V Rising’s Free 2023 Expansion Lets Players Build the Castle of Their Dreams

Who knew building vertically could get us this excited?

The incredible popularity of Stunlock Studios‘ top-down vampire survival game, V Rising, took many people (including us) by surprise. Who knew there was such a demand for punishing survival-game mechanics wrapped in a dark vampiric cape? If you’ve stepped away from the game because of a lack of new content, Stunlock is trying to change that in the new year with their free-to-play expansion.

Even though the complex gameplay of V Rising goes deep, there was one thing that always bugged us about the building mechanics. The inability to build up. For any aspiring vampire cosplayer, it was probably the same feeling you had when you first realized you couldn’t build the dark tower of your dreams.

Indeed–in an open world with so much customization at gamer’s fingertips, being able to do something that humans have done since early Sumerian cultures feels like something that a modern game studio could replicate, right?

Stunlock On Vertical Building

The developers recently filled us in with some more details, including the difficulties of enabling multiple castle floors, via the Stunlock Studios blog. According to Stunlock,

“The technical limitations have proven challenging, and as a result, Vampires are confined to sprawling castles that get their height from building uphill, but it isn’t quite the same… It’s taken a lot of hard work, dark sorcery, human sacrifices, animal sacrifices, and the third kind of sacrifice that I am not legally allowed to disclose, but we’ve made a lot of progress in making this vision tangible.”

That being said, the company also said that they are “doing our best to make that happen” for the upcoming expansion, so there is still a possibility we’ll just have to live in our vampiric suburban ranch homes for a little bit longer.

In addition to the building mechanics seeing attention, there were also new characters, zones, jewels, and powers teased for this large expansion.

You can read the Stunlock Studios blog post to read everything that’s changing in the upcoming V Rising 2023 Expansion.

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