full of mystery. Gain allies online and conquer the land of the living. All right, so Josh, let's start off by talking a little bit about Stunlock Studios, because you and I have a little bit of history with one of their previous games. We do indeed. Stunlock Studios made a little-known game called Battle Rite that basically was what

they call an arena MOBA game. I am not a fan of MOBA games. I don't like League of Legends. I don't like Dota 2. I've played them a few times. They're just really not my cup of tea. But one thing I do like about them is the combat. When you get into a fight with the other team, you have abilities. They're skill-based, so you have to aim them. Maybe there's a cool combo that you can do or something like that. What Battlerite did is basically gave you a cast of characters. And I feel like there was probably 12 to maybe 14 characters in Battlerite. And they followed standard tiers like DPS, Tank, and Healer. And then you would go with your team of three, and you would just run out into this middle, small arena and go up against the other team of three. And would just run out into this middle small arena and go up against

the other team of three. And if you had good teamwork or a good team comp, you could really outplay the other team. It was an absolute blast. It was so much fun. It was a free to play game. It does actually still exist, although the developers don't really support it anymore. But if you wanted to try it out, I do believe that you can still download it and play it. Yeah. So when we heard that this studio, which put out a game that had buttery smooth combat, we absolutely loved the perspective and the abilities. And when we heard that they were going to be putting out a third person perspective survival game, I think that immediately got put on the map for us. Now, we did not include it in our most anticipated games of 2022 because we just hadn't seen a whole lot about it. But as we got closer

and saw more footage, I know that we just got more and more excited to be able to jump in and play it. Now, Michael, are you a big fan of vampires? Is a vampire game something that you were kind of looking for? Yeah, you know, what most people don't know about me is my favorite series of film ever is called Twilight. And it's absolutely mind-blowing. No, I'm totally kidding. Josh likes Twilight, so watch out. I like the Twilight series. I think Josh just likes Ashley Green, which i know for a record for i know on record he does

actually my my wife never listens to this podcast she is magical by the way um yeah no i i'm a huge fan of vampires for the most part i think i i like the mystique and the lore and you know just the mystery surrounding them all um i love interview with the vampire i like the different things like that i so yeah so i was like cool vampire game this is interesting and exciting let's check this one out because i mean and i do relate to the collins by the way in twilight because when i take my shirt off on the beach i definitely sparkle i do glow very nice all right so you know you load up v rising in the very beginning, the game tells you that you are a newly awoken vampire. You start out in a beginner zone where

you're just basically fighting skeletons and some very easy mobs. And basically, the game just starts throwing at you little quests. You know, go kill this many skeletons. Press this button and go ahead and craft a piece of gear. And pretty much for like the first hour, you are putting together some of the initial weapons, some of your initial equipment. And then after about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, you start building your own base. And those quests really just continue throughout the entire game until you unlock and build everything that the game has to be available. So there's never a question as to where the progression of the game is going. You always know what you need to go find next or what you need to build. And I don't know what you

guys thought about this system. I found it to actually be quite good. The game never says, hey, sit down and let me teach you how to play this game. It's kind of like on-the-job training. They just give you little pushes toward what to do next. You are basically in the action from second one in V Rising. Yeah, I found it to be very easy to follow, which was nice because you weren't, like you said, you weren't spoon-fed um a tutorial you know games love tutorials these days just like hey do this mission and you get rewards and things with it

and you learn how to play the game as you go it was really pretty pretty cut and dry and easy to follow but it didn't take me out of like this this thing where i'm sitting here having to play a tutorial for the first hour and just learn that way. And then you start the game an hour, hour and a half in. You truly just feet on the ground. You started right away. You wake up out of a coffin all Nosferatu-like, and then you're going. The floating... By the way, I did love that animation. Every time I came out of my coffin, I'm like, it was awesome. Yeah. I like the system that they use. It's very akin to rust. So anybody

that's played rust will understand this, but basically when you wake up out of your coffin in this deep dark cave, you know, there's just a little, like a little quest snippet in the top left corner. It just says, uh, find your way outside, you know, and that's pretty easy to do because it's really just a linear path, but you do fight a couple of skeletons and you find some bones and little other things. And, and so it kind of introduces you to that part. And then you exit the cave and then it'll change and it'll say, find a suitable spot for a castle or something like that. And so it definitely points you in the right direction without being overbearing or boring. Because let's be honest, some tutorials, you're like, dude, I just want

to play the game. I know how to use WASD and i know how to mouse look i don't need you to teach that to me you know but how many games still do that right and it's like i get it if this is your first video game ever like maybe you need that and that's okay but i really like that system rust does the same thing where it'll say hey you know collect some wood collect some stone okay now build a you know a like a shack a collect some stone. Okay, now build a shack. Make a hatchet. Yeah. Okay, now build a tool cabinet and that kind of stuff. And I like that progression system because it seems very natural. And it's not in your face or obtrusive. You don't have to do that

if you don't want to, but it's just going to remain up there in the corner to point you in the right direction if you need it. Right. You don't have to do it, but you should. But also, it's not like a traditional quest system either, where you're like, hey, go to this exclamation point, then run halfway across the map, go to the question mark, get your reward. But you're still doing quests as a tutorial. I did think that it was a very simple... I wish a lot more games did this. 100%, I want to play a lot more games that are just like that because like josh said like wasd okay yeah we know that like i'm using a gamepad anyways you know you know what i mean it's just kind of like one of those things where it's it's just it was easy and it was it was a breath of fresh air to be able to just start

playing a game yeah i i really did want to give them props for that because you're just playing the game right away like the game itself is not so complicated that you have to learn it over the course of 20 minutes they put you in the beginner's zone but you're out of that within 10 minutes and you're just in the open world with other people and you're just already playing the game you really do hit the ground running which i really love all right one more one more thing to throw on top of this that I know, right? I'm already, we're going to spend like 94 minutes on this one point, guys.

It's going to be a long episode. One of the things I also liked is I've seen other games that have done the same thing where it's like, okay, collect some stone, right? Say hypothetical, Seven Days to Die does this.

And like, if you play that game and you've already collected like a million stone, you get to that part of it and you're like, I have to go get seven more stone. I've already gotten like 100,000 of them. This game, if you've collected the seven stone at any point, it just automatically is like, you're done. You're good.

You've already collected that stone earlier. You know how to do this. So you don't have to go do it again. Yeah. Yeah. No repetition in that regard. All right. So let's talk a little bit about the weapons and then eventually we'll talk about the spells and then the combat of V Rising.

So basically the game has a total of seven different types of weapons that you can use. Right off the bat, they give you access to swords, spears, axes, and maces. And then pretty quickly, you unlock the ability to craft crossbows. And then as you get much closer to the very, very endgame, you unlock the ability to make slashers, which are like small daggers, and reapers, which as you might imagine are just big scythes. So the weapons themselves come in different levels. So in the beginning, you can make these weapons out of material like bone, and they are relatively weak. Later, you start to make them out of copper, and then iron, and true silver, and I'm sorry, dark silver, sanguine. And then basically, these also unlock

new abilities within each weapon, where you can press a button button and like if you are a sword in the beginning all you can do is swing it but then as you build a sword of a higher quality it'll give you the ability to do like an aoe whirlwind or something like that or like the axes you can throw both of them forward in an arc and they spin and then they return back to your hands so i was kind of wondering if you guys had like any weapons that you really liked and what your overall thoughts were of the various weapons. I love the weapon system, to be honest, because it adds flavor and you're going to find that weapon that you like. I started off with an axe, I think, because it was easy to chop trees with. And yeah, you could hit things. But then I found a spear and the spear, when you get to that

kind of increased level, you get like this, like repeated thrust move where you thrust it forward really, really fast. And it does like a ton of damage. And I was like, Ooh, this is great. And then, so I, you know, I stayed with the spear for a little while, but then I got to craft a big mace. And then the mace has this big leap attack where you can actually cover a lot of ground and then smash the ground. And I was like, oh, this is cool. And all the weapons are like that. So I really enjoyed this system. On top of the upgrade to where you do more damage, which everybody wants to do, you get the reward of you unlock a new weapon skill on top of that, which really improves the feeling of the weapons.

And you actually feel like you're getting stronger and progressing because those skills are pretty impactful. Really thought it was a great system. Love how they did that to keep things fresh and actually make you feel like you're progressing when you're improving your weapons. You're not just improving a weapon score. It's not like, oh, I do 0.7 more DPS now. Yeah. And I think an important point to it as well is the game doesn't have different classes. You're a vampire and you just start out. But it almost feels like when you pick up different weapons, it's almost like you're switching to a different class because some of these weapons work very differently from other weapons. Josh just talked about the mace. And then also the mace, I think, was the one that has the spinny move where you can just go and spin around and do this whirlwind, which made it absolutely my favorite to use because the leap and the whirlwind were just...

I was just devastating with that stuff. But it almost feels like you're trying out different classes, even though there's not different classes in the game. So it was unique and interesting the way it was. And then again, also, when you feel like, when you start upgrading the weapon and you start getting more of these better things, it was rewarding, but you're not looking at going down another skill tree. Like we've played games where there's nine different skill trees

and there's so many different things you have to pick. It's just like, oh, this weapon upgrades to this. Cool. Yeah. And this is a game where, as we do talk more about the progression, we'll get into it, but this game does not have those types of skill trees, but it does have its own way of progression

of unlocking new abilities, and then you get to swap all these different things out. Now, I think one of the really neat things about the design of the weapon system is that every weapon in this game can also be used as a tool to gather mats out in the open world. So if you have a giant mace, you can use that mace and hit a tree and you get to gather lumber out of it. But the game is smart enough to give you bonuses if you use the right tool for the job. So if you have axes, you get a plus 25% bonus when you're hitting trees. And if you are hitting a metal node of like copper or iron, then you get a 25% bonus if you use a mace. Similarly, if you're running through a farm and you want to gather cotton, then your sword is

going to cut all those things down a lot quicker. And I thought that that was really smart, that in the game, you're not forced to really pick and get locked into one weapon. If you have just unlocked your first amount of dark silver, and you're not sure what to build, you're still going to be able to use that same weapon to farm mats in the world until you're able to build more weapons. But I thought that was actually very clever. I did like the... I mean, let's be honest, in any kind of survival, crafting,

progression-type game, you're going to be doing a lot of material gathering. That's just by nature part of the game. And I did enjoy the fact that having the right tool for the job mattered. And then on top of that, again, part of the progression system is if you just have a regular copper axe, you might not be able to farm that ancient wood tree. Or if you have a copper mace and you come across an iron ore node, it's not strong enough to actually harvest that. But when you upgrade to level two or whatever the upgraded part of the weapon is, now you have access to those iron nodes or these other resources that you couldn't gather before.

So not only do you get that bonus of you can fight better with that weapon because you just got a cool new weapon skill and it does more damage, now you can take on tougher monsters. But now also you can progress on the progression side of things with your castle and your resources and your material gathering and stuff like that. So they really found and you're like i have to go spend so much time gathering all this wood having it all tied into one system with the weapon where it's like okay your combat gets better by up when you upgrade the weapon and you gather better when you upgrade the weapon like you gather um like he was talking about the like the dark iron and things like that like different kinds of different kinds of resources in other games it's oh i have to be a level 22 lumberjack to be able to do that and it's so tedious to get there it's nice to have everything tied into one thing where you upgrade the weapon you get to do this now and it just it really got rid of that monotony

yeah it's very similar to how they use weapons and tools in Valheim. So if you're familiar with that system, this is borrowing very heavily from that. All right, so you've got your weapons, and then also in the game, you start to unlock abilities and spells. And basically, what they allow you to equip are two spells. You can also equip one travel ability, which might be like a dodge or a dash, and then it gives you some kind of bonus. And then you also get to equip one ultimate. And you are free to swap these out at any time. You don't have to pay any penalty. You don't have to do it at your base. You are free to swap everything out and you can customize it as you will. And so pretty soon before you know it, you're using a weapon that's got a couple of different

abilities that are on cooldowns. You've got all of these spells and everything has a pretty fast cooldown except for your ultimate. That's really the only one that takes a while. And so it does give you the ability to do an awful lot during the combat. It definitely feels like an action RPG in that regard. And there's also a lot of PVP because in V rising, the entire world is PVP enabled.

You can fight other people along with the monsters. So I was very curious to hear overall, if you guys were pleased with how the combat works. So, yes, I was, I was pleased with how the combat works so yes i was i was pleased with how the combat works we're not going to the pvp part yet right well a little i mean if you want um no i i definitely like how the combat works and i i thought it was interesting that they got so much out of a vampire game like we're doing so many different things with all these different weapons right they give you so much more of an ability to not just be like i want to suck your blood and you're going after them you know or other games where the vampire hunters just run

around with a stake and they're trying to stab the vampire with a stake there was a lot of different things you could do and being able to swap out the abilities and swap out your weapons so easily you know when there wasn't a lag issue and you had to wait seven minutes to do it because the launch was a little difficult. There was some lag on those servers. But once that kind of died down a little bit, it was really nice to just say, oh, I'm going to try out this weapon that I made now or I try out this other ability because you get abilities often like you get i was getting every time i played i was getting seven or eight different abilities just based on the different things you do i don't know if we can spoil that or not now how we do we'll go into that in a few minutes right how you get the abilities and stuff and yeah but but the overall pvp aspect of it um josh why don't you go ahead i was just gonna say i love i mean we talked about the weapons and the

weapon skills and stuff like that but you you're vampires, right? Vampires don't go around fighting with swords. Like they use magic in their vampire abilities, you know? And so it's like, where do, where's the vampire skills, man? Well, this is, this is where they are. And so I really, again, this, this harkens back to the battle, right?, right? Where they really made a game that focuses strongly on combat, strongly on skill shots. If you've ever played a MOBA in the combat in that game, you're going to feel very much at home with the combat in V Rising.

One thing that I really appreciate that they did is not only do you get the weapons and the variation there, but you also get these different categories of, I guess they're magic? Is that what we're going to call them? Like abilities? Might as well. Yeah, they call them spells in the game. Yeah. So it's like chaos orbs that you're firing out.

Right. And so they have five different categories. So just to kind of give you an idea of some of the depth of this system, they have five categories, right? And so they have blood, unholy, illusion, chaos, and frost are your five categories. And within each of those categories, you probably have six to eight different abilities that you can unlock within each one. Now, you unlock those by fighting bosses. And when you defeat a boss, you get to unlock an ability that that boss had. So that's how you get them. But this is the heart of combat in this game and where you can get into some of the variation

with the different builds that you want to run. Now, this is not an MMO. You don't have 12 different active abilities that you can use at any time. You get your weapon, which you can swap between quickly. You get your two spells that you lock in and you cannot really swap in combat. And then you get one ultimate ability. So you definitely have to kind of plan what you want to do with them. But I love the variety. I love that every category feels different than the other one. If you're specced into frost, you're going to slow things

down and you're going to freeze them. If you're specced into illusion, chances are you're probably going to summon some little warrior thing to help fight with you or something like that. So they really keep it on point with the flavor of these spells. Yeah. And the combat itself is very reminiscent of Battle Rite. In fact, they took some of the abilities straight out of Battle Rite, popped them them into v rising which i'm more than fine with because it worked so well in the original game and a lot of these abilities you do have to aim and you also have to do a lot of dodging so a lot of these characters will either aim a weapon at you or they will cast an ability and you see the telegraphs on the ground and you have to evade them and as you shoot at other players they're trying to evade you so in that sense you also have that built into the game so like for example the chaos orbs which everyone kind of agrees you have to keep equipped

because they're so good you shoot out two orbs in quick succession and you have to constantly track with your mouse and aim at whatever you're trying to hit because they're moving and you have to try to make sure you're aiming it correctly and so all of those things together makes for a system that is very easy to understand but very hard to master which is kind of like that sweet spot that you're looking for yeah and then and again with all the customization too with like you truly like at at any point i don't believe that any one of the three of us was really doing the same build ever even if we had the same weapon we would use different spells and different abilities and um yeah speaking of the combat too you just reminded me of like when you aim also like your character is always so you have

wasd to move up down left and right but you also your character looks whatever way your mouse is and so again it added in that extra layer of like you were saying paul which is that sweet bread and butter spot of a combat game like this easy to understand difficult to master but also like you truly can play how you want to play and if you want to be like me and every time you fire a chaos orb you go pew pew pew pew you can do that i just wanted to throw that in there because i was doing that and miss i did i did i was terrible with those things i mean i got good by the end but like no yeah um so let's talk a little bit about the map and how you get around in this world so basically the game is kind of like divided into these different zones and each zone kind of has its own atmosphere and its own type of enemies that are inside it.

And the map itself, I actually found to be much smaller than I thought it would have been. This is not like Rust, where it's going to take you probably a couple hours to go from the bottom left to the upper right of the map. This game does allow you to travel around the map pretty quickly. There are certain different forms your vampire can take, so you can transform into a wolf and it lets you run a little bit quicker. You can find horses in the world that allow you to then travel by horseback. We don't need to talk about the horses, though. There are even ways to teleport

around the map. There are way gates and there are cave passages. I was curious as to how you guys felt about the size of the map, especially considering that there are a maximum of 40 concurrent players that can be logged in at once. Well, it feels daunting at first because at first it does seem like it's enormous you know but as you move around you have to actually go step on a way gate or step near a way gate to unlock it and so the map does get considerably smaller it doesn't literally get smaller like it's not um what a survival shooting battle royale game where literally the map gets smaller and you get to a smaller area but like it feels like it gets smaller because you become more mobile you know when you learn

how to become a horse when you learn how to become a wolf you know you can move around faster but then you can pop way gate to way gate and so forth but to stop you from really kind of exploiting the size of the map you drop you have to drop anything that you're carrying that's not a weapon or your armor or any other special items like if you're carrying a bunch of wood you have to drop anything that you're carrying that's not a weapon or your armor or any other special items. If you're carrying a bunch of wood, you have to drop it before you fast travel, which still kind of made it so the map didn't become too small, I think. I think the map size could be a little bit bigger, but it also works for the server size because... I mean, we should say that you can play this game purely PvE if PvP is not

your thing. I think this game is intended to be a PvP-ish type game. And so by default, I think that's what they're going for. But if you don't want any PvP at all, you can just play on a PvE server and just do the progression and have fun, fight bosses and not have to worry. But there's something about that coming across other players in the world. And I think that's the way that this game is designed. So initially, the map does feel very big at first. But like Michael said, you get a lot of abilities that get to the point where you can travel faster. And finding horses definitely does one of those. The waygates are a great idea. But I love the fact that you can't use them if you're carrying stuff. Because if you're loaded up with loot and things you need for your castle,

you have to have that fear of traveling across the map to get back to where you need to go. And maybe you're going to come across some enemy players, and maybe they're going to try to gank you and steal your stuff. And so that really does add to the experience in that regard. The only issue I found was that as a server progresses, if you're on a full server, people build castles and they build them very large. And then the castles start to take up a lot of space. And so I almost feel... Yeah. That's when the game started to feel a little small to me at that point because i was like dude there's castles everywhere and now the world doesn't seem like this big open deep dark forest or the farmlands or something like that it's almost like now we're just in a

vampire city with castles everywhere yeah and it became really apparent as well once you got the bat like i'm flying over six castles and I'm barely going anywhere. I'm like, there's a castle. There's a castle. There's a castle. So yeah, that did also become a thing. And then one more thing I definitely want to mention about, you know, way gates and traveling and dropping items is that certain resources are only available

in certain parts of the map. And so you do have to go and venture out sometimes. Like next to my castle, I didn't have certain types of metal i had to go over next to josh's castle and get that or venture into a harder area where higher level like things are and so forth so it did add that sense of danger but you make a good point about like especially later on towards the towards the server like towards the end game essentially when you've got the ability to fly as a bat like you're flying over castles you're no longer really flying over a lot of a lot of random just fields or forests that you can just chop down it's castle castle well let's talk about the the biggest danger out there in the world that we haven't really talked about yet son

praise the sun oh yeah the sun i was like. You hated this mechanic, right, Paul? I kind of did. I liked it. I liked it, man. No, see, I can appreciate it because, of course, vampires can't stand in the sun. I get it. My problem is that sun in V Rising is a lot like night in Rust. It kind of limits what you can do. Now, once you have some faster traveling,

it's much easier to dart from shadow to shadow where the sun doesn't affect you. But in the very beginning of the game, you have very limited ability to protect yourself and you're in the sun a lot. And if you're in the sun for about six seconds, then you start taking damage and you'll die about six seconds later. Oh, I think it's faster than that.

The sun wrecks you when it starts hurting you. You die fast. Yeah. And it seems like every time I did, I applaud the ingenuity on the mechanic. It was a very unique and interesting way to apply something that is the biggest danger to a vampire essentially is the sun to a game where you have day and night cycles but man every time we went and we fought a boss we're like why why did we do it during the day because there's like oh my god i got boss damage and i'm trying to stay in these shadows but there's like a million little things going on the ground because

this is a high level boss and i can't stand here i can't stand here because there's little red circles and fire and all kinds of stuff. And I've also got to make sure that I'm looking for shadows when I can't see much anyways, because there's so much stuff on the ground for this boss. See, I disagree, man. I think it adds so much to the game. I get that it can be inconvenient, but you're a vampire. The sunlight is inconvenient. And the way that they did this mechanic is perfect. If you can go into the sun for a few seconds, and if you're out in the sunlight for a few seconds, this ray of sun starts kind of shining on your character

to kind of give you a heads up, like, hey, you're in direct sunlight. And it actually gets brighter and brighter until your screen starts to go really bright. And then that's when you start taking damage. And when you get to that point, that's your oh poop button to be like, I am going to die very, very quickly if I don't get out of this right now. And so when you're just traveling, yes, it's inconvenient. You have to dart from shadow to

shadow and that kind of stuff. But shadows are plentiful. It's not that big of a deal. Where it really enhances things, I think, is when you're trying to do other stuff. If you're trying to resource gather, guess what? The sun moves. So if you're in the shadow of a tree and you don't pay attention, 15 seconds later, that shadow has moved and now you're getting melted by the sun. And every single time that I was just a straight up idiot, and I'm chopping down the trees, chopping I'm out there chopping down the trees, chopping down the trees. And I'm like, oh no, I've chopped down all the trees.

And now I've got to go find this, something to hide behind. Cause I'm like, why did I, I always like leave a tree, Butler, leave a tree. You got to leave a tree. And I would never do it. And I'd have to go run. Don't get me wrong, I liked this mechanic.

I thought it was really clever. It was annoying at times, like boss fights and stuff like that and that was about it but overall i i think it was an interesting and ingenious way of adding this vampire peril and also don't ever go afk yeah you can't go afk because of the angle of the sun changing i i think it's a clever mechanic i think they could have done it better maybe if you're just in sunlight it cuts your hp automatically the max to be in half or something but there are so many moments when you're uh at least at least for me when i would play solo i would know i cannot fight this boss in daytime so i'm literally standing here in the shade for the next three minutes waiting until the moon comes up and then I start the fight.

So I found it to just add a little bit too much annoyance for my personal taste. Paul, the sun for vampires equals death, not half HP. It's not like they're putting on a coat and I got to take this coat off because it's getting hot outside. No, it's certain death. You know what else vampires aren't doing? They're not running around chopping down trees and building magical castles. I mean, this one is. So, you know, yeah.

You know, every vampire does need a place to lay his head. And in V Rising, they let you build these massive castles which serve as your home base. How'd you guys feel about the castle building? What are some of the pros and cons? I like it. It gives you something to aim for. You guys know, historically, I'm not the best builder in video games. You guys have picked on me plenty. I built a fairly decent castle. You know, the building in this game is top-notch, to be honest with you. You get a lot of leeway in how you want to go about building your castle. They make it very simple. Everything's snappy. Walls go into place like they're supposed to.

It's a very well-done system so that even a terrible builder like me can actually create something that actually looks pretty good at that point. The castle building just adds a dynamic to the game. It just adds to the progression, right? Like, hey, now you can get this for your castle, or now you can upgrade your coffin, or now you unlock this grinder that will allow you to make different kinds of materials or combine materials and so on and so forth. And I think that's a large part of the game itself. So if you're not into combat, if you could care less about cool spells and weapon

abilities and that kind of stuff, there's a huge part of this game that I think you could really enjoy because it is fully fleshed out. They give you a ton of different decorations and enhancements and things like that that go beyond just being functional to where you can really make this castle look the way that you want. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I saw some really cool castles in our playthrough. Oh, yeah. Right. Absolutely. I thought, Josh, that you sell yourself short a little bit on your castle building.

I was very impressed by your castle. I liked visiting. I would oftentimes just go visit your castle when you were laying in your coffin. You didn't know I was there. Is that where all my loot went? I'm watching you sleep. I mean, I don't know what happened to your loot necessarily. Jake? Where's Jake?

No, but the whole thing about it is that you do have to build. You have to because in order to upgrade weapons and in order to repair weapons, you have to do things that are on a grinder and on the different other tools that you have to do. But you don't have to build elaborately. You can get pretty basic and get by with what you need. So if you're to do. But you don't have to build elaborately. You can get pretty basic and get by with what you need. So if you're not a builder, you don't have to.

Paul is the most efficient builder I have ever seen. I've got different rooms. I've got a study room. I've got a forge room. I've got a workbench room. I go into Paul's castle. It's one giant room with everything just crammed in the middle of it it's like the engineer brain in me is like i don't care what this looks

like i just want to fit as much as i can into as small of a base as i can and that was my only goal yeah i i do think that i i i think the fact that everything snaps to a grid is the best part of this. It works very similar to Rust. Valheim did not do that, which is why our bases looked like hot garbage until Jared or Todd hopped in to help us make our base look good. I think the only real con is that if you try to move your base, depending on what server you're on some will allow you to only have one base some will allow you to have two or you can run custom servers our server only allowed you to have one base and it is not easy to disassemble your castle heart in order to build a new castle heart in another location it got to the point for us that we would have to kick one of us out of our

clan, and you would have to fake raid our own castle and destroy a castle heart. That way, you could move your mats. So that part was a little buggy for sure. Yeah. It's weird because there's some stuff that has amazing quality of life, stuff that every game should copy. And then there's stuff like that where I don't know if it's just a bug or if it's by design. Now, this game, I don't know that we clarified, this game is technically still in early access. Now, it's insanely polished for being early access, almost to the point where it doesn't feel like an early access game. But one of the huge things that I absolutely love that they did is when you

are doing your castle and you plop down a treasure chest and it's filled with loot, or you've got your blood altar or your forge or whatever, and you go, man, I really wish I hadn't put it there. You can just move it. You pull up the build menu and it lets you select something you can dismantle it and get 75 of the materials back or you can just move it to a different part of your castle and you can do this you can do this with a full treasure chest so if you've got 20 things sitting in a treasure chest and you're like man i want to move this to a deeper part of the castle so i don't get raided and somebody gets it you don't have to take everything out of the treasure chest and try to do the inventory shuffle. You just say, hey, I want to move this chest. And then you walk to the room you want to move it to and you plunk

it down. And there it is. And I don't know why every game in the world doesn't do this because it's one of the most simple but most impressive quality of life things I have seen in a game like this yeah josh how many times in rust has it been hey i've got 30 pickaxes come help me destroy this workbench yes because it's blocking where i need to build and now we're spending eight minutes you know yes pickaxe something to destroy it it's awful yeah v rising does give you a lot of quality of life in that regard. Not only that, I think maybe the biggest quality of life is that all the crafting in this game is done 100% automatically. So you can build something like a sawmill, and if you throw in a whole bunch of wood, it's going to for it to process one. And you can load up this sawmill with hundreds of wood and you can log out, you can run off and fight in the world or go gather new mats.

And the entire time, it's gonna process all that wood until it runs out or until the output side of the building gets filled. And so you get to do that with all crafting in this game. You are never stuck at your base waiting for something to finish. Yeah. And you can be at your base if you want to. There were definitely many hours where I would just be at my castle working on something. Maybe I'd go farm mats for a little bit, go back to my castle, enhance it, redesign it. Oh man, this layout's

terrible. I want to change things up. And they make it super easy to do. So I really liked the fact that they've made it so accessible to people without making it feel like it was a chore. And you, you touched on it, Paul, you have to build a castle. Like that's part of the game. If you don't, I don't even know how you could progress, to be honest. And you're going to be fighting the sun the whole time. So basically have a friend and just bum everything in their face. Right. Like we did with Jake. Jake, I stole a lot of your stuff, Jake, now that we're done playing.

Oh, did you? I never stole anything from Jake. What, you never stole anything from Jake? No, never. Neither did I. I did not steal anything from Jake. Jake just gave me everything that I needed. I think he knew I was stealing everything, so he just started giving it away.

Right. But no, the building's great in this game. It really does enhance it. I never felt like doing castle work was a chore, and that's saying something, because that's not normally my forte in a game like this, but it was thoroughly enjoyable for me. Yeah, and the castle building was simple,

for the most part. It's not super complex. Both simple in the way it's done, which is good, but also simple in the way that they can't do a lot. You can put up walls, you can put up doors, you can put up... When you put a floor down, it automatically puts a roof over your castle. But you're not talking about multi-floor buildings and big, round, cool-looking this and that. It's just very functional, very simple, which is probably something that Paul really loved about it. Me, I'm a builder, man. I love building in games.

I want to play a game where nothing snaps. I want to play a game where I can do whatever I want and build this amazing-looking, cool thing. I mean, shoot. In Atlas, I once built, and I was like, hey, guys, come see my base profess. See what I did. I spent like a week and a half building a maze

underneath this building and made my friends go through the maze because you could just do whatever you wanted. So this game doesn't really have that, but, but the building is not lacking in a way where it's like, Oh, this is very much.

You plop a house. That's it. I plopped a house. Cause there's games where it's like, there's your race. You plopped a house, you know, you still get some functionality.

Um, and it is kind of one thing I want to mention too, is like the the the bonus is like the same thing is like when you get an axe and when you get um you know uh a hammer or a sword to take cotton or to get rocks the different types of floors also can match and make your machines work more efficiently as well so you'd want to put a certain type of floor down underneath a certain type of machine and it would actually be more efficient which was kind of cool too yeah i totally agree all right now i think maybe the coolest thing in v rising is the blood altar and this is like the primary system of progression i guess you could say in the game will you guys give a little bit of an explanation as to what

the blood altar is and what its purpose is yeah Yeah, the Blood Altar is super cool, man. This is where the game starts to take off, in my opinion. And you get the Blood Altar fairly early. I feel like you get it after maybe two, three hours worth of gameplay, somewhere around there. And so what the Blood Altar does is once you build it, it pulls up a list of all of the bosses that are in V Rising. And I think that as of this time of the recording, I feel like there's 37 bosses, if I remember correctly. Right around there. There's a lot. There's a good, good bit. And you start off with just the very first boss, which is the alpha wolf. And what you do is you select the boss that you want to fight.

And then it's like your vampire can sense where it's at, and you can follow this blood trail to get to that boss and track it down. And then lo and behold, you found this boss, and now it's time to fight. And regardless of PvE or PvP, this system remains the same. You fight the boss, and if you kill the boss, you can then leech its blood, and all bosses have something called V-Blood. Thus, the game is called V-Rising, I imagine. I don't know what the V stands for, necessarily, unless it's supposed to be five. See, but I think it's like... Vampire Rising?

Vampire Rising. It might be some reference to... It's Vampire. ...to five. Guys, you know how the Roman numeral five is a V? Five blood. Yeah. No, but anyway.

So you can then leech. I thought he was serious for a minute. I thought he was serious. I was like, wait, what? So you can leech. What? No one knows what the V stands for. The translation was lost.

So you can leech the V blood, which then gives you the abilities of that boss. Now, it's not like a direct copy of the boss's abilities all the time, but sometimes it actually is. And so this is how you unlock the spells. This is how you unlock some of the transformation abilities we already touched on. You get the ability to become a wolf and move around faster and stuff like that. And so this, to me, is like the meat and potatoes of the progression of the game. Yes, you can spend a lot of time on your castle. Yes, you can PVP if you want to. But when you beat bosses is where the leap in progression comes from. Because not only do you generally get a spell

or some kind of ability from the boss, you also unlock a recipe from the boss. And that's where you can then say, oh, I killed this boss. Now I've unlocked the ability to make iron weapons. And so now you start going down that iron weapon path and you're mining iron and you're going to the iron mines and that kind of thing.

And then you become stronger and now it lets you fight the next boss in line. And these boss fights are fun, man. Like these are well done fights. Yeah, and they're hard. And I feel like, again, with this game, it just, it takes away a lot of the mundane that you see in so many other survival-esque games.

Like, what a cool way to progress. I want to become a bat. What do I have to do to do that? I have to go kill that boss and take his power. That boss is tough, by the way. Oh, yeah. We all died 40 times on that boss. We just zerg that boss.

I'm not proud to say it. We zerg that thing, man. We were just running at him naked. Oh, man. I had like 12 corpses on the ground at that point. I'm walking around and I'm trying to pick up all the little red bags. I'm like, no, all the stuff's staying. No, but it was cool because you progress by playing the game, by doing like it seems so simple that like i want to do this i need to play the game and beat that boss whereas other games it's like

oh if i want to be able to do this i have to research this thing and build this thing and uh spend x amount of hours gathering this stuff and then open up this thing there's so many things that you don't just go kill the boss you get you get his abilities it's almost like highlander you know you take the highlander get his powers it's yeah and you things that you don't just go kill the boss you get his you get his abilities it's almost like highlander you know you take the highlander yeah and you don't you don't even have to track the bosses if you run into them in the open world you just kill them right then and there and you get all the same abilities so you don't even have to use the blood altar but it does lead and guide you throughout the game i think one of the really cool things too is that there are different factions inside the game, and as characters walk around in the open world,

they might engage in combat with others. So you sometimes will run across one of those bosses fighting a group of militia, and they may have already gotten the boss down to half health, and now you can jump in and actually almost help those NPCs, and it may have already gotten the boss down to half health. And now you can jump in and actually almost like help those NPCs. And it gives you a little bit of a leg up on the boss. I know one of the bosses I struggled with the most, Josh, you said they were in the middle of a fight. You walked up on them and they were already almost dead. You really lucked out. Oh, I did big time. Yeah. So even just those random encounters that all of the different bosses and NPCs have,

I think makes the world feel more alive. Yeah, the fact that there's always stuff going on, whether you're seeing it or not, is honestly a very big thing for this game, because the world feels alive. Like you said, if you're not online, your stuff is still processing. Players can raid your base if you're on a PvP server. If you're wandering around and you come across Tristan the Vampire Hunter, you're like, oh, no, I'm out of here. But then you might come across another boss, like you said, Paul, where they're engaged in some big fight. I came across a boss that was fighting a mini boss in the Iron Mine one time. And I sat there and watched them fight each other for a solid five minutes and then thankfully like the boss killed the mini boss but then the

boss was at like half health and i'm like oh well this is my time to shine i'm gonna let him do all the work and i was able to kill the boss i would not have been able to kill that boss solo if they were full health and that's the one thing that I'm a little confused on on this game, because these boss fights are how you progress, but some of them are tough, man. These are no joke bosses at a certain level. And so if you're playing solo, how do you progress enough to get strong enough to tackle that next boss in line? If you're not strong enough to tackle that next boss in line if you're not strong enough to fight that boss who's the next one in line yeah i think it's a tough it's a tough solo experience and that's where a group setting really comes into play now we saw this even on a pvp server where people would team up

and if somebody was fighting the boss you would just help them kill the boss at that point because you got the benefit as well it's not like anybody was locked out of getting the vent like the benefit of leeching out the v blood and getting those abilities right well you can group up but well but i mean like you don't have to be like hey let's be in the same group to get the right ability you and this other guy can just go kill it you both get right so you don't have to be like hey you want to join my grouper fest yeah yeah it's not whoever gets the killing blow or whoever tags it. Right. Everybody can share that kill. Yep. Yeah.

All right. So there's like a million things we can talk about in V rising. We're already a whole hour into this episode. Obviously it's going to go pretty long, but let's just open it up. All right. Any random thing about this game that you want to talk about? Let's bring it up and talk about.

I really liked the, I mean, we're vampires, right right and we haven't even talked about blood okay like what's every vampire want every vampire wants the blood and so it's like this game does that whole system extremely well in my opinion as you feed and you can feed on a lowly little rat you have a pool of blood that is very noticeable it's right in the middle of your ui and it's kind of like an orb and you can tell when it's full or half full or empty. That is in essence, like your life essence. And so if you take damage, you can self

heal, but it will drain some of that blood. Like you're using that blood to heal yourself. And the really neat mechanic in this game is that the types of blood that you come across affect your vampire. And so if you leech a rat, which is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to blood, you're going to get a frail buff, which makes you not fight very well. And it's like, hey, the only thing I fed on was a rat. I'm not feeling so hot. But as you come across creatures in the world, they may have different characteristics to their blood. Like a militia guy might have a brute characteristic where if you drink his blood, you inherit that, which makes you tougher. Maybe you take 10% less damage and maybe you heal every time you do

damage. Maybe you come across somebody that has rogue blood so that you do, you know, maybe you have a 20% chance to critical hit and you run 5% faster. And there's a lot of these in the game. So, I mean, there's probably what, eight different blood types out there? Something like that? At least, there might even be more. Yeah. But basically, you have to do enough damage to get them below like 30% health or whatever. And then you can press a button and you'll jump on them and you'll feed off of their blood. And not only that, it will randomize what percent of purity their blood is. So if you mouse over an enemy, it might say worker blood 50%, and that's pretty good. So I might choose to not just blitz and kill them.

I might decide to feed off of that creature or, you know, you might decide to mouse over everything and kill that person last after feeding their blood. But you can also share that blood with your other fellow vampires. So if Josh happened to get 100% warrior blood, well, guess what?

You better share that with me, buddy. And so Josh can choose to expose his vein. Now I can feed off Josh and he's going to lose half of his blood, but now I've gained half of that blood as well. And now we can share those buffs. And so sometimes we would actually have to go farm and find the right kind of blood and then go fight the boss because we knew in our basic

frail state there's no chance we have of beating them yeah and the higher the percentage you unlock several abilities at that point very very clever for a vampire game yeah the blood just adds another layer to this game that again is is i that's the only part that's a little bit tedious is like oh i have to get some blood but you're never that far from at least a basic animal or some low NPC that you can just at least get your life back with. The tough part about it, though, is if you do run completely out of blood, you die

fast. Yeah, don't be a vampire. It gets the bloodthirst, man, because it'll wreck you. Just basically equal to the sun, except there's nothing you can do if there's no animals or anything around. And I've done that where I'm like, I can't find... There's always stuff to kill in this game, except for when you're out of blood. And there's nothing around.

There's nothing to kill. But we can't feed off Josh's exposed vein because he's also almost out of blood. And so it was a thing. It's clever. I love the way it's a buff system as well, because vampires, it's that way. You see that in lore with vampires. Well, I am a vampire who I consider myself good. I'm only going to feed on rodents and rats and stuff. Yeah, but you're not a very good vampire because you're drinking

rat blood. It was cool to see that kind of lore in a game that really doesn't have any story. It's kind of just assumed that you understand that. You know, like it's vampire stuff. Yeah, 100%. I think one of the really neat things in the game also is that you can go out into the world and you can use your vampire charm to turn a humanoid and then they will follow you back to your base. So you can't do that with things like the random wolves

or spiders or witches, but you can do that to the different humans. And if you walk them back to your base, you can either turn them into a servant. And if you do that, you can then put gear on them and you can send them out on missions. So passively, a timer goes and then when the timer is up, they return with a bunch of loot. Or you can actually imprison one of those humans and then feed the timer is up they return with a bunch of loot or you can actually imprison one of those humans and then feed off of their blood and so you can actually set up jail cells and you've got like these humans that you're keeping around just for the purpose of feeding off of which is kind of weird and like super creepy but you are a vampire so it does make

sense and so it's very clever you can even use glass bottles and you can start bottling their blood and carry it around with you and then you can drink that when you're out in the field it's uh pretty clever in the different ways they chose to use vampires yeah it was i like that they added that piece into again with just vampire lawyer vampires are charming like that's one of their abilities is hey you know like you always see these beautiful looking vampires and they're just like hey i'm gonna go out and find this person and then they prey on them with their vampire charm and so it was interesting to see that as well i like that's what i was gonna ask about was the fishing i didn't do any fishing i didn't

realize i forgot to ever fish i don't see a vampire fishing that doesn't paul had bad luck with the fish the fishing i i love fishing in games in in um i almost said lost ark in uh what's the amazon mmo new world new world yeah new world one of the very first things i started doing was fishing and i got really excited world of warcraft i would always max out fishing right away with every new expansion. EverQuest fishing? The fishing in V Rising is so half-baked, it's preposterous. So there is water everywhere in this world, but you can't fish anywhere. You have to run around and hope that you'll see a little ring with some bubbles, and that means it's a fishing spot. But it does not matter where you fish.

You don't get certain fish from the ocean versus the rivers you just fish wherever they let you but there's hardly any nodes and then half the time you just fish gems which i guess is neat it's like all right i got a a topaz awesome but even if you do get a fish like a rainbow trout or a fat goby like you don't cook them or eat them all you do is chuck them into a machine called a devourer which breaks down materials into more basic parts so literally all you do with your fish 90 of the time is chuck them into the devourer and it shoots out fish bones and fish oil and then you can use those to craft other things. The fishing is not very well thought out, in my opinion.

Now, there's one boss quest where you need to have a specific type of fish to unlock that boss fight. Yeah, which I was lucky to get. I probably fished 200 times in this game, and I never found a Twilight Snapper. Whatever the drop rate is i had incredibly bad i fished like 10 times and got two of them just unlucky nice i'll say this since we're talking about just kind of random things about this game the pvp in this game is a lot of fun i think it's the way that the game was designed rating leaves something to be desired and maybe that's just because we're such huge fans of rust.

And it's like, you know, you're going to get rated in rust, but you're going to be able to rate in rust as well. We came, this is one of my few complaints that I have with one of the game systems where we came across maxed out level players that were higher level than us. You raid by kind of creating this giant siege golem,

which then knocks down people's doors. And then you can get into the castle and you can steal their loot and stuff like that. Um, the issue is, is that there's really not a ton of balance to that system in rust. If you get rated by guys with AKs and full armor, you might get lucky and land a headshot with a bow and arrow.

If that's all you have and kill one of those guys. You're still outnumbered and you're still outgunned, but you at least kind of have a chance in that regard, even though it's a small chance. One thing that we learned is that if you are outgunned in V Rising and outnumbered, you stand a zero chance at all of doing anything to stop yourself from being raided. So what happened with us on our server is we were fairly strong. I feel like we were pretty advanced in the game. We played a lot, but there was a group that was running around with five people. The maximum group size is four. So that's kind of against the rules, but I don't follow rules myself. So okay, whatever. I don't begrudge them that. But they started raiding the server, and literally there was nothing that anybody could do in that regard. And we tried, man. We fought our tails off. We tried to use strategy. We tried to...

Anything we could think of, and it was all just futile. And that's a bad feeling. It sucks to get rated in Rust, but again, sometimes you feel like you have a chance at least, or even if you're seeing somebody getting rated, maybe you can be the little rat and sneak in there and steal somebody's gear, right? And so you benefit from somebody getting rated. That didn't exist in V Rising. And I feel like that system needs some tweaking. Now, it's not as catastrophic as Rust because you don't lose everything. You can only lose what's in your chests in your castle. And there's even a vampire chest that's off-limits. So you can put your most valuable things in there. And even if you get raided, they can't get into that chest.

So that was a little disappointing to me. That's right about when we stopped playing, too. Well, let's talk about that. I'm going to go as far... I was going to say this when I murdered the game later, but... I'm going to go as far as to say I think the rating in this game is awful for several reasons. It's really bad. First of all...

It breaks the game. It is way too easy to raid another person's castle. All right? Once you have that stone golem up, all you have to do is break one door and now all the other doors magically become brittle. You have essentially breached the castle and it does not matter how big your castle is.

All you do is break the first door. You're gonna get through all the rest. You can maybe slow it down for a minute, but you're going to get everything. Now, the problem is in V Rising, if you kill another player or loot their castle, you cannot take their gear, so their equipment, their weapons, and you can't take any of their best stuff in their vampire chest. So why am I even really raiding to begin with? Like, I might luck out and get some of the higher

level mats that I'm just going to run back to my base that i probably already have because i'm already at the level that i'm rating i almost don't even know what the point of rating is and as soon as you start rating they put you on the map where everybody can see you and because the map you can travel across so quickly as soon as you start rating every high land every high end character on the map is immediately there and even if you fight them all off you're not getting great gear anyway so like what's the point rust you're gonna get you know maybe you luck out you get a ton of gun powder or you get those rockets or you get those ak's because they were stockpiling weapons you're

never gonna get that in v rising the sake of rating is simply for the sake of just pissing people off that's it like i just want to go and pick on you maybe if i'm a bully or whatever because there's no it's inconvenient for the person who gets rated but there's no there's no benefit really too and that's that's one of the biggest things that you pretty much covered like the points that I wanted to talk about is it's like, it just, it feels like it left me really wanting like, cause we literally spent like, we're like,

let's get up there. Let's raid people. Let's do this PVP piece. It's what I felt like the game was about. And for me, it was like trying to work towards that. I'm like, yes,

yes, yes, yes. Let's go. Yeah. Let's PVP and get them. Now PVP really is just about running into someone on the road and hoping there's not four of them and you can have a fair fight or something

like that because i feel like the game is designed for pvp but really the end game of pvp in almost any survival type game like this is to get their stuff and you just you get their stuff what are they gonna do they're just gonna come back with a siege golem and get their stuff, what are they going to do? They're just going to come back with a Siege Golem and get their stuff back. And it's just going to be annoying. That's it. Yeah, the rating's pretty poor. I will say, this is really minor, but something I really loved. The game gives you a compulsory count button, which is really ingenious. Because one of the hardest things that you can do in a survival game is to organize your chests. So whether it's Terraria or Rust or

V Rising, it's very hard to maintain any kind of organization. And what the game lets you do is I can click on a bookshelf or a chest and it's got a button that says compulsory count. And all that means is if I have anything that's on me that is in this chest, it will automatically move all of those over. So I've got like a chest for just gems. So I can open that chest and click it. Any gems that were in my inventory immediately move into the chest, which is really good. It does make me wonder why they don't just add that with a radius.

Let me click I for inventory, compulsory count all of my chests at once, and then immediately drop off my loot and get back to the action instead of clicking individual boxes and doing it every time. But still, I'm not complaining. It's a great quality of life improvement where you don't have to click on 15 boxes to try to figure out what goes where. Yeah, they did a lot of good quality of life stuff in this game. I mean, you have to give it credit where credit is due. They definitely thought about what's going to make this game fun for people. What can we do to ease some of the pain points

that a lot of other crafting and survival games have? Yeah. Last thing that I'll mention before we'll move on to community reviews. The game has some very clever debuffs so at some point within the first couple hours you will kill somebody and loot a silver coin and immediately your whole screen has like a white shimmer around all of the outlines and at first i was like what's going on and it tells me that i've that i'm like i'm poisoned with silver and i was like oh i looted a silver

coin and then it does a little bit of damage over time and if you carry several coins then that'll increase the damage you take i thought that was really cool and very clever and maybe even funnier is the garlic so we all know the garlic right we all know vampires can't be around the sun, they can't be around silver crosses, and they can't be around garlic. And so if you start raiding the different farms in the world, you will see in the art design that they are hanging cloves of garlic around their homes and around their farms. So as soon as you start going in, you take a debuff that goes from 0 to 100 very quickly, where if you mouse over, it tells you that it's making your breath stink and it will draw monsters from farther distance

because they are all more aware of your presence. And the garlic debuff takes quite a while to wear off. But what a funny design again sticking with that vampire theme i really thought that was clever the other thing with the garlic is for each tick you take one percent more damage too so you can run around this farm and you can loot you know all their stuff if you want but the longer you're there the more damage you're gonna take so even these little peasants if you're're up to 80, 90% garlic rating or whatever it is, you're going to take 80 to 90% more damage. So now you need to be careful because you're going to get hurt real bad from these

people. Yeah. There's that. There's the holy debuff to where you take holy radiation, which is just straight up damage over time. There's the garlic mechanic. Really, there's so many systems in this game that kind of come into play. And they mesh so well, man. They really did a good job with having so many different aspects and having them all just work in this crazy vampire crafting survival pvp fighting game this one more thing that i just wanted to bring up is let's think let's step back and look at this game from a thousand feet right this my eyes this world a bat a bat side view this this world that exists like could you picture being these peasants and these farmers there's 40 vampires in your tiny little world that exists, like, could you picture being these peasants and these farmers? There's 40 vampires in your tiny little world that's just a tiny rectangle. There's 40 vampires in this world.

And they're after all my cotton yarn. Yeah. No wonder they're hanging garlic everywhere, because this world is not self-sustaining. We'd kill all the people so fast that we'd all be starving to death. And it's just funny to me. Oh oh and the poor scholars on the road you'll run into a group of nine and they all start you know crying and yeah you're running through slaughtering them all and feeding off that scholar blood because it gives you buffs to your spells all right so you guys have heard a little bit of our thoughts josh you've got some community reviews people have left on this game i do indeed

now remember this game is in early access officially so these are all early access reviews um i will say that again i mentioned it earlier this is one heck of a polished game for coming out in early access we encountered a couple bugs i think it's a strategic yeah i think so it's not it's not really it's a finished game yeah we i mean we i encountered one bug where I couldn't move a chest or deconstruct it, which was kind of annoying, but not game-breaking in any regards. And then we did touch on the just trying to move your castle to a different part of the map is really a headache. I'm sure they're going to fix that stuff. But this is polished, man. This is basically a full release.

But just keep that in mind. So, all right. This first review is positive. This person has 164 hours on record. And they say, this game is awesome. Lots of thought and purpose put into how the vampire moves about and interacts with the outside world based, of course, on the lore and tales behind vampires. To think this game is in early access is mind-blowing. It is super polished, way better quality than most triple a titles of late do yourself a favor and get this it's worth every cent and it's only a $20 game

it's only a $20 game i forgot that it was so cheap you're right yeah okay this next one is not recommended 75 hours on record fun game nice, great sound and music and visuals. Biggest issue is the small server caps and the fact you'll be starting over all the time, especially when your server inevitably drops to no population. Longevity from a PVE perspective is questionable, too, as

once you've killed all the bosses, what's the point? Ooh. Fair assessment, right? I kind of agree with everything. yeah i i agree with everything he said yep we struggled we picked a server where it was not full population and we did not encounter a lot of pvp now that let us you know check out all the aspects of this game but then the few people that were on the server were so high level that nobody else on the server could do a single thing against those. And that's just not fun in that regard.

So, yeah. And if population dwindles and you're on a PVP server with nobody on it, what's the point of a PVP server? Right. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And then this next one is a recommended review. 48 hours on record. And it says, way to shatter the trend of early

access expectations. This game is finished, if you ask me. Absolutely love survival, crafting, base building games. However, they all have lackluster combat systems. The combat in this game is phenomenal. Variety in builds between weapon and magic combinations, and it's easy to switch this at it. It costs nothing to switch your abilities, aka respec. Game has so many quality of life functions that others lack.

Move buildings in build mode with full inventory. Auto extract items from inventory into a chest that are already in that chest. I could go on and on and on about this game. $20 is an absolute steal. This game is incredible. Everything's kind of right on that one too.

Yes. I did not know you could move boxes with inventory in them. I played the inventory shuffle the entire time I played this game. I had no clue. I would empty boxes and then move them. I had no idea. It's because most games like this we're conditioned that way it's so ingrained i didn't even try yep

when i think about it oh man that's too funny okay and then uh this last one is not recommended 60 hours on record this game is fun but pvp is a real mixed bag most of your pvp encounters will be squads of four ganking everything in sight as they camp the boss everyone needs to progress so if one clan gets ahead then everyone else on the server is just stuck at their current level you also lose 25 of your equipment's durability when slain by another player so it's a slog to repair or get back to where you are if you get ganked four times in a row trying to gather resources or trying to kill the target that you have to kill.

Because there is no way around killing that singular target that you need to kill to progress in the game. So the PvP for the game is a real mixed bag of enjoyment at the moment. As for the PvE, it's pretty easy, so it's not that much of a challenge for a pure PVE playthrough. Okay, I can see what you're saying.

Parts of it. Yeah, and we experienced this. Now your gear does break. We had very high level gear, right? When we were towards the end of the game, we got wrecked. We tried our hardest. We got wrecked again and again. Our gear broke.

Now we're in a bind because we don't have that high level gear anymore and so that sets you back a pretty good ways if your gear breaks now you can spend materials to repair gear but then you have to go out and farm those high level materials so there is a lot of detriment to getting wrecked over and over and over again and it it can and will set you back in this game yeah so yeah i i can i can definitely see why that review was written and i think there are And it can and will set you back in this game. Yeah. So, yeah. I can definitely see why that review was written. And I think there are good points in there as well. Yep.

All right. So that is some of the community reviews. You guys know what time it is. It is time to play Guess That Score, boys. And I think Michael won last. Wait, did I win? No, I won twice ago. I won twice, twice ago. I won twice ago, guys. Oh, man.

I think I won last time, actually. It's been a little while. It was Elite Dangerous. Was that me? Yes, it was me because I remember saying, do you want to waste more of my time and make me hate you even more? That's right. So I'll go first.

My guess on this one, I think there's a lot to like about this game. I think it's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. So I tried to go for that mid to high score. I guessed 82%. Michael, I'll let you go next because you won the time before. I feel like I haven't won this in a couple months. It's been a little while.

I have no idea where to put this one. Like this is, and I was thinking about, this was the first time that I had to exercise some self-control and not cheat. Because I've always been like, this is so much fun. I'm like, I have no idea. I have no idea where it's going to be. I feel like, though, that

there is something for a lot of people in this game. And so I think that a lot of people that pick this one up are going to be like, hey, I found some things that I liked about it. I'd recommend it's fun. You said 82, Josh. It's funny because I either want to go much higher or much lower. So I'm going to pop out 75 and say that because of a few of those things that the reviewers said and some things that I'm going to gripe about, enough people didn't like so 75 i'm gonna strategically say 74 because i think that

the lag in this game made it virtually unplayable and i think you're gonna get a lot of angry people who came out early to complain and i think the people who have spent the most time in this game recognize that you kind of eventually hit a wall and the pvp is not robust enough that it's going to keep you around long term so i think this is also the kind of game that you're going to get people who do put in the 75 hours and then leave a negative review which is not fair but i think it's going to happen so i'm going to say 74 well boys you're both big losers oh no the actual score on this is 88 percent wow i am shocked really that it's that high really yes see it's because those people just played for 20 hours and didn't hit i'm shocked it's not a little bit higher i think that there's

a ton that this game has to offer to people that might be looking for that i completely agree it's more so anybody who who was able to play in the mornings had a good experience but as soon as it hit anywhere near 5 p.m when everybody would log in you could not move gear you could not change weapons you couldn't open doors yeah building was brutal yeah it was it was really brutal upon launch of this game and for the first what two weeks of it if if it was prime time the lag was unbearable and the crazy thing was the lag only affected things that were had to do with inventory or base management base building inventory shuffling and things like that did not affect never combat never yes combat was always smooth and fluid no matter what.

But half of this game is your castle and inventory and stuff like that. And you'd click something. And then it became a joke that I'd say, hey, guys, I tried to switch weapons. Give me 45 seconds. And then literally a minute later, my weapon would switch so that I could farm that tree or that iron node or something like that. It was insanely frustrating. I would like to think that it's getting fixed.

The last time we played when we were doing the raiding and being raided, there was not any lag at that point, so I don't know if they fixed it or maybe we just got lucky, but that was a huge pain point. Or people just started to drop off to perhaps the people that bought it and played,

you know, I think there were 12 people online when we were doing all that. So, I mean, maybe that means we were eight of them though, because it was us. Well, no,

yeah, we had us four and then there was their five. The other clan of five. I know. So, all right, whatever you guys lost, I win.

Hit that. Yeah. Congratulations. So yeah, Josh, we're going to start that music. You're going to lead us into our next segment. Oh, yeah. Hey, Tristan the Vampire Hunter, why don't you come back to my castle, and I'll trap you in a prison and drink your blood.

Right? That's what you're into. Yeah, I don't know. Hey, I don't prepare for these things, Paul. I'd never expect to actually win. I want to go back and just say that Paul's congratulations definitely had some attitude behind it. It didn't sound sincere? Congratulations.

He was like, you won this pile of... Paul doesn't like to lose. He may not come across as competitive, but he doesn't like to lose either. I'm not that competitive. What's the segment, Josh? This is the part of the show where we give our individual ratings on what we think about the game. We call this affectionately make, love, marry, or murder. If we think a game is terrible and not worth your time, we're going to murder it. If we think a game is phenomenal and you absolutely should pick it up and we think it has a ton of longevity or is a phenomenal value for the price, we might marry it.

If we think it's pretty fun, probably worth checking out. If it sounds like it's your type of game or the price is on point, then we might say, hey, this is a make love. For me, V Rising is right between that area of make love and murder. To be honest with you, I... No, I'm sorry. Not make love and murder. Make love and marry. Make love and marry? Yeah, make love and marry.

Sorry, I totally got that wrong. Because I think it has a lot to offer. I have found... I've mentioned this before. I have found that I love progression in video games. And this does progression very, very well. I like combat. I like PvP.

Paul is 100% right. And this is why it's not going to get a Mary from me in this regard, in that you hit a wall and that wall is simply, you're going to stagnate on the progression aspect. And if you're in a PVP server, you're going to get raided

and you're going to hit that wall where you just can do nothing against other players. And that's not really fun at that point. And then you kind of go, what's the point of all this time I'm putting into it? If there's no more bosses for me to fight, no more abilities for me to unlock, and I can't compete with other people on the server because I don't have 20 hours a day to put into this game. So for me, it is a strong make love. I had a lot of fun playing V Rising and it touched on a lot of things that i really really enjoyed but it's not without a few big flaws so i can't give it a mary at this point but i could see in the future if they fix a lot of that stuff saying at that

point i think it's a mary but it's fully enjoyable in my opinion michael i am very conflicted about this game i really want to murder this game like i really want to murder this game but i can't i can't murder this game the reason why i want to murder this game is because i don't play a survival building s type of game to put in 60 hours and never touch it again and right now i feel like once you quote unquote beat the game like what do you do you got nothing to do well. Well, then give me a story. Give me a story. Because if I want to play a game and spend 60 hours and play through it, I want to feel something at the end, something like that. But that's the thing though, is the game was fun. Now, it wasn't fun when I played by myself. I didn't enjoy logging in

without you guys. I was like, okay, I'm going to get caught up on building my castle and I'm going to get caught up on doing this stuff. But was like yeah i killed some bosses because you guys were a little bit farther progression wise and so i'm like i'm gonna kill these bosses down here but the combat was really really good and i feel like there was some things about the game that were just so clever that i'm like i can't murder this game and you know like the things we talked about earlier with just the way that the progression works, the way that you go, it's just like three or four different clever things,

like the weapons being kind of like a class system, the way that you get abilities from progressing through the game, the way that the tutorial or lack of tutorial worked. That was all so brilliant. But I feel like it has no point. I feel like the one guy's review says, I feel like it was all kind of

for nothing because am I ever going to play this game again? No. And I feel like with a survival game, I want to go pick it up and do it again sometime. And it just seems like there wasn't anything to do once you finished the game and you should never finish a survival game.

This being said though, I will fully eat my words and go back and say that if they fix rating and make rating better that might do a lot more for me in this game but i feel like even the pvp like if i'm two levels ahead of someone i'm gonna smoke them if i'm two levels underneath somebody they're gonna crush me and they just wasn't they needed a little bit more that balance in the pvp system i think that just didn't make it enough for me in a game that is clearly designed for PvP. PvE, I think there'd be no point in playing this game, to be honest with you. I think, well, I mean, it is fun to do the battles and stuff and go do the progression, but what are you really doing?

You're just like, oh, I killed all the bosses. I guess I'll go play Horizon Zero Dawn now or something like that you know and so maybe i'm being brutal on it but i feel like the part of me that wants to murder is because i think that a game that is designed to be a survival game should have that evergreen thing about it um it makes sense and if i'm gonna yeah and so that's it so i'm gonna make love to the game because i did have a good time caveat was i had a good time playing with my friends if i was gonna try and pick this up by myself i'd have probably played it for a couple of hours and never touched it again you guys were all about it like like as far as like that was all about my enjoyment was like let's do this together let's have some fun let me see if i can make this weapon and go fight with you guys and go do this and and i don't know

i know i just talked for a long time about that but i'm very convicted in how uh conflicted yeah two points for the uh the alliteration there i know the convicted and conflicted. Yeah, two points for the alliteration there. I know. Convicted and conflicted. The autobiography of Michael Butler. That's so right, too. Oh my goodness. But yeah, what I'll do is I'll make love to the game because I did have a really good time. I just feel like in a survival game I should be able to want to go back in a year or do

something like that and I never want to play this game again. I am very close to what Josh said. I feel like it's in between that line of make love and mary i think that this game is pretty incredible for about 25 to 30 hours and honestly for a 20 game that's not a bad value at all so even if i do ultimately say make love i still think it's a game people should buy and they should play. I do disagree with Michael that I loved playing this game solo and I loved playing

with it in groups. I would almost be tempted to say that this is better PvE content than PvP because of the way it just works. I think building your castle, discovering the new stuff, and the progression are all very effective drivers to keep playing the game. But with that being said, this does not have the magic of Valheim. No. Not even close. Which I'm really sad to say because functionally from the outside, these games are almost like very similar. We even talked about in our discord server, maybe this will just be Valheim with more combat,

but that that's not what it is. Valheim had the magic of exploration and going out on adventures. You don't get that in V rising. No, the world of Valheim is bigger. And also the, um, the,

the, the new recipes that you discover in Valheim is vastly different. Valheim is where I kill a Death Skeeto for the first time, and I loot a needle, and it immediately pops up and says, you have discovered how to make this new type of arrow, and you can make this, and you can make this. And that was really exciting. V-Rising does it the other way around. They let you build a grinder, and I

can crush stone into these types of brick, but then I can mouse over and see everything else I can learn, and now I have to go to the blood altar, figure out what boss gives me that recipe, and then I go kill them. It almost takes that discovery and that fun out of it. V Rising, I think, is still super fun. It's just nowhere near that level of Valheim for me. So for $20, I highly recommend it. As soon as we got high-end gear, and as soon as we did raiding, and then we kind of got wiped out,

I was kind of like, there's really nothing left for me, because why would I continue to raid? There's no point. Rust, there is no ceiling, because every base could have something great. there's really nothing left for me because why would I continue to raid? There's no point rust. There is no ceiling because every base could have something great that you're going to raid and get. So for me, I think ultimately I would say make love because of the timeframe,

but I still think it's a recommended by for me, but it's like right on that edge. Yeah. All right. I think it's time to go into our last segment, guys. Let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. You know, it's funny because we all kind of landed in the same place. You know, we all kind of landed with, hey, it's we're going to it's a make love game which i like that we did that this time um because it was really hard on the

last episode where we had to um number one and michael still scored um number one and number 72 um but i just as a final caveat i i do agree with all of your points on this i just think that it's i think paul you got it perfect like my magic game was atlas if i was done building my base today i could spend a hundred hours sailing around and and finding mermaids you know what i mean stuff like that there wasn't a lot of magic in this one so good good well put my friend well put thank you so yeah this is the leaderboard this is where every game that we do a deep dive episode on, we take a look at all the other games that we've covered. And as a three-person consensus, we have to decide where we want to put it on the overall leaderboard. So we do currently have a total of 72 games. That number keeps getting higher really fast,

Josh. I feel like it wasn't long ago that we're like, wow, we have 20 deep dives, and now we're in the 70s. So we've got some games in the top 10 like Rust. We also have Valheim, Satisfactory, Outriders. Down in the 20s, we've got some stuff like The Forgotten City, Weird West, Deep Rock Galactic. 40s, we're talking Little Nightmares 2 loop tiny tina's wonderlands all the way down in the 60s stuff like minecraft dungeons sea of thieves the forest halo reach things like that looking at v rising i'm guessing somewhere middle-ish there's no way this is like top 15 or bottom 15 right no

not a chance no no no it it's playing, especially when you can see the price with friends. Caveat. Don't play below. I actually have a spot where I think it would go really well. What are you thinking? I'm thinking in the mid to late 20s.

That's where I was looking as well. And I have a first question. Now, Michael, I don't think you played resident evil village josh i think you're gonna squeeze about the same number of hours out of this as resident evil would you rather spend 60 on resident evil village or 20 on v rising oh man that's a really tough question paul. I mean, I would say Resident Evil Village. You would? I mean, I feel like Resident Evil Village is the better experience. But man, price comes into play sometimes, too.

But I would. It's funny that you mentioned that, because my sweet spot on this is I would rather play V Rising over Weird West any day. But I think how fun. But I know and i know paul loves that disagree yeah i know paul disagrees on that but for me that's i i don't think it's above resident evil village but i do think it's above weird west so for me i would put it at 26 man my benchmark on that i was literally going to make the statement if we put this above weird west i'm going to make the statement, if we put this above Weird West, I'm going to quit the show. Because Weird West is so

much better than this game. I don't know, man. You guys are a lot higher on Weird West than me. It's about the same amount of time. It's about the same amount of money, but I don't know, man. It's got a story, and I feel like... I don't know. I think you're in a good

spot there, but I would also much rather team up with friends and play Deep Rock Galactic. See, Deep Rock's a fun game. Paul's the one that brings Deep Rock down. Yeah. I think they're close to each other. I think we're in the same... I think we're all close, right? I'm thinking more

30. 30 is kind of what I was thinking. I would put this below No Man's Sky. Absolutely. See, that's the problem below No Man's Sky. Absolutely. See, that's the problem. But above Among Us. No Man's Sky is really good, man. You're right. It is hard to put this above No Man's Sky.

I think 29 is a good spot for it. I could see doing 29. Among Us is kind of starting to feel dated a little bit. I don't know if it's just that we haven't played it in a really long time, or maybe that just schtick is kind of fading now or maybe just maybe just 30 i don't know how you guys i love hollow night man i think hollow night's a great video game i would just keep counting 31 if you're gonna do that then i'm gonna say there's no way it's going above stardew valley so all right it's like you start somewhere It's somewhere between 26 and

32 because this game is infinitely better than Tribes of Midgard to me. I think it's between 30 and 32. Wow, really? Yeah. I say my vote would be put it above Among Us at 29. What are you thinking, Michael? This is hard for me because

I... It's hard for me to put it below that because i have not played like the four games immediately after that i haven't played hollow knight started valley tribes midgard i've played enough far cry 5 to appreciate it but so i can't really put it in there somewhere i i would feel comfortable putting it at 29 above among us but that being said among us had so much magic for so long it was so much fun i got to got to still play Among Us. But I think, I don't know. When you look at a similar type of game where we're grouping up and having fun together, I'd kind of rather play this one with you guys with the combat piece and stuff than to play Among Us.

It's got more replay value. I will say this. I don't know that there's any update that could come to Among Us where I would say we have to play it. Among Us 2. V Rising, I think the main reason it's early access, there is one zone you can see on the overall map that you just can't get to yet. That'll be future content.

If they opened that up, and if they added a whole bunch of new mats and new buildings, and they fixed some of the issues with raiding, I could see hopping back into V Rising. So I'm fine putting it one above among us that that's also a good point is that i can see myself like if they fix raiding and they fix the end game content i could see myself putting this game top 10 it's just i can't do it because

i i want that from a survival game the end game that makes a lot of sense because the potential is there it's just not there yet. And they'd have to add some pretty cool and intriguing things, but I can see that happening as well. I can too. Honestly, the developers got something here and I don't think they're done with it. So I hope-

VR, VRising. Oh, that'd be weird. Give it to me. Let me do it. All right. So is that vain, Josh? I'm going to come get it. Are you good putting it at 29, Paul? Yeah, let's do it um all right so is that main josh i'm gonna come get it immediately are you good putting it at 29 paul yeah let's do 29 i'm fine with that i think that's a good

respectable rating for this game too so it's fun it's well worth playing i always say most of the games on our leaderboard we have enjoyed for the most part i think it's highly worth playing i just think it it just it's not not quite to the same level of quality as a Resident Evil Village, which is such an immensely fun, complete storyline-based game that's an absolute blast. It's more memorable. I don't know that anything ever happened in V Rising that's as memorable as multiple moments in some of those other games. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. All right.

And Josh, do you want to tell the people what our upcoming deep dive is two weeks from now uh you're making me say it because it's near i don't know is that how you pronounce it i still don't know that's why you passed it to me i kept saying nyer and then you said near and i was like all right i'll let josh say i'm pretty sure it's near automata which i will say is is i had heard of the Nier series. Oh, I love Mr. Roboto, by the way. Good sticks reference there. Actually, that might be 70s, man.

Anyway, Nier Automata, I have heard of the Nier series. I've heard of Nier Replicant, Nier Automata. I knew absolutely nothing about them. This is the game that legendary supporter BlackstarDQ picked for us. I have been playing it an awful lot. I won't spoil anything, but I'm excited to do that deep dive on that one. So you all will have that in two weeks from today. That is correct.

And what is not correct is 1983 is when Styx released. Oh, really? Mr. Roboto. Yep. I do remember seeing a young boy and hearing that for the first time and then really loving

Mr. Roboto and asking my parents to play it all the time. Which is weird because weren't you in like your 20s in 1983? No, you butthead.

Oh, that's just your beard was in his 20s. I was five. I forgot that your beard was born before you were. Michael's like 18 months younger than Josh. So this is very funny.

You feel like the old man. I know. One week, one week away, guys. And I milestone it. Oh, boy. All right. Well, that finishes this deep dive. We will have a Twig episode on Thursday covering This Week in Gaming.

We'll have a quick take on Saturday. Hope you guys are enjoying these episodes and this content. The one thing I would like to mention is our free Discord server. If you're not already on there, come join us. We'd love to hear your guys' feedback and your suggestion for other games and other things to cover. And once again, just we'll plug MultiplayerSquad.com. That takes you right to our Patreon page. You can help support our show and also get that bonus content like the squad cast, which is incredibly fun.

And I think we're done, guys. I think this might end up being like our second or third longest episode ever. But this game has so much content and go out and play it. I think the rising is great. This is the kind of game I do want to support and get future games that are similar to this. And we're all done so happy gaming everybody we'll see you on thursday all right see everybody i love you all