It’s been a while since we last checked in, a bit longer than usual. First and foremost, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your patience and faith in us.
The V Rising community, while certainly having its faults (like draining the blood of the living to sustain its unholy existence, participating in dark magic rituals, and eating uncooked rats), has always been a bastion of earnest excitement united around the things we all love. We are all monsters for our passions.
Today, we’d like to share a bit of what we’ve been crafting and offer some clarity on the direction of Stunlock Studios and V Rising. We can’t reveal much just yet, but we don’t think even creatures of the night enjoy being left completely in the dark.
So with that in mind, let’s talk a little about what we’ve been up to in the Stunlock Studios crypts these past months.
Pour yourself a glass of blood and get comfortable, Vampires! It’s that time again.
As foretold in Dev Update #31: Midnight Reflections, we’ve already unfolded all of our initial plans for V Rising. Since then, we delved into darkness to search the shadows for new and unexplored paths. In the end, we’ve come to the conclusion that V Rising, in its current form, is something we’re proud of, and the journey to Dracula is a complete one as it stands.
As you, a clever Vampire, might guess, this statement will undoubtedly raise some questions that we’ll try to clarify. For one, we are not currently developing a new content update for V Rising. This also means there should be no requirement to start a new save anytime soon, as is normally required with major content updates.
We intend to continue supporting the game with balance and bug-fixing patches whenever we feel it’s necessary. To help find those moments, we’ll be holding regular polls to take the temperature of the game’s state based on your feedback. For bug fixes, we’ll be focusing on patching when a major or particularly impactful issue appears. When we do, we can usually fit in a few smaller fixes at the same time as well!
Alongside this upkeep, working deep into the winter nights fixing dangerous bugs as they rear their ugly heads, and keeping tabs on the state of the game balance, we also spent some time investigating what more official modding support could look like. After digging into it, we came to the conclusion that the game simply isn’t structured in a way that would allow us to provide mod tools at the standard we’d want for the community. The time spent exploring it wasn’t wasted, however, and what we learned will prove valuable for our future schemes and our new focus.
This might have you, that ever-clever Vampire, asking… focus on what, if not a V Rising update? What is going on in the crypt?
Put plainly, Stunlock Studios is working on a new game set in the beautiful, strange, and gothic world of V Rising. This will be our most ambitious project yet in our 15-year history of making games, and we can’t wait to begin this journey with you. The hunt for blood is about to evolve.
V Rising is an achievement built on years of work and decisions, a castle raised brick by brick, forming the foundation we stand on today. While the core workings of V Rising are strong and have allowed us to construct a wonderful bastion of dark Vampire delights, that foundation can also be limiting. Decisions made to lay those bricks in a certain way often make sense at the time, but they aren’t always perfect for ideas that emerge later.
We’ve been experimenting in ways we haven’t been able to for a very long time, exploring fresh ideas unbound by our previous limitations. With the foundation of knowledge we built alongside you, we’re able to craft a bolder vision for the future of our Vampire world. Right now, we’re set about creating the architecture that can support our new and wild ambitions, and one we think will be able to support yours as well.
Our next game will invite you to explore your darkest whims in a world of greater depth, danger, and mystery than ever before. The odyssey of the Vampire continues in an experience that feels both familiar and strikingly new. We take on this challenge with great respect for what it demands as we set out to build something extraordinary, and when the time comes, your feedback, as always, will help guide us as we refine and improve.
We’re very early in development, so you’ll have to give us some space to brew. Just know that our first priority is to make this new game work great, and while there may be changes along the way, our blackened hearts are aligned with yours. Though things may grow quiet for a time, we’ll emerge from the shadows now and then to share how things are progressing.
Included in those regular check-ins will be regular community polls and round-ups to promote active community servers, as we mentioned earlier. You can find the first of those polls here!
Please give us your feedback in the form linked above!
With that done, it’s time for us to descend into darkness once again to continue our work. Though we will be returning soon to discuss the results of the feedback poll.
What sort of dreams do you have of another V Rising game? Let us know, and for future updates on what we’re working on, please follow our socials linked below!
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Lots of love and a pint of blood,
/The Stunlock Studios Team