Viral Steam Success Vampire Survivors Is Getting a Lot of New Content Ahead of Release

Viral hit Vampire Survivors is getting a lot more content ahead of its official launch on Steam.

Developer Poncle has released a roadmap for the game after its Early Access launch on December 17 became a huge success.

Five more levels, nine more characters, 16 more weapons, and two more power ups are being added to Vampire Survivors, and it's also being ported to an industry-standard game engine.

Poncle is also adding new achievements and Relics alongside a brand new item called Arcanas, but no further information on what these do was given.

A "new major gameplay mechanic" will also be implemented, the developer said, and while it's currently undecided which one, "some kind of endless mode" is the frontrunner.

This will come at the expense of the story mode, however, but "this doesn't necessarily mean that story mode is gone forever," Poncle said in the post, indicating that Vampire Survivors' lore may be best told through environmental storytelling.

The post added: "Thanks to the overwhelming success and support from the players, new content has started to come out at a much faster pace than anticipated and the roadmap has also been expanded significantly.

"The amount of playable characters planned for version 1.0 of the game has been doubled and so has the number of stages with the introduction of bonus/challenge ones."

The port to an industry-standard engine is being worked on alongside these outlined updates with the help of a newly recruited team. Poncle said the port is "going smoothly" and is showing "a tenfold increase in performance". Poncle aims for work on this to be completed in the summer, and save games will transfer from the old version to the new engine.

No timeframe was shared in the post but it said the game is currently 70% complete, compared to 60% when the game was first released in Early Access.

In our 7/10 review, IGN said: "It may look extremely basic, but if you give Vampire Survivors' clever one-stick shooter idea a chance to sink its teeth into you it might not let go for a while."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.