This week on Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviewed V-Rising. Starstruck Vagabond on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/24... Support us on Patreon: / secondwindgroup Second Wind Merch Store: sharkrobot.com/collections/se...
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Iunno I really liked this game. It wasn't anything that blew my socks off, but it did the usual but in a way that was a bit better thought out and interesting, and compared to where the bar is for the industry at the moment that might as well be worth a standing ovation.
@@thePsiMatrix Yes! And of course, we're suggesting to folks if they want to throw that $5 in, just grab a Patreon membership and get those benefits too :)
@jkitty542 honestly it's a boring copy of breath of the wild with absolutely horrible writing that tries too hard to be funny. Nobody remembers it because it wasn't fun or memorable
Unless they are Discworld vampires, because Igors are equal-opportunity assistants. You want to be a mad scientist, a werewolf, a vampire, or even a military lieutenant or police department, the Igors are willing to lend a hand where needed.
Ultimate irony of the game is that you can turn enemies into ghouls, gear them up and send them on raids on human settlements. But you still have to do all the menial tasks yourself in your own castle, because Igor is busy burning down a cotton farm.
"Did I mention I've got a tongue like an excitable dachshund in a laundry pile?" After so many years of creative euphemisms and round-about expressions, I didn't think it was possible for Yahtzee to outdo himself, and yet he does it again!
Had a similar reaction when Yahtzee mentioned how boring it would be to swing around Cardiff as spider-man. Maybe if he keeps going for eons to come, every major population centre in the UK will be represented! St David's next!?
Only know of Wolverhampton because of its football club. Also Yahtz also referenced Wolverhampton once in ZP. I think it was the Vampyr one, ironically.
You can get help gathering stuff by turning villagers into vampire minions, but sending them out to gather takes hours of real-life time for them to complete, because the game is entirely designed around logging on to a multiplayer server for a few hours a day rather than playing it single-player.
As much as V Rising can be fun (especially when you can disguise as a human which is how you get to those shops) the waiting around for stuff like a bad mobile game grates a lot.
At least they made it so now it counts offline hours too. Back when i first played it, in EA, it did not. "You have sent your minions out for 16h? Well, they will be back in 16h, after you have beaten the game, twice"
now that the timers count down even when the "server" is off, I kinda like it, meaning you can send them to gather materials when you are done for the day and come back the next day to get the spoils. it feels nice. you can also always just change the time multiplier in the world settings if you want it to take just a few minutes.
@@craigwilde2162 Just customise crafting settings, it literally takes 2 minutes to set that up and even less time to figure it out. I have no idea why people stick to the rails as if they were trains.
And not really accurate comparison ether. Kain has no issues with living people. He has issues with anyone who even mildly inconveniences him. Living, dead, demon, literally anyone.
@@Pokefan_64 Kain is the protagonist of the best game Silicon Knights ever made that then turned into Amy Hennig's masterpiece (she also agrees) with the sequels, and back in the PS1 days of Blood Omen and Soul Reaver they were pioneers in ambitious storytelling and high-quality voice acting. And what Kain did was doom the world to apocalypse because the Morton's Fork self-sacrifice offered to him was sus and he decided it was all rigged from the start. That's the first game, the rest of the series is spent figuring out just how rigged it was and what game Kain is playing with the riggees (you only play as Kain in the first game Blood Omen and the last game Defiance, and in the basically-unrelated Blood Omen 2, in Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2 you control Raziel). Also voiced by Simon Templeman in his best role, where one little exchange at the start of the last game sums up Kain's personality: Random Sarafan crusaders: "Surrender, fiend, and we'll promise you an easy death!" -> Kain: "I could promise you the same... But it would be a lie." Or how Hennig herself later sums up her two protagonists Kain and Raziel (who she describes in an interview "as kind of a self-righteous little twit with a lot to learn"; he's great btw) as Raziel being the kind of character who does the wrong thing for the right reasons and Kain as the kind of character who does the right thing for the wrong reasons.
"I don't have the time for hovering! I'm not a Californian parent!" *Yahtzee's toddler enters frame: "Yes you--" "Alright! Technically I am!" Best joke line in this review. And Yahtzee's feeling more enthusiastic about this game and review than he's been in a while.
Yup, it's not a perfect game by any stretch but it is amazingly fun and I feel like it's the rare kind of game you can complain about a lot of little stuff and then still want to keep playing
yeah I enjoy playing it with my sister but we fuckin CRANKED that craft time, smelt time and resource yield up, we don't have the several hours to spare otherwise lmao
@@Zambicus At this point Drac's Castle must be the size of a continent. Soma Cruz should just bring a wrecking ball next time he visit to save the trouble
I just wanna know… Yahtzee, how tf did you write Will Leave the Galaxy for Good and develop Starstruck Vagabond and do your job AND raise a kid at the SAME TIME?! Do you ever sleep?!
Well, Starstruck Vagabond was in *development hell* for more than a decade until Yahtzee did that "12 games in 12 months" sanity loss program. If ZP is still around, might want to watch it. It was a wild and fun ride.
I genuinely can't believe that the game made it to it's 1.0 release without having default settings for a solo PvE server. Before even launching the game I searched "v rising solo reddit" and copied someone else's world settings, and that fixed almost every complaint you mentioned. Don't think I would have made it 1/4 of the way through the game without those settings.
@@enman009 and that's exactly the wrong mentality and reply to have here Who should know more on how to make the experience good for a solo PvE player? The player that just started the game or the dev that made it and (hopefully) took a ton of feedback? Since it's clearly the dev, one flashy button tagged "Solo PvE Defaults" should have been there ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES! SET YOUR OWN CHALLENGE!
@@Daniel-yy3ty The thing is you can change it whenever you want, at anytime, I made it to iron in solo and decreased the smelt time, made it to dark silver, reduced the durability loss, building a castle hit my tile limit exited the game and raised it. There is literally no excuse to not make the game the way you want it to play at anytime, heck you can even adjust your flat level from zero to something else to make the game easier.
@@Daniel-yy3ty When you start a playthrough the game *ask* you how you want your experience to be, and the option called "relaxed" is precisely for people that don't want to spend much time in the farming/survival. There's another button below that ask you how you want the grind to be and if it is a PvE focused experience. That's why you should read and pay attention to what the game says. Literally anyone that starts the game sees those options.
@@genesisswift384 I guess it's easier not to pay attention to what the big lines of text say and instead bruteforce your way through it. To add to your points: the game is so generous that even if you take a lower or higher difficulty, you can still choose how fast the overall progression is. Since bossfights are the main progress and their fights are quite brief, the crafting is one way to get stronger gear and more gameplay interactions with the world.
For people interested in V Rising: you can customize things like the amount of loot you get, speed of crafting, tools, rewards, damage, focus on single player and so much more. No, V Rising isn't just a Multiplayer Crafting grind, it gives too much to people that wants to Speedrun the crafting aspects and focus on the action. It gives many conveniences for many players.
Probably one of the last games I expected Yahtz to review but its a welcome surprise indeed, I'm glad to see some of the variation considering this is mostly a game designed for multiplayer.
This is one of those games that really does benefit from multiplayer. A bit later, you can craft prison cells which lets you imprison and continually siphon blood out of high percentage people you find. One of my friends had a room filled with these, and because he couldn't take them with him to the new area he wanted to build on we spent the evening playing "Who can survive the mutation?" There's also a mechanic where you can feed them some radiation sludge and there's a chance they'll either mutate into a horrible monstrosity, or increase their blood percentage. We roleplayed the whole time as snooty vampires evaluating the stock. Was good fun.
Are you certain he couldn't take them to a new castle? Were you playing before 1.0? The new castle relocation heart lets you transfer everything to a new plot, prisoners and servants included.
I’ve been loving this game. Playing local co-op with my husband has made it a lot more fun. I’ve decorated the hell out of several giant fancy dramatic castles to live out my fancy bloodsucker fantasy and it rules.
Crafting and building is so beneath vampires. That's what the undead servants are for. Count Dracula managed to enchant his castle to not only teleport wherever he wants but also shapeshift and regenerate, a true 'creature of convenien- I mean, chaos'.
@@tarnetskygge Even so, I'd argue only the murder of the bones-haver and the physical collection of the bones should incumber the vampire. The removal of soft tissue from the bones and the actual assembly of the throne should be done quickly and easily with magical spells created by some nerd at a stuffy fantasy research center.
@@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563 nah, vampires have eternal life so you know those guys who spend a lifetime building entire replica ships and cathedrals out of matchsticks? A vampire can happily spend a century or two doing that with bones at 1:1 scale.
@@kildain3438 I mean it makes sense from a plot point of view, but the game is trying to sell you on the fantasy of being a vampire, and carpentry just isn't that.
Wooo - Wolverhampton shout out! That used to be my stomping ground - til i moved far away from it. Nice Brian Blessed cameo, and i laughed at the tampon teabag bit!
If I had a penny for everytime Yaghtzee mentioned a vampire protagonist slaughtering countless people from Wolverhampton, I'd have two pennies. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird it happened twice. The other time was in his Vampyr review.
I am so desperate for a new entry into the Legacy of Kain series that I would play a game about his castle interior decorating upon the ruins of the Pillars of Nosgoth.
To be honest, Brian Blessed's characters are all rather demure and subtle compared to the utter trash on display in V Rising. Imagine every boss is a reject from an MMO's Generic World Boss lineup, and all of them were rejected because their lines were just too full of terrible puns. "I'm going to CUT you down!" says the lumberjack. "TIME to STOP your heart!" says the clock maker. "The candle of your life is flickering out HAHAHA!" screeches the chandler. And yes, those are (mostly?) fake examples. They're too funny to have been written by the actual game dialogue writer.
A teleporting vampire castle and no Duckula reference? Love that you mentioned Legacy Of Kain, but that bit was screaming for at least a knod to a certain green vegetarian vampire duck.
It is heavily recommended that if you plan on playing this game solo or with a small group that you modify the default world settings substantially. I'm talking maximum boost to crafting speed, drop rates at 3x, just go absolutely ham on resource surplus; make the shop discount things at the maximum rate (0.25x costs) have it recharge every 10 minutes, etc etc. The default settings are intended for long term, large multiplayer servers and will absolutely annoy anyone who does not know this ahead of time.
One of the biggest impacts to enjoyment of V Rising, when played purely PVE, that I had in 1.0 compared to EA is the server setting that increases yield of resources and reduces crafting and refinement time (I boosted each by a factor of 3). That iron and wool wall ceases to become a problem at that point.
The whole "V" Blood section, and teabag reference was so unhinged I actually gagged. Well done, I only hope to gag as much during Starstruck: Vagabond, Out Now by This MadLad
V Rising is pretty fun. If you tweak the sandbox settings to reduce the grind by... about 40-50 times. Max inventory stack sizes, halved crafting/refining costs, maximised refining speed (so it doesn't take fucking 10 REAL LIFE hours to smelt a stack of iron, maybe also double-triple the resource yield too, if you don't feel like spending an afternoon grinding new resources every chapter... Etc.
@@Spriktor Worker blood below 50% barely has any effect, and such high quality is rare. And need i remind that prison cells are about quarter into chapter 2? Servants are also unlocked late in chapter 1, by then you would already had to grind a ton of materials (plus servants would require you to just stop playing until tomorrow). And servants are literally useless unless you give them good gear, and without the modifiers i specified, it took me AN HOUR to grind enough copper to even make myself a set of tools/weapons... P.S. The only other game i have played with such blatant padding through grind was ARK. I have finished Abiotic Factor literally just few days ago, playing it in parallel with V, and it didn't require almost any grind to progress
@@NekoiNemo You can progress to max gear level in like 10-15 hours on brutal difficulty if you know exactly what you are doing and are super tryhard. Considering how many bosses there are a ton of that time is just killing them. If it took you an HOUR to grind enough copper either you were playing on an extremely high pop server or almost wandering around aimlessly. That should take you like 3 minutes of hitting the copper rocks + travel time back and forth (5-10 mins in total)
@@NekoiNemoVRising doesn't require grind, you literally can gather enough resources on your way to hunt down each new boss. There are even bosses in resource-heavy areas where you need to go to anyhow.
"The trail of this scent bears the unmistakable signature of Dracula, the Immortal King. When Dracula fell, he cursed the world of Vardoran with a blood rain, a scourge in which many perished. Some who survived became unknowingly twisted by the downpour, their bloodlines forever empowered by his malice. This mighty predator is infused with that legacy." ~Alpha the White Wolf description
@@jamesnewman7509 What!? Is it some sort of community joke? I only know the basics of basics when it comes to the lore, and the only human to animal transformation I know of is lycanthropy and the mystical woods in the north east.
Many of the complaints mentioned here go away if the player reads a few lines in the objective tracker (it shows several steps ahead, including a way to craft wool thread, or trade in a village). It is deliberately designed as a guide and hint list, and imo is one of the major hooks of the game. The flavor texts there also include vague story stuff, although those are definitely sort of thin. As for iron smelting time, perhaps the game wants to prod you towards building more furnaces? The base-building part might not be for everyone, of course.
I always assumed the length of crafting was meant to encourage me to go hunt more resources or v bloods after queuing up some refinement. It flows pretty well as a game loop, though the pace dips innevitably for everyone, but sooner for some if they either don't spot the v-blood they need in the list soon enough or are having a tough time with a boss with a key progression bit they are stuck on. Ultimately I think they did a pretty good job with the loop/pace as far as these survival sandboxy games go anyways, but I can also see how someone may end up spinning their wheels a bit.
@@CunnyMuncher yeah the adjustments are key, the only setting that feels close to mandatory is disabling the teleport limitations... I have played with it and have a brutal save with it... but man does it feel bad. I think on average its more fun to disable.
@@notednuance Some choices, like that, are purely mistakes made during the time the devs intended for the game to be PvP(which is bad, rust gameplay is bad);its a big oversight that seeps into some minor systems
Yeah that confused me too, you don't need special flooring to make wool thread either, you just need to beat Christina. I definitely predicted he'd hit his breaking point in act 2 or 3 based on something, but I was expecting something that made a bit more sense, like the crazy material costs or wait times, even though you can turn them down in the settings.
@@eugloopydilemma Let's face it, the fact that a metric fuck-ton of progress is basically locked between very specific boss fights is a fucking pain in the ass. And the fact you have to do this over and over and over again for every biome on the past is just, insane.
I guess it would get annoying if you replayed the game multiple times, which to be fair is one of, if not the, intended way to play: multiplayer servers that reset sometimes. I disagree though if we're talking about a single playthrough, every boss has a few things it unlocks, and there's a lot of them, but I think they're pretty fun fights usually, and you can edit resource settings to be more friendly to solo players. The default settings are totally geared towards pvp servers, I tell all my friends to crank every setting to make resource management easier in solo worlds. I don't mind having to beat most of the bosses to progress, that feels normal to me, and I want to fight them all anyway so I just do, I've only played through once though way back, and right now I'm on my second playthrough after years of updates, I changed all those setting I mentioned and the gameplay loop is really fun for me, I can only hope other people have fun too, so good luck finding the balance of settings that's right for you if you're willing to give it another shot.
Unless the vampire says bleeh when they attack like in HOMM 2 i prefer to ignore new vampire games. It sort of reached its peak with that game in my book as far as vampires goes.
Honestly, one of the best things about v rising is how customizable the experience is. The first thing I did was turn off durability and massively reduce harvesting and gathering times. The game was so much better without that bullshit faffing about.
The teleport restriction *really* should be off by default in PvE mode, especially solo. It makes no sense there. - I can see why it would make sense in PvP tho.
If you can just teleport everywhere all the time it removes the "be back before sunrise or face extra difficulty" element. Obv. if people don't want to deal with that in solo play that's up to them, but that's why that restriction exists.
@@dandominare Factually incorrect. You cannot just teleport everywhere in the first bloody place, teleport sites are few and far between as it is. On top of that, the devs decided to slap players with a default garbage restriction meant to keep PvP trolls amused as they murder all the newbies foolish enough to stray into a public realm, over and over and over again. Or perhaps they all have tea and biscuits while walking their sulfur back to the castle, I've never been. But doubt it.
@@hazukichanx408 "the devs decided to slap players with a default garbage restriction meant to keep PvP trolls amused" Can you actually back that statement up with anything or are you just butthurt someone ganked you?
@@dandominare the problem with that argument is that if you're just running back to your castle, that "extra difficulty" is basically non existent. Just wolf up and you can run straight there in broad daylight past any enemy, while dodging into tree shadows to keep from burning. Might have to side step an arrow or two, but even if you get hit, just wolf up again and keep running. There is no difficulty, sun or no sun.
That childrens' floor map reference has thrown me for a loop. Thanks Yathtz, you utter bastard. The nostalgia is trying to push the ennui into investigating where I remember it from. I'm confident procrastination will win out in the end, still though, low blow.
More vampire games really should go for the Hellsing logic where consuming blood can be useful for information gathering and storing away the consumed soul for later purposes like extra lives, using an ability of theirs or even just flat out summoning said consumed as familiars.
I have way too much time in the game, so I know a little too much, but. There are some things that are kind of just objectively wrong. Mostly if you want to make wool thread, the loom doesnt require a tailoring floor at all. None of your refinement/crafting stations need the associated floor. Being enclosed speeds up refinement and correct flooring gives a 25% discount. Station speed can also be changed in server settings to be sped up or down. Though why the devs made the base speed so slow is a better sticking point. The biggest problem is that if you have a station previously set down, once you unlock a new recipe, you need to click that recipe to enable it. It's not automatically enabled. You can also be arbitrarily gatekept from the next areas resources if you're unlucky and don't have the research for the best melee weapons unlocked. Or you dont have a full set of X lvl gear score so youre stuck at a certain score until you grind or luck your way into being stronger. If you do want to buy from area 2s vendors you need to unlock and use the human disguise form. But yeah the bosses are the creme de le creme of the game. Its a shame you didnt see the later game bosses that are REALLY fun and engaging. Not to mention an optional Brutal mode that gives some bosses additional movesets snd higher level.
I never heard of your channel before. I watched this video and immediately became a fan! Instant subscriber! Your examples are spot on. Keep up the good work! :)
Okay but I can't be the only one who was hoping this week's Fully Ramblomatic review would be of Starstruck Vagabond? I know it's technically corrupt as hell and shameless promotion for Yahtzee to review a game he made but I don't care, it would be hilarious. Especially if he just treats it like a normal review for the whole video until the end where he adds "oh I made this game by the way".
No no, veterans of his old channel know there's only one correct way for Yahtzee to review a game of his own making - a new episode of The Ego Review (with Gabe)
0:50 - I normally wait until the end of a video before deciding whether to Hit That Like Button or not, but a Legacy of Kain reference in the year of Our Nosgothic Lord 2024? That'll do it.
And he quit cause he couldn't figure out how to get lots of wool lol. You can just murder 3 villages in dunley and walk home with 2 stacks of the stuff on default settings.
While I agree with everything said here, I will say that I'm strangely addicted to V Rising. It's just fun. I thought the base building elements would be tedious and turn me away from the game but I really got into it and then the combat (and bosses) are just really fun.
@@Skorak Grim Dawn has been my podcast game recently. Learning about the 40K lore has given me a new way to enjoy the game after around 70 hours of playtime.
v-rising is much more fun if you adjust the world settings to your playstyle as the default is tuned for competitive multiplayer and not small group co-op
Pointed stick? Oh, oh, oh. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you eh?
Been loving the game myself, but it really is meant for online play. Co-op not so much, but having a save based on an online server means you can put all your iron in to smelt, log off for the day, and its all done by the time you log back on. Time doesnt pass on a locally hosted save file, so its better to edit the settings to reduce production times. The game could do better informing players about this though.
also how much do you love being free and beholden to none to the point where whenever you lose all interest in a game you can just say so and go do anything else you feel like in life, truly you have levelled up a key skill tree for life right there
Joke's on you, Yahtz, I already bought your game. Really digging the "Yahtzee casually riffing over the credits thing." My note to the editor would be to make it a regular thing, because with the sheer amount of Patron supports I honestly can't be arsed to wait the credits out. But if it means a little extra Yahtzee content while they scroll briskly by, I'll happily hang out until the end of the video.
For the record, there _is_ a plot to this game, it's just one of those affairs where everything important happened while you were asleep. Hundreds of years ago vampire nobility vied for control of as much territory as they could hold over the others. Dracula happened and stole territory with power from literal Hell or something, the vampires clades started ganging up on him, which gave humans time to discover solar magic and fuck everything up. Dracula died, and enacted a rain of blood that granted mortals power and mutated some creatures, and every leftover vampire wisely decided to go to sleep to avoid being given a nice new tan by force. Dracula's cult managed to resurrect him, this wakes you up, and now you're gaining power drinking up the blood of those Dracula's edgelord rain effected. There's also several more settings in the game to make the grind less grindy. You can triple how big stacks of items can be, as well as how much resources you get from a node of the stuff. That really shortens the outings. You can also shorten the time it takes for your crafting stations to spit stuff out to 1/6 the time. You can alter how much durability damage weapons and armor takes to the point of turning durability off because I made this crap once and I cannot be arsed to do it again. You can drastically increase how many servants you can have per castle and triple how much stuff they get per outing, which is good cause sending the fucks out to get paper and scrolls made unlocking new gear much smoother. I suppose the fact that sending them out on a 24 hour outing only triples how much they can gather as apposed to 2 hour outings is good cause time still doesn't pass when you're offline on private servers, but also screw the devs for making 24 hour outings the default whenever I log back in as well as that scale of diminishing returns for _wasting my time._ Yeah if it's not obvious, I'm more favorable to this game than old man Yahtz is, but I agree with all of the criticism. The fact you can alter settings like this is the only thing that makes it tolerable to play the game in single player. The dodge cooldown is pretty unforgiving, and it'd be nice to shorten that if only by a full second. Though one technique I learned in Early Access was to use the Slasher weapon skill to turn invisible briefly to truly maximize how long you can avoid enemies, which pretty much becomes a mandatory talent during the final set of bosses.
Wasd is the best dodge, time your space better, weapons have dashes and s too, weapon swapping exists, as do movement speed spells, counters and shields. Space cd is fine
@@Spriktor I am aware of these things, brave internet defender, and I use these techniques regularly. I stand by my opinion nonetheless, as I am entitled to it. At the moment of typing, I'm up to Adam and just taking a break to fill out the ranks of my servants, get them all decked out in high tier equipment, and decorate my castle, because I have the resources to do so. I ain't no hardcore expert in this game, but I been playing since Solarus was the final boss. I been around the block long enough to know the tips and tricks, and literally the first thing I figured out is cooldowns are _just_ long enough that if you alternate correctly you'll always have at least one option, endless aggression is a fast track to leaving yourself vulnerable, and bullet hells are pretty much the same in isometric space. That doesn't change the fact that I'd be happier if I could spell sling a little more freely. No game is perfect, people enjoy things differently and have different opinions, and just cause you change your channel name to the dev studio name doesn't mean they asked you to defend them from criticism in the comments section of a youtube review.
There is something about this game that I just love. It is the uniqueness of the premise and the simplicity of its gameplay loop. And just building my own castle speaks to the sims player in me. Edit: you don't need the tailor's floor for making wool thread, just need to beat the boss who would allow you to suck out the info for how to make it. Edit 2.0: You need to gain the ability to disguise yourself as a human to buy from those merchants.
The game gives you the tools to reduce the grind meant for whole clans so you might as well do so for solo or friend coop. The settings don't really favour treating the pace without waiting after all
Hey Yahtzee, love how second wind is doing. Keep up the good work. I was wondering if you plan to Upload compilation stile videos like you used to on the escapist. I have a hard time sleeping but your voice and witt really help. Anyways have a good one
I see now how I need to approach these Ramblomatics - check the comments! There I'll find the answers to all of Yahtzee's problems with the game, and I can decide better if the game is right for me. Thank you, knowledgable commentors!
I do know how to deal with the vendors in Area 2. You need to hunt a specific V Blood target to get the Human Form spell, and then can happily trade with them. Gives out an achievement for doing so, too. It's kind of dumb that you can't just go "I'm not hungry today, I just want to buy some wool."
You....think its dumb to not let your enemy take your resources because they didn't want to be hostile to you just once...? What level of logic do you live on
@@GeriAttric eh, the map is small enough that getting back takes little time and is a core part of the game. the map has shortcuts that are unlocked later in the game that allow you to travel with anything.
I think Yahtzee might learn to get acquainted with the world settings menu, you can turn off teleport bound items, speed up refineries, make thread much easier to get etc... I turned off the teleport bound items and been having far more fun now.
That's a lot of struggle from not going through the server settings, which aren't tuned to a single player experience by default, as it's a game designed to have up to 60 players. So much headbutting, so many easily answered questions about the game. It's very boss focused, from general progressing to what's the most crucial upgrade to handle the next bosses.
The other issue with some fo the stuff as well is like how often you need to get a thing, but its locked behind another thing, that needs you to beat a boss that you can't beat because you don't have the first thing.
In act 2, you DO gain the ability to keep NPCs locked up in your prison as bloodbags for their particularly useful, high quality blood. You do need some materials to keep them healthy after each blood extraction and to hold the blood in a potion bottle, but that soon becomes trivial.
