Vampire Survivors Releases Castlevania DLC, New Patch Notes

The latest DLC expansion for Vampire Survivors has arrived, adding new content based on Konami’s Castlevania franchise. The Ode to Castlevania DLC can now be purchased for $3.59 (normally $3.99 but there’s a 10% discount active). That price is a bit steeper than previous expansions for the game, but it looks like it will be well worth the cost. Poncle Games has now released patch notes for the expansion, laying out everything players can expect to see today, including new playable characters, a new map, new music, and new weapons. If you’ve been on the fence about buying the expansion, this should offer a better idea about its value.

In today’s patch notes, Poncle notes that the versions are slightly different across each platform, but the developer is working to achieve full parity. Nintendo Switch users should take note that there’s already a patch planned for about two weeks from now, which will “address some very late-game issues.” The developer does not note how serious these issues are, or how common they might be. The patch notes also lay out how far into the base game players have to get before they can access the Ode to Castlevania content.

Full patch notes from the game’s official Steam page can be found below:

Patch 1.12 – The Castellated One

Our dreams have come true and Castlevania is now officially part of Vampire Survivors. Thank you so much to KONAMI, the team at poncle, our partners, and all the fans for making this a reality at last!

And remember: it’s big. IT’S BIG.

• 20+ new characters
• 40+ new weapons and evolutions
• 30+ new music tracks
• 1 HUGE CASTLE
• More info on the store page above and on the old post:

How to jump into Ode to Castlevania

1. Reach Level 20 in the first stage to unlock Inlaid Library and therefore Stage Selection.
2. At the bottom of Stage Selection, choose “Ode to Castlevania”.

Problems after getting Ode to Castlevania

1. Right Click the Steam icon -> Exit Steam
2. Wait a few seconds.
3. Restart Steam.
4. Go to Downloads, see that VS is getting updated to the latest version (1.12)

Gameplay in Ode to Castlevania

• All characters from Ode to Castlevania have the ability to find special pick-ups, in any stage. Initially this is limited to Wall Chicken (that is the big brother of Floor chicken of course) but 3 more types of pickups will be unlocked while progressing through the Ode to Castlevania stage.
• All characters have at least 1 unlockable Weapon Selector, that can be chosen from Character Selection by clicking/pressing a button on the character’s icon at the bottom of the screen. All Weapon Selectors have to be unlocked; to do that, every weapon in a specific Weapon Selector has to be unlocked first 🙃
• There are a lot of bosses in the Ode to Castlevania stage, but you’ll have to actively seek most of them instead of waiting for the right minute for them to appear. You’ll find new icons on the map to help you navigate the stage.
• Evolutions are straightforward and work just like in the base game: find the right passive to pair with an active weapon (some might require the passive to be at Max Level).

The music of Ode to Castlevania

There are 36 new covers and a more than 50 original Castlevania music tracks to choose from. The covers are all available on the VS playlist on YouTube (minus 2 tracks that will be released on Nov 07 due to… reasons…)

As fans of Castlevania and its music ourselves, we were expecting people to be excited for the covers, but we actually couldn’t anticipate all that hype!
We had originally planned for 24 covers, but then asked all musicians to do more if they had spare time. That’s how we ended up with a total of 36 music covers!
Just as for the rest of the contents of the DLC pack, we tried to balance the covers between homages, reinterpretations, experimentations, and plain remixes.
The only real rule I’ve put in place to choose tracks was “tracks that already have an official version that would fit with VS, we can also include that version” (which is purely arbitrary, stylistic choice by me, Luca, sorry!) and so I know we ended up leaving out several tracks that would have been amazing remixed in one the new styles.
In hindsight what we could have done is… start earlier to have the time to do even more! I really couldn’t trade any of the current tracks for a different selection.
We can’t make any promises now, but we’d love to cover and add more tracks in the future if we’ll get the chance. In the meantime I hope everyone will be able to find a new favourite, maybe among the more niche tracks that got picked for this collab!
Thanks so much to Daniele Zandara, Filippo Vicarelly, Evelyn Lark, and KEYGEN CHURCH for this incredible soundtrack!

More FAQs

While most of the contents of the DLCs are straightforward, being a collab there are some differences. For example, 

there are no Steam achievements and 

the music covers won’t be available in the paid Soundtrack on Steam (but we will publish them on YT as usual), so please read the FAQs here for more info: https://poncle.games/ode-to-castlevania-faq

Patch 1.12

1. Advanced Music Selection
   There are so many tracks in the game, especially if you have some DLC packs, that the little menu was really struggling to be functional anymore. And it comes from someone who knows the order of the music tracks by memory… so we have added an advanced menu to easily navigate through different albums and music tracks to chose from
   
2. MEGA SEAL
   After buying any of the Seal Power-ups, you’ll also unlock the Mega Seal panel in the Collection menu. This panel lets you easily seal the content of a whole DLC, or even of the whole base game. Who needs weapons anyway?
   
3. Pause Menu Map ZOOM
   You can now zoom in and out on the pause-menu map. 2024 ho!
   
4. Pause Menu Arcana Info
   You can now get a reminder of what your chosen arcana do. Affected weapons are also highlighted. Another big step for humanity.
   
5. New Passives in Preview mode
   In order to complete the evos for Ode to Castlevania, we needed 2 passive weapons from the future to be available today! So, while the patch to properly unlock them will arrive sometime next year, for now it will be possible to access these 2 new passives, Parm Aegis and Karoma’s Mana, through the Arma Dio’s selection menu.
   
6. Memory usage improvements
   Several optimisations have been made to reduce memory usage, that should help the late-game running better on console and mobile.

Other platforms

In order to launch simultaneously on all platforms, we had to compromise a little on patch versions. This simply means that the game version will be slightly different across different platforms, but we’re working to get parity across versions as soon as possible.
A special note for the Nintendo Switch version: it is already scheduled to receive a patch in about 2 weeks to address some very late-game issues.
The file size of the expansion is around 260MB, which is a lot bigger than our average (all those music tracks add up quickly), so if you’re on mobile you might want to download through wifi.

Are you planning to buy the new expansion for Vampire Survivors? Are you excited to see Castlevania content in the game? Share your thoughts with me directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp, on Bluesky at @Marcdachamp, or on Instagram at @Dachampgaming!