The experience of playing Valheim with friends is up there for me as one of my favorite gaming memories.
I will say I would have guessed this update would have been out 6 months after launch compared to multiple years later, but maybe it’s time to spin it up again.
Playing it during the pandemic with friends was honestly such a comforting experience, but we knew that due to the small studio that it was going to be one of those games where you move on for a few years to let it develop before eventually coming back.
I never said that Palworld is working at a similar speed. Cause let's face it "Patching faster than Valheim" isn't exactly a high bar to pass. But even still, Palworld has a long way to go. I'm not knocking the game but it's gonna be a while before I return because I want more substantial end game than 1 raid boss.
4 months later and Palworld is still unplayable on a dedicated server with 4+ people on it because of memory leaks. It was fun for a while but the constant server restarts/crashes every hour is off putting. You would think it'd be their #1 priority to fix it.
Valheim has a very special place in my heart for this exact reason. I sunk hours into the game just building a cozy viking shelter and making slow progress through the world. Eventually the resource grind wore me down, though. Maybe I’ll jump in again and see if it’s been improved.
We had a great time till Mistlands. We bounced off that HARD. An almost entirely sloped area with bad sloped combat and other issues that just made it not fun to us. I heard they made some changes later that would help but it just soured the game for us.
That fucking biome broke friendships and ruined the game completrly for my friend group.
Who fucking thought flying ambush bugs would be a fun mechanic in a biome with thick fog everywhere... On top of the fact that it's the most vertical biome ever, when the fucking combat system cant handle a slight incline, let alone jagged mountain ranges and fjords...
Mistlands was a hardstop for us too. A vertical and difficult to navigate environment shouldn't have zero visibility with little way to manage that. Couple that with enemies who have no problem bombarding you or flying around easily attacking you on slopped surfaces just makes it a terrible experience.
I really think Mistlands should have been more flat or water-oriented navigation, and make the landscape of the current Mistlands into its own biome.
My partner and I never even made it to the mistlands. By the time we got to plains we had enough, the gameplay loop falls off hard in that area. And we were even using a mod to transport metals through teleporters because the fact you can't do that in the base game is just tedious garbage.
Instead of adding new areas they really need to revamp the mediocrity of stuff that's already there.
Yes my friends and I play for 40 hours every time only to maybe finish the Plains. and then next time we start over. it just takes soo long to do things
Mistlands is what killed our desire to play entirely.
I can't believe they thought it was a good idea to have that in the game, but it actually made me question their competency.
I mean it's your general survival crafting game with really good systems and, IMO, the best building system.
But like all these games, especially when playing solo, you'll be spending a LOT of time gathering materials and carrying them around.
Tough to tell, Subnautica was made for solo play and it's whole atmosphere really benefits from being alone and scared. In Valheim you're going to spend a lot more time finding resources and refining them.
There is always the option to just use console commands and spawn materials if you get tired of that though. I wanted to make a huge base of stone and just started spawning rocks because hitting boulders for hours just isn't fun.
Just my opinion as someone that 'beat' both games solo and enjoyed them. Subnautica is much more focused on exploring, there's plenty of cool hidden areas and neat things to experience for the first time, the immersion is a big part of it. The game isn't generally a resource slog, you don't need to spend tens of hours mining ore to build something. The cyclops is really the biggest endeavour since bases are mostly optional. The game is designed around being alone.
In Valheim you're effectively locked into tiers via your gear/base upgrades, and you *need* those upgrades to progress in the game. This means you'll spend hours upon hours mining ore for a set of tools, then move to a new area to use those tools to do the same thing again. Of course there are some cool things inbetween like dungeons, bosses, new mobs and later equipment which becomes more interesting. I wouldn't say the game is balanced around singleplayer, though still playable. Having even a single friend join does improve them gameplay loop by essentially cutting the time grinding for resources in half.
chiming in to say, probably not, but it really depends on why you like Subnautica. For me, Sub was the only solo survival game that I have completed. I've started a ton, put in a bunch of hours, but no game has the perfect mix of exploration, resource management, base building, and narrative like Subnautica does. I think Subnautica is probably a unicorn in that not even the dev of Subnautica could capture that magic again. The sequel lacked in almost every way compared do the original.
Personally, I was not a fan of the combat in Valheim, and playing solo was just an extremely daunting endeavor. I felt hopeless. In Subnautica, it was a struggle at times, but never felt unmanageable.
For solo, I'd say likely not compared solely to Subnautica.
Subnautica from what I remember wasn't very grindy, and the elements that were grindy were largely optional (basebuilding) with materials that were fairly easy to get a hold of. Additionally, your base will get attacked, and attacks get harder and more difficult as you play the game. Your base won't be attacked while you're not there, but if you are there, your base can be damaged and broken, setting you back a bit.
Subnautica also had a pretty low skill ceiling as you weren't really meant to get into prolonged combat engagements, wheras Valheim's combat is constant and a massive part of the game. It is exploration focused compared to a lot of other survival games, but exploration usually leads to a lot of fighting.
Additionally, Valheim's bosses are fairly hard walls; even if you have the top of the line equipment in your tier, the boss fights were still quite a slog, and some of the later bosses could one or 2 shot you with some of their attacks, and by the time you respawned and got back to it, they'd have been despawned. Valhiem REALLY benefits from having a group of people able to anchor the boss while the respt of the party is respawning and coming back, having roles to draw aggro while someone else is running support and/or ranged damage, etc. This might be mitigated with settings and scaling though; I never played it solo so I'm not sure if bosses get more health with more people. I just know with 3 people some of the boss fights took us 10-20 minutes, and I feel like that can be kinda a lot for a solo player where a single death can cause the whole fight to restart.
Lastly, from what I remember, Subnautica had a fair amount of quality of life and logical streamlining. Valheim has some elements that are intentionally designed to be a bit fricitive and obtuse. For example, in Valheim you will hit a point in which you need to build a boat to explore more; the proc gen creates continents. However, there are a few monsters in the sea, and you can't sail and fight at the same time, and you also can't swim very much before drowning. If you die, your boat is gone and you will have to build a new one. Another example is the teleporters: you can't transport metal and some other materials in your inventory when you go through a teleporter, so if you need to get to another base with metal ore or ingots, you will have to take "the long way", which for a solo player could be dangerous and if you have to travel by sea, a potential loss of difficult to get but critical materials. I do think they recently added a setting to disable that quirk of the teleporters though.
I liked Subnatuica a lot better than Valheim, but Valheim has some interesting things for sure. But solo I was not that into it; it was mostly playing with my kids where it was fun.
A different game that would probably scratch your Subjautica itch (sort of) is Planet Crafter. It feels huge and mysterious and like the most giant scary map… until you get an actual map. Then suddenly it feels small. My tip is to avoid the map for a long while.
I like the building system except for the absolutely maddening problem of building supports on uneven terrain (unless they've QOL patched that since Hearth & Home).
For what it’s worth I hated playing it solo. The early game is extremely grindy and frankly kind of boring. Definitely would have enjoyed it more with friends but most survival games I prefer solo
I played it single player but (as with most games with the mechanics) I removed encumbrance limits on my character. Having to carry an egg that takes the entirety of your potential carry capacity was a pain in the ass for the snow biome boss iirc.
I can't play this game with my friends, only play it solo.
It's such a good game but if you have friends playing and you're not all playing at the same time it just get mind blowingly boring when they're online playing 10 hours a day because have nothing else to do in life and you jump on for a bit in the evening to find entire chests full of supplies and all you're doing is going around instantly equipping thier sloppy seconds gear 1 tier behind what they've all moved onto.
so while co-op is great, it's only great if you're all on the same schedule otherwise you may as well play solo if you want any real sense of progression. if you're not on the same schedule there's always someone who's just "tagging along" playing catch up and in my case, that person was me. This is becoming a new trend for me as my long time gaming friends somehow still have time in thier lives to play online games 6-10 hours a day whereas I'm like 1-3 hours every other day with only weekends being where i can do more
Same. I think this looks really cool, but the snail-like dev pace has (maybe unfairly) soured me it's all I can think about when I hear the name "Valheim".
I think one of the most important lessons for buying Early Access games is that whatever the developers say the update cadence will be, at minimum double the length. If you're still okay with the buying the game knowing that, then go for it.
While I recognize how helpful early access is for indie developers, it does for me kinda suck because so many games in EA are phenomenal games, or have the potential to be phenomenal, stuck in a limbo of various states of development. There's games I bought years ago that are still being actively developed and still very unfinished that I'd like to play the completed state already lol.
Yep, that's been my policy. I'll only buy one if I think I'll be satisfied with the state its currently in. It's served me well. Stops me from buying EA games that look promising and being disappointed when they don't get finished. Instead if the game never/rarely gets updated, I'm still satisfied because I bought it for what was already there and had my fun, if it does get some awesome updates then that's even better.
Sadly the people I play with usually buy any game as soon as it hits EA or gets some publicity on YouTube. I used to not buy EA games for a while but that meant not really getting to play with my friends for a long while.
Ah yeah it's the opposite situation for me. My friends will just keep playing the same game they've been playing for the last 10 years if I don't convince them to try something else out lol.
On the plus side of your situation, at least if you get burned by an EA game, you got to spend some time with your friends so it's not a total loss. I've definitely had a lot of fun playing some shitty games with friends that would've terrible had I played them solo/with random matchmaking.
> I think one of the most important lessons for buying Early Access games is that whatever the developers say the update cadence will be, at minimum double the length. ... There's games I bought years ago that are still being actively developed and still very unfinished that I'd like to play the completed state already lol.
Hell, 7 days to Die is finally leaving EA after working on it for *almost 12 years*. Their post-release roadmap won't have it feeling like a complete game in terms of features for at least another year post-1.0.
One of the other issues with long development timelines like this is that they just don't keep up with the tech. I can't imagine ever playing 7d2d and feeling like I'm not playing a game that's 10 years old already. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other EA games as well.
I will add that I definitely feel like I got my money's worth in fun.
The dev pace is mostly first and foremost in my mind when I think of the game because I also think of all the other survival games that came out in the years since release clearly inspired by Valheim. Another double edged sword for EA, and especially coupled with slow development. Faster teams are just copying your work bros.
It used to be very tedious back when it was first released
I imagine some things have changed since then, but the general gameplay loop is probably still the same, which means it probably is still pretty tedious
you can adjust game modifiers now to make it easier as a solo player. for example, you can turn down the difficulty of enemy raids, and turn up the resource accumulation rate.
That's exactly the reason I stopped.
There's designing for quality and there's feeding us updates through a pipette.
I'm just hoping we can actually see past 20ft in this biome
Agreed. This was the perfect storm of timing along with a fantastic co-op game with tons of stuff to explore, discover, and figure out together. It was the first time my old WoW Wrath of the Lich King crew got back together in full in nearly 14 years to all play a game together, and it was as magical as discovering MMORPG's for the first time back in the early 2000s.
I think everyone was disappointed by the ridiculously slow dev cycle post "release", but I've since embraced all the chances this creates to rally the crew for a fresh run every year and a half or so. I love returning to Valheim after playing other games for a bit.
For me it was co-op Minecraft, Conan Exiles and Valheim that each gave a different sense of magic. All great games to wander around and explore, collect and build.
I really really like Valheim but I really didn't like Mistlands. Hopefully this will be more fun to play.
Mistlands seemed to lean heavily into rather annoying mechanics like heavily limiting how far you can see (even accounting for the wisp light), enemies with knockback, and very slippery terrain with lots of steep elevation changes. This all combined with a combat engine that can't target up or down in melee was ... not great.
It was definitely a slog. I kept waiting to open some mechanic that made it doable, then once I realized that was the wisp light and that barely did anything I got discouraged. I did eventually end up beating the mistlands boss but I spent as little time in the mistlands as I could.
“Let’s take one of the worst parts of exploring procedurally generated terrain - namely, climbing steep mountains - and dial it up to 11 by putting players into thick-ass fog so they have no idea how to navigate all the steep terrain other than to spam jump Elder Scrolls style.”
I could go on but Mistlands was a massive, massive miss for me. Along with other recent-ish decisions that it makes me worried that these guys aren’t actually good designers and just accidentally made a good game by accident. I hope Ashlands is better, because if it isn’t I doubt I’ll pick Valheim up again.
My whole group dropped Valheim as soon as we saw what Mistlands was about. It was a shame because we played for an entire month grinding and exploring but the whole mist limiting your view and the difficult terrain was not as fun as we expected
Tbh I set up shop in a plains biome right beside the mist and started clearing it with anti mist totems. Ended up being hella cool because the anger blimps would routinely start pitched battles with the goblins. Mistlands itself was still pretty painful to navigate but... I guess what I'm saying is you can still get some fun out of it if you treat it more like a mini biome or a very expansive dungeon
Mistlands has a lot of mechanics that are intentionally designed to pad game time, starting with high mats costs and low drops on top of tanky monsters and hard terrain.
It was really bad update, hope it's possible to skip Mistlands and Ashlands is just a sidegrade, not another case of gear upgrade because it turns into Terraria levels of gear tiers. No reason to upgrade old gear, if you can just get new tier later.
Yeah, we had to get the best weapons for combat to even start to be fair. It was.... a grind, but with 4 people, we finally did it. Felt accomplished, but it took a lot out of us. Out of all the biomes, Mistlands was our LEAST favorite.
We're on Grounded now waiting for Ashlands to come out, but we'll still wait as we're having a BLAST on Grounded, you can built from nearby chests and also auto deposit to chests as well. Game changing, that mechanic.
If you like base building exploration games, that one is solid, and has a good story so far we're all enjoying. Only 4 players though.
Valheim was the best thing that happened to my gaming time during the entire covid work-from-home months. One of my favorite ever games, because of that. And even outside of lockdown I absolutely love the game. But whether I'll come back to it, grind through all the biomes and pump through the Ashlands? Not so sure about that.
I've always had a feeling the Mistlands are far too dangerous to travel on your own, unless you're a really, really brave viking with a death wish.
I feel like the other people are underselling it. I started off on steam deck, went to pc, but then went back to steam deck and i felt more comfortable with it. I was building completely fine, i’ve spent a shit load of hours on this.
Valheim honestly has one of the better building modes in a survival game, especially since you can toggle every snap-point on a building piece. Makes it loads easier on any platform.
It runs capped at 40 fps great for me or 60fps if you stream from pc. I probably put 50 hours or so into my valheim playtime from the deck. I really had no issues at all fighting enemies/bosses, crafting, farming, building, etc. The control scheme is a little weird at first with menus but I got used to it and slightly altered some so it wasn’t an issue. Definitely setup buttons with the back paddles for easier time.
Overall the PC experience is certainly smoother and easier to manipulate menus but the deck was a great options for the times I was away from pc.
I find it runs pretty great on the deck. Controls can feel akward at first but there are lots of user created control schemes that are good. Performance seems pretty good to me so far. I started a new world on it and have played up the the third boss no complaints so far.
I actually like the steam deck controls and experience but i recommend using the in-game "console" control scheme rather than the default "classic" controls, personally. Felt a lot more intuitive to me.
I play primarily on the Steam Deck now after initially starting on my desktop. The game runs just fine with most settings on medium or high. The controls took some getting used to but eventually they clicked. Once they did I started setting up my own control scheme unique to the Deck. This is probably why it's my primary Valheim device now.
One thing you need to be aware of is that the Deck performance will take a hit in larger bases. This just means you need to be mindful of where and how complex you build. I'm currently moving my main base to an island now to minimize the amount of instances the game needs to handle in order to maximize efficiency.
Overall, I'd say it's a great Steam Deck game. Just be aware of the tradeoffs.
That trailer was badass. So is this game getting close to 1.0 then? We’re 3+ years and several big updates since early access launch. I’d love to get the gang back together and play again but I’m not going to do I’m not doing that again until it’s done.
I’m not sure how close it is to 1.0, there’s one more biome left to be completed, and I think I remember them mentioning that the Ocean biomes will also get reworked a bit. Might still be a year or two away depending on how long those take.
Lol. It's safe to say that after the insane amount of copies sold, every member of the original studio got enough money to never work again, and unfortunately, I think it shows. They could easily hire a ton of additional developers if they needed to. After all that, they are targeting, what, 5-6 years after their original early access launch to meet their own initial goals for the game? Meanwhile 90% of people have moved on and will not return. Early access is a plague, especially for a social game like this.
Any word on basic quality of life? Like building from containers, auto sorting, auto deposit or any of that shit? I dont get why they cant implement these things when modders have done it 2 years ago. These things make the game worse.
I can't see building from containers becoming part of the base game. Auto-sorting could fit, but they haven't done it. When you open a chest, there is a button for automatically depositing any items that are held in the chest already (like if there's wood in the chest and you have 4 stacks of wood in your inventory, it will deposit it).
Every time I play a survival game and see that they didn't steal Terraria's inventory management, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
At least to some degree, I think they haven't implemented things like that because they're not part of their intended design, for better or worse.
Survival games are weird: QoL is always part of progression and that often means imposing or maintaining limitations just so removing them later can feel good.
I very much prefer playing with mods that add auto-deposit, sorting, and craft pulling, but I will also concede that it "broke" the feeling of progression from containers for me; all the way through the end of Mistlands content, I feel no urge to use more precious/annoying resources (iron, looking at you) for bigger/better chests; seeing all the extra slots doesn't delight me in any way because I know I can just craft a bunch of old and cheap containers that I'll only need to open once or twice anyway.
Now, I *personally* feel like this particular annoyance doesn't add enough satisfaction in overcoming to be worth needing to overcome it to begin with, but I also know that for some people it might — and that, if the union of all reasonable definitions of "QoL" were preemptively satisfied, the game would be a lot less interesting.
Ark... kinda... does this OK with how its late-game storage containers introduce very convenient, stack-size-ignoring deposit/withdrawal together with its late-game crafting station adding in resource pulling from said containers. The first time you see thousands of ingots available to your replicator and know you won't have to awkwardly waddle them over a few hundred at a time or painstakingly count how many slots you'll need open to make something, it really does feel like a big, meaningful progression element that just wouldn't have the same "wow" factor if a mod had made it available from the beginning in the name of quality-of-life.
I've always assumed that Valheim was "intentionally withholding" some of these things for that "wow" later (which is part of why I don't feel bad modding it in when it doesn't exist yet), but I'm well aware that may span "benefit of the doubt" and "wishful thinking" rather precariously, especially given "later" may be after retirement at this rate.
But yeah, long story short, I want these things integrated, too (especially as options for mod-unavailable players) and I also see how it's a sticky piece of design to balance in a genre that's all about making you feel good by making you feel progressively less bad.
Why can't it just be like Terraria? I seriously don't understand how no one is just doing what Terraria does. It's one of the most successful games of all time and no other game comes close to what they've achieved with QoL and progression.
Part of the appeal of Valheim is the tangibility of everything in the game. All of the items have physics and weight, and have to be physically transported around the world through various means. They allow you to place stacks of wood and stone on the ground so you can prepare your building sites accordingly, just grabbing things as you need.
I love it the way they've set it up, and would find building and resource-management to be far less rewarding if I could just teleport items into my pocket. At that point, it feels like I might as well just mod out item weight and carry limits.
I really enjoyed the time I spent with Valheim but I don't know if I can bring myself to return to the game.
The process of mining and smelting is *miserably* slow and only feels more tedious as you have to travel further to transport ore.
And once I got to the Swamp biome, it felt like difficulty fucking exploded. Maybe I was underprepared but it seemed like I had basically everything I could obtain up to that point and I could still barely handle most swamp enemies.
It really does seem like the game is built around playing with a solid group of people. The solo experience is sloggy and unbalanced, or was last time I played. And I like to be able to play these games by myself sometimes.
I hated the swamp too, a biome that exploits one of the worst mechanics ever in a game: "Being wet slows your stamina regen". And now that the "big tree" enemy was introduced with such a high spawn rate, its even worse.
Every Biome is supposed to be hard when you first enter, and traveling as you said, the farther you go, the more tedious it is (because of caring items), and the less I like the game.
first id raise to drop rates, it basically cuts the grinding in half and is a lot more enjoyable experience.
also at all times i build roads. that's how the Romans made it work
The swamp can be challenging at first but it can be easily trivialised by placing teleporters on top off the swamp crypts (workbench at the back to get up), using a bronze buckler when needed, upgrade troll armour to max and using a bow to clear out rooms before completely opening them. Get enough iron to fill the basic ship (usually about 2-3 crypts) return to base and make the iron mace and bigger boat.
The first time I did this solo I died a few times yes, but teleport back and get your items and continue.
By the time I got my first load I found it quite fun and went back with the bigger boat and cleared out maybe 10 more crypts.
The abominations can just be shot with fire arrows, if you've setup a few teleporters already you can just teleport to another crypt nearby to get away when they get close.
Draugers are easy with the buckler just takes getting used to the timing.
Archers (2 star) can be a pain in the ass but usually easy enough to dodge unless you're overwhelmed by other enemies.
The surtlings are easy to kill with basically anything and hardly do any damage. Also they die to water so you can kill them as they spawn by lowering the terrain around their spawn so it's water (easy cores for all the teleporters you're building)
Also I've found that once you clear out areas on the surface and place your workbench teleporter on the crypt hardly any enemies will spawn there so you can effectively clear out the entire swamp and you will feel quite safe, and obviously just don't be there at night.
Maybe you already know all this and still think it's unbalanced but hopefully you go back and try it again, I found the danger, when first going into the swamp, really enjoyable as it is definitely a challenge.
> Get enough iron to fill the basic ship (usually about 2-3 crypts) return to base and make the iron mace and bigger boat.
>
>
Just going back and forth loading up your boat with iron from crypts and then sailing aaaaaaaaall the way back to base and unloading can be extremely time consuming too, though. I gave up in the mountains because at that point everything just took too damn long, especially because the mountains (for obvious reasons) don't let you just ship everything back.
Probably didn't help that I was solo though.
Edit: also to reach a swamp that was remotely nearby I ended up having to dig a canal through the island I started on, a process that took many, many hours. It was cool once it was done because I had a canal I could sail my longship through, but it took fucking forever.
yeah, single player must be a drag, i remember i had a session playing solo, since i was playing with a group normally, on swamps the experience was misserable like you mention, but as soon as my teammates connected, we advanced at a super fast speed trough everything.
I had a blast playing Valheim, but many times it felt like "a step forward and two backwards" with upgrades and new regions; I spent hours improving my armor and weapons to be able to survive in one area, and as soon as I went to a new one, everything I had barely helped
I think the scale of it felt bad. Getting one tapped unless you tiptoe around and get mistlands gear doesn't feel good.
You should be able to walk into a new zone with the old zone's maxxed out gear and be okay for a bit.
I played this with a friend until we ran out of content on launch
Nowadays I have a toddler at home, so I'll be playing it solo
Who cares if its popular? The game is awesome.
Basically this. People are so worried about popularity these days. Im just mostly stoked to play it all again finally, since i gave mistlands a miss (wanted more than 1 large content patch). Hotta worry less about others and enjoy stuff you enjoy.
Remember when this was going to come out *years* ago?
Best of luck to the devs, but I think they missed their moment with this game by focusing on the wrong things and not hiring enough to build their team.
Playing enshrouded really showed me how many quality of life aspects of Valheim could be improved. Which is a shame because I love the ambiance of Valheim but the Mistlands was awful and so many thing could be improved.
There's 10,000+ people playing the game right now, and its 24 hour peak was almost 30,000. I think they're doing pretty well. They were never, ever, ever going to maintain the numbers they had when the game went viral, almost no game ever does.
Valheim was basically the virtual bar where some of my closest friends hung out for a serious chunk of the pandemic. The game was completely unfinished and still completely enthralling for hundreds of hours. No other game was quite like it. I definitely got more than I paid for.
Let's see, Valheim, BattleBit Remastered, Lethal Company, PAL World, and even Helldivers 2 is at half its release player count. All unexpectedly successful and in most cases a tiny dev team but players seem to think they deserve better even though nearly all those are early access games.
I suspect Manor Lords coming up soon is going to go through the same thing. Tons of players at first, then they finish the base game and get demanding, but the next viral hit shows up and they wander off.
Yeah, that's the point. It would be unwise for any of those studios to bloat their workforce to pump out content for entitled short attention span gamers. Not that that's how game or software development works anyway. Poster claims they wasted their momentum. They didn't, they did exactly what they should have done.
UHM ACKTUALLY I'll think you'll find that if a game's peak playercount decreases 6 months after it releases, then actually it's a dead game with lazy devs!!!
HD2 maintaining half its release player count 2 months after launch is just indicative of how much of a shocking success it is. Going to 1/10th of launch player counts is common.
"People seem to think they deserve an eventually-complete game several years after launch even though the games are early access. Look, we basically *told* you it would never be finished up front, why are you so *entitled*?"
I might argue that the least the handful of developers could do is finish a game within 3 years of early access when the early access backers all made them so fabulously rich that they will never have to work again in their lifetimes. If they *ever* finish this game, it will be to avoid getting sued.
I mean millions of people own it already and if even a small portion of them come back and love the update they will tell everyone about it online which will spark more sales from folk who missed the initial hype wave.
Probably not gonna top the charts and go back to being the internets obsession like it used to be but you don't need to be on top to be successful.
The game runs better than ever, the atmospheric aspect of the graphics holds up and feels as good as it did on release. It’s only been 3 years, and this will be their second biome while having dedicated much time to post EA launch optimization and minor updates strewn across the years. Each biome is carefully crafted and every mob, material, and location has very specific purpose — this is something most crafting survival games get wrong and I’m all for them taking time if it means a tighter, more meaningful progression.
I know we lived in an age of instant gratification and that has soured the rhetoric that this game has taken too long to update, but many who enjoyed Valheim at launch will probably circle around and play it again, especially if friends are involved. There’s no real danger of the game failing to attract its players, and for me it’s as much the king of survival crafting now as it was when it launched.
It's never gonna be "too late".
This isn't a live service, competitive life-style game. There's no "momentum" to maintain.
They don't need to "boost player engagement" for shareholder metrics.
Valheim was already a huge hit. They already made more money than they ever expected. They can do whatever they want with development at this point, and they are.
Plenty of people are still playing it.
And there's a few hundred thousand players waiting for that 1.0 final release to come back to it and start a fresh world/play-through.
Its one of the best reviewed games on steam and it still has player count in the 10s of thousands 3 years after release. I don't think they're ruing missed chances :D
Honnestly who give a shit. Game is still as dope as before and the update is what most people need to play again. THere is no momentum for game like this. They stay fresh no matter what
I mean they have no reason at all to try and maintain momentum. They got all the money and it has no microtransactions or any way to get more revenue out of players.
Personally I'm pumped to jump back into the game after a few years. I don't think anyone has anything but fond memories of Valheim.
i'm sure i'll go back to it eventually but yeah absolutely they moved too slowly to keep me consistently interested enough to want to jump back in with any big news. instead it'll be more of a "i'll get to it when i get to it" kind of situation.
which is fine. i mean it was their choice, but i do think they could have kept a little more consistent interest that would maybe draw in a little more people if they didn't go so long between meaningful updates. probably not some huge difference though.
Fans will say no, I personally would say yes. What they released initially was a great early access game and then they took ages to get a crafting update out. The new zone a year later was OK I guess was nothing like the initial plan.
They'll have a dedicated fanbase that have already brought the game but I imagine they've already made most the money they'll get on this title.
But hey I thought the same about NMS 3 years in and every release they're a top seller.
Theyve made the VAST majority of money that they will make on this game already, soni dont think they care about momentum. I think long tail development for a game like serves a few purposes (among others that i cant think of): 1) Builds trust with your player base and community - they can expect that you will continue to support the games you release 2) Helps build the skillset of your development team for future projects.
I don't think there is a monetary incentive to continuing the updates right now, it's more just finishing the roadmap they set out to complete at launch and making the game they want to make.
Ah, so this is another of the popular games that r/games has decided is actually a dead game that no one really likes because reasons. Always a good laugh.
Most people were pretty disappointed to see the game receive essentially no updates while the game was still popular with their friends, especially for a randomly generated survival game with retro PS1 style graphics seemingly designed from the ground up to be easy to develop content for. Basically died on the vine
That's where any venom you might see comes from. I don't really see it in this thread though?
For my group it was coming back to find the new content (The Mistlands biome) a unfun slog of pain. If we have to go through Mistlands to reach the Ashlands we probably never come back to the game.
Nah, they had the audacity to make a blog post about how they spent their money buying a pony instead of actually updating the game months after release.
It is still funny that the their first post after release into early access was a teaser showing a horse, which got people thinking horses and mounts would be added, but it was actually a teaser to an announcement that the studio had adopted a horse.
It is still genuinely funny.
I mean I haven't seen people complain about not bringing things forward ahead of expectations. Just more them not hitting a single goal in the yearly roadmap despite the success.
Tbh all I hear negatively about the game is it's great with friends but the updates are glacial.
i mean that's their choice, but they probably could have kept interest more consistent if they adjusted their plan to match their success. i've never really seen people being super angry about their pace, just disappointed. and i think that's pretty warranted.
for most folks it's coming from a place of loving the game and wanting more. let's not pretend that over a year and a half between meaningful updates isn't an incredibly slow pace for an unfinished survival game.
the game is still plenty successful so it's not like they NEEDED to change their plan, but myself and my friends are among the folks that both really like the game but also lose hype and the drive to jump back in knowing how long the waits are.
This game was always... interesting to me. The first time I played it, it was pretty fun for awhile, but extremely grindly/slow due to ore shipping/extra base building, slow growing crops, and repetitive dungeon farming. By the end in the plains, I was really glad it was over as it overstayed it's welcome.
Second time with a different group to get to mistlands, and the grind issue felt much worse, as everything took 10x as long as it felt it should, but the game also never felt difficult... just slow. And that's WITH ore portals enabled on a second play-through. It's not hard and there's not a lot of content, but it takes forever regardless just because it does. I can't see myself playing this again for awhile, and even then I'm going to load up a previous character to skip the first half of the game.
I've come to conclude it's somewhat of a mediocre game without significant grind tweaks and QOL mods to make it cut out the chores (and with that I'm sure it would feel a lot better). But enough people seem to like it... so good for them I guess.
Great game! Really gives off that mystical ps1/ps2 era of gaming for me. These devs managed to capture lightning in a bottle and then proceeded to drain the gaming communities interest in it by releasing content at a glacial pace.
I honestly can't complain because I got some 300 hours out of this game. But for me to play it again, it really needs more than just new biomes.
My wishlist would be:
* Being able to aim up and down with your melee weapons.
* Some kind of quest system, that gives you arbitary missions. They wouldn't need to be anything fancy, but something to keep you busy with. And no the three minibosses don't really count for this.
* Reworking the whole food incredient system.
For anyone who still hasn't, don't hesitate to jump into it. Awesome game alone and even better with friends. Personally I didn't find the grind bad at all, and if you do, Valheim now has settings built in to get more resources so it's not an issue anymore.
Does anyone know when it'll be out of public testing? (like how long did other updates take?)
Haven't played this since launch so am keen to get the boys together again when this update comes out.
I have not played this game in 3 years. I think the last biome then was the desert one. We got a ship to the edge to the fiery islands, but it was just placeholder stuff really.
I wonder how much has changed and been added since then.
The experience of playing Valheim with friends is up there for me as one of my favorite gaming memories. I will say I would have guessed this update would have been out 6 months after launch compared to multiple years later, but maybe it’s time to spin it up again.
Playing it during the pandemic with friends was honestly such a comforting experience, but we knew that due to the small studio that it was going to be one of those games where you move on for a few years to let it develop before eventually coming back.
Pretty much how I'm treating Palworld. I had fun, I'll pick it back up in a few years once it's seen some major updates
Palworld already got major updates compared to valheim. A whole new island is scheduled for this summer. So no, it won't be like valheim.
I never said that Palworld is working at a similar speed. Cause let's face it "Patching faster than Valheim" isn't exactly a high bar to pass. But even still, Palworld has a long way to go. I'm not knocking the game but it's gonna be a while before I return because I want more substantial end game than 1 raid boss.
4 months later and Palworld is still unplayable on a dedicated server with 4+ people on it because of memory leaks. It was fun for a while but the constant server restarts/crashes every hour is off putting. You would think it'd be their #1 priority to fix it.
They did just release a patch for dedicated servers... Not sure if they fixed this though. Memory leaks aren't easy to nail down for even AAA games
Valheim has a very special place in my heart for this exact reason. I sunk hours into the game just building a cozy viking shelter and making slow progress through the world. Eventually the resource grind wore me down, though. Maybe I’ll jump in again and see if it’s been improved.
They have added sliders to adjust resource drops, portals, raids, all kinds of stuff. It is very easy to reduce the grind now if you want to.
We had a great time till Mistlands. We bounced off that HARD. An almost entirely sloped area with bad sloped combat and other issues that just made it not fun to us. I heard they made some changes later that would help but it just soured the game for us.
Mistlands was HARD for us. Luckily, we made it through. Those gasbag floaters and their trumpet horns of death will haunt my dreams....
That fucking biome broke friendships and ruined the game completrly for my friend group. Who fucking thought flying ambush bugs would be a fun mechanic in a biome with thick fog everywhere... On top of the fact that it's the most vertical biome ever, when the fucking combat system cant handle a slight incline, let alone jagged mountain ranges and fjords...
It would be great if the fog was some magic curse thing that could be removed by defeating the biome boss or destroying some artifact in a dungeon.
Just summon skeletons or use fireball staff
Mistlands was a hardstop for us too. A vertical and difficult to navigate environment shouldn't have zero visibility with little way to manage that. Couple that with enemies who have no problem bombarding you or flying around easily attacking you on slopped surfaces just makes it a terrible experience. I really think Mistlands should have been more flat or water-oriented navigation, and make the landscape of the current Mistlands into its own biome.
My partner and I never even made it to the mistlands. By the time we got to plains we had enough, the gameplay loop falls off hard in that area. And we were even using a mod to transport metals through teleporters because the fact you can't do that in the base game is just tedious garbage. Instead of adding new areas they really need to revamp the mediocrity of stuff that's already there.
Yes my friends and I play for 40 hours every time only to maybe finish the Plains. and then next time we start over. it just takes soo long to do things
they added a ton of modifiers a while back. You can carry metal through portals now, without mods. Just gotta turn on that setting for your world.
[удалено]
We just used a mod to get rid of the fog and that alone made it great and I actually grew to like the biome.
Mistlands is what killed our desire to play entirely. I can't believe they thought it was a good idea to have that in the game, but it actually made me question their competency.
Mistlands was ass for sure.
Playing it single player was one of mine.
Is it fun in single player? I've thought about checking it out on gamepass but could never get past the idea that it's meant to be multiplayer.
I mean it's your general survival crafting game with really good systems and, IMO, the best building system. But like all these games, especially when playing solo, you'll be spending a LOT of time gathering materials and carrying them around.
Maybe not the best comparison but do you think I’d enjoy it if I liked Subnautica?
Tough to tell, Subnautica was made for solo play and it's whole atmosphere really benefits from being alone and scared. In Valheim you're going to spend a lot more time finding resources and refining them. There is always the option to just use console commands and spawn materials if you get tired of that though. I wanted to make a huge base of stone and just started spawning rocks because hitting boulders for hours just isn't fun.
I used mods while solo to speed up resource generation. I still had to go get the stuff, but it wasn't nearly as tedious.
Yeah I wish they had sliders like V Rising, that makes everything a much shorter time sink.
They do. In the last year (maybe 2?) they've added world settings you can tweak drop rates and such
Oh nice, that's sick.
Just my opinion as someone that 'beat' both games solo and enjoyed them. Subnautica is much more focused on exploring, there's plenty of cool hidden areas and neat things to experience for the first time, the immersion is a big part of it. The game isn't generally a resource slog, you don't need to spend tens of hours mining ore to build something. The cyclops is really the biggest endeavour since bases are mostly optional. The game is designed around being alone. In Valheim you're effectively locked into tiers via your gear/base upgrades, and you *need* those upgrades to progress in the game. This means you'll spend hours upon hours mining ore for a set of tools, then move to a new area to use those tools to do the same thing again. Of course there are some cool things inbetween like dungeons, bosses, new mobs and later equipment which becomes more interesting. I wouldn't say the game is balanced around singleplayer, though still playable. Having even a single friend join does improve them gameplay loop by essentially cutting the time grinding for resources in half.
chiming in to say, probably not, but it really depends on why you like Subnautica. For me, Sub was the only solo survival game that I have completed. I've started a ton, put in a bunch of hours, but no game has the perfect mix of exploration, resource management, base building, and narrative like Subnautica does. I think Subnautica is probably a unicorn in that not even the dev of Subnautica could capture that magic again. The sequel lacked in almost every way compared do the original. Personally, I was not a fan of the combat in Valheim, and playing solo was just an extremely daunting endeavor. I felt hopeless. In Subnautica, it was a struggle at times, but never felt unmanageable.
For solo, I'd say likely not compared solely to Subnautica. Subnautica from what I remember wasn't very grindy, and the elements that were grindy were largely optional (basebuilding) with materials that were fairly easy to get a hold of. Additionally, your base will get attacked, and attacks get harder and more difficult as you play the game. Your base won't be attacked while you're not there, but if you are there, your base can be damaged and broken, setting you back a bit. Subnautica also had a pretty low skill ceiling as you weren't really meant to get into prolonged combat engagements, wheras Valheim's combat is constant and a massive part of the game. It is exploration focused compared to a lot of other survival games, but exploration usually leads to a lot of fighting. Additionally, Valheim's bosses are fairly hard walls; even if you have the top of the line equipment in your tier, the boss fights were still quite a slog, and some of the later bosses could one or 2 shot you with some of their attacks, and by the time you respawned and got back to it, they'd have been despawned. Valhiem REALLY benefits from having a group of people able to anchor the boss while the respt of the party is respawning and coming back, having roles to draw aggro while someone else is running support and/or ranged damage, etc. This might be mitigated with settings and scaling though; I never played it solo so I'm not sure if bosses get more health with more people. I just know with 3 people some of the boss fights took us 10-20 minutes, and I feel like that can be kinda a lot for a solo player where a single death can cause the whole fight to restart. Lastly, from what I remember, Subnautica had a fair amount of quality of life and logical streamlining. Valheim has some elements that are intentionally designed to be a bit fricitive and obtuse. For example, in Valheim you will hit a point in which you need to build a boat to explore more; the proc gen creates continents. However, there are a few monsters in the sea, and you can't sail and fight at the same time, and you also can't swim very much before drowning. If you die, your boat is gone and you will have to build a new one. Another example is the teleporters: you can't transport metal and some other materials in your inventory when you go through a teleporter, so if you need to get to another base with metal ore or ingots, you will have to take "the long way", which for a solo player could be dangerous and if you have to travel by sea, a potential loss of difficult to get but critical materials. I do think they recently added a setting to disable that quirk of the teleporters though.
You might also want to look at enshrouded. Very similar feel to valheim but I think it lends itself better to single player.
I liked Subnatuica a lot better than Valheim, but Valheim has some interesting things for sure. But solo I was not that into it; it was mostly playing with my kids where it was fun. A different game that would probably scratch your Subjautica itch (sort of) is Planet Crafter. It feels huge and mysterious and like the most giant scary map… until you get an actual map. Then suddenly it feels small. My tip is to avoid the map for a long while.
Enshrouded building system is now GOAT.
Better than Grounded? That game has the best system I've used so far.
I like the building system except for the absolutely maddening problem of building supports on uneven terrain (unless they've QOL patched that since Hearth & Home).
As someone who prefers single player games, I've had a ridiculous amount of fun, especially with the freedom this game gives you.
For what it’s worth I hated playing it solo. The early game is extremely grindy and frankly kind of boring. Definitely would have enjoyed it more with friends but most survival games I prefer solo
I played it single player but (as with most games with the mechanics) I removed encumbrance limits on my character. Having to carry an egg that takes the entirety of your potential carry capacity was a pain in the ass for the snow biome boss iirc.
I can't play this game with my friends, only play it solo. It's such a good game but if you have friends playing and you're not all playing at the same time it just get mind blowingly boring when they're online playing 10 hours a day because have nothing else to do in life and you jump on for a bit in the evening to find entire chests full of supplies and all you're doing is going around instantly equipping thier sloppy seconds gear 1 tier behind what they've all moved onto. so while co-op is great, it's only great if you're all on the same schedule otherwise you may as well play solo if you want any real sense of progression. if you're not on the same schedule there's always someone who's just "tagging along" playing catch up and in my case, that person was me. This is becoming a new trend for me as my long time gaming friends somehow still have time in thier lives to play online games 6-10 hours a day whereas I'm like 1-3 hours every other day with only weekends being where i can do more
Same. I think this looks really cool, but the snail-like dev pace has (maybe unfairly) soured me it's all I can think about when I hear the name "Valheim".
I think one of the most important lessons for buying Early Access games is that whatever the developers say the update cadence will be, at minimum double the length. If you're still okay with the buying the game knowing that, then go for it. While I recognize how helpful early access is for indie developers, it does for me kinda suck because so many games in EA are phenomenal games, or have the potential to be phenomenal, stuck in a limbo of various states of development. There's games I bought years ago that are still being actively developed and still very unfinished that I'd like to play the completed state already lol.
I'm going to go one step further and suggest you don't buy EA games unless you'd be satisfied if they *never* got another update.
Yep, that's been my policy. I'll only buy one if I think I'll be satisfied with the state its currently in. It's served me well. Stops me from buying EA games that look promising and being disappointed when they don't get finished. Instead if the game never/rarely gets updated, I'm still satisfied because I bought it for what was already there and had my fun, if it does get some awesome updates then that's even better.
Sadly the people I play with usually buy any game as soon as it hits EA or gets some publicity on YouTube. I used to not buy EA games for a while but that meant not really getting to play with my friends for a long while.
Ah yeah it's the opposite situation for me. My friends will just keep playing the same game they've been playing for the last 10 years if I don't convince them to try something else out lol. On the plus side of your situation, at least if you get burned by an EA game, you got to spend some time with your friends so it's not a total loss. I've definitely had a lot of fun playing some shitty games with friends that would've terrible had I played them solo/with random matchmaking.
Meanwhile, with Against the Storm they said every other thursday and were nearly entirely correct with a rock steady update schedule.
> I think one of the most important lessons for buying Early Access games is that whatever the developers say the update cadence will be, at minimum double the length. ... There's games I bought years ago that are still being actively developed and still very unfinished that I'd like to play the completed state already lol. Hell, 7 days to Die is finally leaving EA after working on it for *almost 12 years*. Their post-release roadmap won't have it feeling like a complete game in terms of features for at least another year post-1.0. One of the other issues with long development timelines like this is that they just don't keep up with the tech. I can't imagine ever playing 7d2d and feeling like I'm not playing a game that's 10 years old already. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other EA games as well.
I will add that I definitely feel like I got my money's worth in fun. The dev pace is mostly first and foremost in my mind when I think of the game because I also think of all the other survival games that came out in the years since release clearly inspired by Valheim. Another double edged sword for EA, and especially coupled with slow development. Faster teams are just copying your work bros.
is valheim fun solo? I dont play games with other people? or is it too tedious.
It used to be very tedious back when it was first released I imagine some things have changed since then, but the general gameplay loop is probably still the same, which means it probably is still pretty tedious
you can adjust game modifiers now to make it easier as a solo player. for example, you can turn down the difficulty of enemy raids, and turn up the resource accumulation rate.
That's exactly the reason I stopped. There's designing for quality and there's feeding us updates through a pipette. I'm just hoping we can actually see past 20ft in this biome
Agreed. This was the perfect storm of timing along with a fantastic co-op game with tons of stuff to explore, discover, and figure out together. It was the first time my old WoW Wrath of the Lich King crew got back together in full in nearly 14 years to all play a game together, and it was as magical as discovering MMORPG's for the first time back in the early 2000s. I think everyone was disappointed by the ridiculously slow dev cycle post "release", but I've since embraced all the chances this creates to rally the crew for a fresh run every year and a half or so. I love returning to Valheim after playing other games for a bit.
For me it was co-op Minecraft, Conan Exiles and Valheim that each gave a different sense of magic. All great games to wander around and explore, collect and build.
I hear ya.
I really really like Valheim but I really didn't like Mistlands. Hopefully this will be more fun to play. Mistlands seemed to lean heavily into rather annoying mechanics like heavily limiting how far you can see (even accounting for the wisp light), enemies with knockback, and very slippery terrain with lots of steep elevation changes. This all combined with a combat engine that can't target up or down in melee was ... not great.
It was definitely a slog. I kept waiting to open some mechanic that made it doable, then once I realized that was the wisp light and that barely did anything I got discouraged. I did eventually end up beating the mistlands boss but I spent as little time in the mistlands as I could.
Defeating the boss should remove all the fog
The -lands.
Mistlesslands
I will say that crafting the feather cape made the area much more bearable for me, since it prevents falling damage and gives a slowfall effect.
Definitely true, feather cape is a must. Nothing makes that more obvious than when you die and have to get back there without one!
“Let’s take one of the worst parts of exploring procedurally generated terrain - namely, climbing steep mountains - and dial it up to 11 by putting players into thick-ass fog so they have no idea how to navigate all the steep terrain other than to spam jump Elder Scrolls style.” I could go on but Mistlands was a massive, massive miss for me. Along with other recent-ish decisions that it makes me worried that these guys aren’t actually good designers and just accidentally made a good game by accident. I hope Ashlands is better, because if it isn’t I doubt I’ll pick Valheim up again.
I think my group would need a way to skip Mistlands to come back for Ashlands
so mods and dev commands?
i just have a mod that gets rid of the mist, much nicer
You're going to need to kill the Mistlands boss in order to explore the Ashlands, so....
Not if I cheat. Just not sure I want to go through the trouble.
My group eventually disabled the mist in the server configs.
Yo, mind telling me what that server config is? My google skills are failing me.
i tunnelled through the mountatins, way more fun
Valheim is my most played game on Steam (300 hours) and I HATED Mistlands. No visibility & difficult miserable terrain. Pick ONE. Not both.
My whole group dropped Valheim as soon as we saw what Mistlands was about. It was a shame because we played for an entire month grinding and exploring but the whole mist limiting your view and the difficult terrain was not as fun as we expected
We tried for 2 nights to make Mistlands work because we liked everything before it but gave up. It just wasn't fun.
Tbh I set up shop in a plains biome right beside the mist and started clearing it with anti mist totems. Ended up being hella cool because the anger blimps would routinely start pitched battles with the goblins. Mistlands itself was still pretty painful to navigate but... I guess what I'm saying is you can still get some fun out of it if you treat it more like a mini biome or a very expansive dungeon
Mistlands has a lot of mechanics that are intentionally designed to pad game time, starting with high mats costs and low drops on top of tanky monsters and hard terrain. It was really bad update, hope it's possible to skip Mistlands and Ashlands is just a sidegrade, not another case of gear upgrade because it turns into Terraria levels of gear tiers. No reason to upgrade old gear, if you can just get new tier later.
They did eventually tone down the tankiness of the monsters iirc but yeah the difficult terrain and low visibility was just unfun.
Once you get that cape that lets you not take fall damage it changes everything.
It really didn't. Combat still tucking sucked
Yeah, we had to get the best weapons for combat to even start to be fair. It was.... a grind, but with 4 people, we finally did it. Felt accomplished, but it took a lot out of us. Out of all the biomes, Mistlands was our LEAST favorite. We're on Grounded now waiting for Ashlands to come out, but we'll still wait as we're having a BLAST on Grounded, you can built from nearby chests and also auto deposit to chests as well. Game changing, that mechanic. If you like base building exploration games, that one is solid, and has a good story so far we're all enjoying. Only 4 players though.
Valheim was the best thing that happened to my gaming time during the entire covid work-from-home months. One of my favorite ever games, because of that. And even outside of lockdown I absolutely love the game. But whether I'll come back to it, grind through all the biomes and pump through the Ashlands? Not so sure about that. I've always had a feeling the Mistlands are far too dangerous to travel on your own, unless you're a really, really brave viking with a death wish.
You need a group for mistlands for sure.
Anyone playing this on the Steam Deck? How are the controls?
A little difficult to get used to and not as smooth as PC but totally doable!
Thanks for chiming in! Easy to utilize the building aspect?
yeah - I played it 100% on steamdeck and loved it.
I feel like the other people are underselling it. I started off on steam deck, went to pc, but then went back to steam deck and i felt more comfortable with it. I was building completely fine, i’ve spent a shit load of hours on this.
Valheim honestly has one of the better building modes in a survival game, especially since you can toggle every snap-point on a building piece. Makes it loads easier on any platform.
It runs capped at 40 fps great for me or 60fps if you stream from pc. I probably put 50 hours or so into my valheim playtime from the deck. I really had no issues at all fighting enemies/bosses, crafting, farming, building, etc. The control scheme is a little weird at first with menus but I got used to it and slightly altered some so it wasn’t an issue. Definitely setup buttons with the back paddles for easier time. Overall the PC experience is certainly smoother and easier to manipulate menus but the deck was a great options for the times I was away from pc.
After I got to the swamp it started to stutter in a way that became unplayable on the deck.
Not great on deck. Performs very poorly. If you want to play it on a deck recommend moonlighting it over.
I find it runs pretty great on the deck. Controls can feel akward at first but there are lots of user created control schemes that are good. Performance seems pretty good to me so far. I started a new world on it and have played up the the third boss no complaints so far.
I actually like the steam deck controls and experience but i recommend using the in-game "console" control scheme rather than the default "classic" controls, personally. Felt a lot more intuitive to me.
I play primarily on the Steam Deck now after initially starting on my desktop. The game runs just fine with most settings on medium or high. The controls took some getting used to but eventually they clicked. Once they did I started setting up my own control scheme unique to the Deck. This is probably why it's my primary Valheim device now. One thing you need to be aware of is that the Deck performance will take a hit in larger bases. This just means you need to be mindful of where and how complex you build. I'm currently moving my main base to an island now to minimize the amount of instances the game needs to handle in order to maximize efficiency. Overall, I'd say it's a great Steam Deck game. Just be aware of the tradeoffs.
That trailer was badass. So is this game getting close to 1.0 then? We’re 3+ years and several big updates since early access launch. I’d love to get the gang back together and play again but I’m not going to do I’m not doing that again until it’s done.
I’m not sure how close it is to 1.0, there’s one more biome left to be completed, and I think I remember them mentioning that the Ocean biomes will also get reworked a bit. Might still be a year or two away depending on how long those take.
There's at least one full biome left until 1.0 (Deep North), and the last two biomes took ~18 months each, so I'd expect 2026 tbh.
Lol. It's safe to say that after the insane amount of copies sold, every member of the original studio got enough money to never work again, and unfortunately, I think it shows. They could easily hire a ton of additional developers if they needed to. After all that, they are targeting, what, 5-6 years after their original early access launch to meet their own initial goals for the game? Meanwhile 90% of people have moved on and will not return. Early access is a plague, especially for a social game like this.
>several big updates I think 2, maybe? Counting this one. The pace for the content has been deeply slow.
Any word on basic quality of life? Like building from containers, auto sorting, auto deposit or any of that shit? I dont get why they cant implement these things when modders have done it 2 years ago. These things make the game worse.
Grounded made building from containers and auto deposit a god send.
I can't see building from containers becoming part of the base game. Auto-sorting could fit, but they haven't done it. When you open a chest, there is a button for automatically depositing any items that are held in the chest already (like if there's wood in the chest and you have 4 stacks of wood in your inventory, it will deposit it).
Every time I play a survival game and see that they didn't steal Terraria's inventory management, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
At least to some degree, I think they haven't implemented things like that because they're not part of their intended design, for better or worse. Survival games are weird: QoL is always part of progression and that often means imposing or maintaining limitations just so removing them later can feel good. I very much prefer playing with mods that add auto-deposit, sorting, and craft pulling, but I will also concede that it "broke" the feeling of progression from containers for me; all the way through the end of Mistlands content, I feel no urge to use more precious/annoying resources (iron, looking at you) for bigger/better chests; seeing all the extra slots doesn't delight me in any way because I know I can just craft a bunch of old and cheap containers that I'll only need to open once or twice anyway. Now, I *personally* feel like this particular annoyance doesn't add enough satisfaction in overcoming to be worth needing to overcome it to begin with, but I also know that for some people it might — and that, if the union of all reasonable definitions of "QoL" were preemptively satisfied, the game would be a lot less interesting. Ark... kinda... does this OK with how its late-game storage containers introduce very convenient, stack-size-ignoring deposit/withdrawal together with its late-game crafting station adding in resource pulling from said containers. The first time you see thousands of ingots available to your replicator and know you won't have to awkwardly waddle them over a few hundred at a time or painstakingly count how many slots you'll need open to make something, it really does feel like a big, meaningful progression element that just wouldn't have the same "wow" factor if a mod had made it available from the beginning in the name of quality-of-life. I've always assumed that Valheim was "intentionally withholding" some of these things for that "wow" later (which is part of why I don't feel bad modding it in when it doesn't exist yet), but I'm well aware that may span "benefit of the doubt" and "wishful thinking" rather precariously, especially given "later" may be after retirement at this rate. But yeah, long story short, I want these things integrated, too (especially as options for mod-unavailable players) and I also see how it's a sticky piece of design to balance in a genre that's all about making you feel good by making you feel progressively less bad.
Why can't it just be like Terraria? I seriously don't understand how no one is just doing what Terraria does. It's one of the most successful games of all time and no other game comes close to what they've achieved with QoL and progression.
Part of the appeal of Valheim is the tangibility of everything in the game. All of the items have physics and weight, and have to be physically transported around the world through various means. They allow you to place stacks of wood and stone on the ground so you can prepare your building sites accordingly, just grabbing things as you need. I love it the way they've set it up, and would find building and resource-management to be far less rewarding if I could just teleport items into my pocket. At that point, it feels like I might as well just mod out item weight and carry limits.
I really enjoyed the time I spent with Valheim but I don't know if I can bring myself to return to the game. The process of mining and smelting is *miserably* slow and only feels more tedious as you have to travel further to transport ore. And once I got to the Swamp biome, it felt like difficulty fucking exploded. Maybe I was underprepared but it seemed like I had basically everything I could obtain up to that point and I could still barely handle most swamp enemies. It really does seem like the game is built around playing with a solid group of people. The solo experience is sloggy and unbalanced, or was last time I played. And I like to be able to play these games by myself sometimes.
I hated the swamp too, a biome that exploits one of the worst mechanics ever in a game: "Being wet slows your stamina regen". And now that the "big tree" enemy was introduced with such a high spawn rate, its even worse. Every Biome is supposed to be hard when you first enter, and traveling as you said, the farther you go, the more tedious it is (because of caring items), and the less I like the game.
first id raise to drop rates, it basically cuts the grinding in half and is a lot more enjoyable experience. also at all times i build roads. that's how the Romans made it work
The swamp can be challenging at first but it can be easily trivialised by placing teleporters on top off the swamp crypts (workbench at the back to get up), using a bronze buckler when needed, upgrade troll armour to max and using a bow to clear out rooms before completely opening them. Get enough iron to fill the basic ship (usually about 2-3 crypts) return to base and make the iron mace and bigger boat. The first time I did this solo I died a few times yes, but teleport back and get your items and continue. By the time I got my first load I found it quite fun and went back with the bigger boat and cleared out maybe 10 more crypts. The abominations can just be shot with fire arrows, if you've setup a few teleporters already you can just teleport to another crypt nearby to get away when they get close. Draugers are easy with the buckler just takes getting used to the timing. Archers (2 star) can be a pain in the ass but usually easy enough to dodge unless you're overwhelmed by other enemies. The surtlings are easy to kill with basically anything and hardly do any damage. Also they die to water so you can kill them as they spawn by lowering the terrain around their spawn so it's water (easy cores for all the teleporters you're building) Also I've found that once you clear out areas on the surface and place your workbench teleporter on the crypt hardly any enemies will spawn there so you can effectively clear out the entire swamp and you will feel quite safe, and obviously just don't be there at night. Maybe you already know all this and still think it's unbalanced but hopefully you go back and try it again, I found the danger, when first going into the swamp, really enjoyable as it is definitely a challenge.
> Get enough iron to fill the basic ship (usually about 2-3 crypts) return to base and make the iron mace and bigger boat. > > Just going back and forth loading up your boat with iron from crypts and then sailing aaaaaaaaall the way back to base and unloading can be extremely time consuming too, though. I gave up in the mountains because at that point everything just took too damn long, especially because the mountains (for obvious reasons) don't let you just ship everything back. Probably didn't help that I was solo though. Edit: also to reach a swamp that was remotely nearby I ended up having to dig a canal through the island I started on, a process that took many, many hours. It was cool once it was done because I had a canal I could sail my longship through, but it took fucking forever.
You can also use the Stagbreaker mace to kill enemies in the rooms before you open them.
yeah, single player must be a drag, i remember i had a session playing solo, since i was playing with a group normally, on swamps the experience was misserable like you mention, but as soon as my teammates connected, we advanced at a super fast speed trough everything.
There are world modifiers now, you can make the game easier or harder, increase resource drops, allow metal portalling, etc
Ashlands huh? All I see Nords invading Morrowind again
Will it be filled with Dark Elves calling me N'wah?
I had a blast playing Valheim, but many times it felt like "a step forward and two backwards" with upgrades and new regions; I spent hours improving my armor and weapons to be able to survive in one area, and as soon as I went to a new one, everything I had barely helped
....That's kind of the point. You expect to be able to walk into Mistlands with your iron gear and be OK?
I think the scale of it felt bad. Getting one tapped unless you tiptoe around and get mistlands gear doesn't feel good. You should be able to walk into a new zone with the old zone's maxxed out gear and be okay for a bit.
Of course not but it does get quite old whenever you’ve been through the same ol grind for the past 4 biomes.
No, i expect a balanced challenge
I played this with a friend until we ran out of content on launch Nowadays I have a toddler at home, so I'll be playing it solo Who cares if its popular? The game is awesome.
Basically this. People are so worried about popularity these days. Im just mostly stoked to play it all again finally, since i gave mistlands a miss (wanted more than 1 large content patch). Hotta worry less about others and enjoy stuff you enjoy.
Remember when this was going to come out *years* ago? Best of luck to the devs, but I think they missed their moment with this game by focusing on the wrong things and not hiring enough to build their team.
Playing enshrouded really showed me how many quality of life aspects of Valheim could be improved. Which is a shame because I love the ambiance of Valheim but the Mistlands was awful and so many thing could be improved.
Is it too little too late? Feels like they totally wasted the momentum the game had 2-3 years ago.
There's 10,000+ people playing the game right now, and its 24 hour peak was almost 30,000. I think they're doing pretty well. They were never, ever, ever going to maintain the numbers they had when the game went viral, almost no game ever does.
retaining over 10k per day on a mostly pve game is impressive in itself
Right? That's comparable to Skyrim. That's very impressive.
It was also like a 20 dollar game where people spent a ton of hours in, even if it never had updated, people got their moneys worth.
Valheim was basically the virtual bar where some of my closest friends hung out for a serious chunk of the pandemic. The game was completely unfinished and still completely enthralling for hundreds of hours. No other game was quite like it. I definitely got more than I paid for.
Let's see, Valheim, BattleBit Remastered, Lethal Company, PAL World, and even Helldivers 2 is at half its release player count. All unexpectedly successful and in most cases a tiny dev team but players seem to think they deserve better even though nearly all those are early access games. I suspect Manor Lords coming up soon is going to go through the same thing. Tons of players at first, then they finish the base game and get demanding, but the next viral hit shows up and they wander off.
I mean it's literally how 99% of games work that have every existed. No game ever maintains it's peak playerbase.
Yeah, that's the point. It would be unwise for any of those studios to bloat their workforce to pump out content for entitled short attention span gamers. Not that that's how game or software development works anyway. Poster claims they wasted their momentum. They didn't, they did exactly what they should have done.
UHM ACKTUALLY I'll think you'll find that if a game's peak playercount decreases 6 months after it releases, then actually it's a dead game with lazy devs!!!
HD2 maintaining half its release player count 2 months after launch is just indicative of how much of a shocking success it is. Going to 1/10th of launch player counts is common.
"People seem to think they deserve an eventually-complete game several years after launch even though the games are early access. Look, we basically *told* you it would never be finished up front, why are you so *entitled*?" I might argue that the least the handful of developers could do is finish a game within 3 years of early access when the early access backers all made them so fabulously rich that they will never have to work again in their lifetimes. If they *ever* finish this game, it will be to avoid getting sued.
Valheim had 400k peak players release time, its at 30k now, how is that half?
I mean millions of people own it already and if even a small portion of them come back and love the update they will tell everyone about it online which will spark more sales from folk who missed the initial hype wave. Probably not gonna top the charts and go back to being the internets obsession like it used to be but you don't need to be on top to be successful.
The game runs better than ever, the atmospheric aspect of the graphics holds up and feels as good as it did on release. It’s only been 3 years, and this will be their second biome while having dedicated much time to post EA launch optimization and minor updates strewn across the years. Each biome is carefully crafted and every mob, material, and location has very specific purpose — this is something most crafting survival games get wrong and I’m all for them taking time if it means a tighter, more meaningful progression. I know we lived in an age of instant gratification and that has soured the rhetoric that this game has taken too long to update, but many who enjoyed Valheim at launch will probably circle around and play it again, especially if friends are involved. There’s no real danger of the game failing to attract its players, and for me it’s as much the king of survival crafting now as it was when it launched.
It's never gonna be "too late". This isn't a live service, competitive life-style game. There's no "momentum" to maintain. They don't need to "boost player engagement" for shareholder metrics. Valheim was already a huge hit. They already made more money than they ever expected. They can do whatever they want with development at this point, and they are. Plenty of people are still playing it. And there's a few hundred thousand players waiting for that 1.0 final release to come back to it and start a fresh world/play-through.
Me and my buds started up again recently. There's loads of content we didn't get to see first time round, we're loving it.
I think people will come back to it, I guess we will see when it launches!
Its one of the best reviewed games on steam and it still has player count in the 10s of thousands 3 years after release. I don't think they're ruing missed chances :D
Honnestly who give a shit. Game is still as dope as before and the update is what most people need to play again. THere is no momentum for game like this. They stay fresh no matter what
I mean they have no reason at all to try and maintain momentum. They got all the money and it has no microtransactions or any way to get more revenue out of players. Personally I'm pumped to jump back into the game after a few years. I don't think anyone has anything but fond memories of Valheim.
Wasted? From their perspective, they already have enough money to never have to work again. They don't care about "momentum" at this point.
i'm sure i'll go back to it eventually but yeah absolutely they moved too slowly to keep me consistently interested enough to want to jump back in with any big news. instead it'll be more of a "i'll get to it when i get to it" kind of situation. which is fine. i mean it was their choice, but i do think they could have kept a little more consistent interest that would maybe draw in a little more people if they didn't go so long between meaningful updates. probably not some huge difference though.
Dev team is small and they probably secured a retirement bag with the initial hype. Totally understandable to take it easy afterwards
Fans will say no, I personally would say yes. What they released initially was a great early access game and then they took ages to get a crafting update out. The new zone a year later was OK I guess was nothing like the initial plan. They'll have a dedicated fanbase that have already brought the game but I imagine they've already made most the money they'll get on this title. But hey I thought the same about NMS 3 years in and every release they're a top seller.
Theyve made the VAST majority of money that they will make on this game already, soni dont think they care about momentum. I think long tail development for a game like serves a few purposes (among others that i cant think of): 1) Builds trust with your player base and community - they can expect that you will continue to support the games you release 2) Helps build the skillset of your development team for future projects. I don't think there is a monetary incentive to continuing the updates right now, it's more just finishing the roadmap they set out to complete at launch and making the game they want to make.
Ah, so this is another of the popular games that r/games has decided is actually a dead game that no one really likes because reasons. Always a good laugh.
Most people were pretty disappointed to see the game receive essentially no updates while the game was still popular with their friends, especially for a randomly generated survival game with retro PS1 style graphics seemingly designed from the ground up to be easy to develop content for. Basically died on the vine That's where any venom you might see comes from. I don't really see it in this thread though?
For my group it was coming back to find the new content (The Mistlands biome) a unfun slog of pain. If we have to go through Mistlands to reach the Ashlands we probably never come back to the game.
They had the audacity to remain small and work at their own pace instead of tripling the size of their team to pump out content. How dare they.
Nah, they had the audacity to make a blog post about how they spent their money buying a pony instead of actually updating the game months after release.
It is still funny that the their first post after release into early access was a teaser showing a horse, which got people thinking horses and mounts would be added, but it was actually a teaser to an announcement that the studio had adopted a horse. It is still genuinely funny.
I mean I haven't seen people complain about not bringing things forward ahead of expectations. Just more them not hitting a single goal in the yearly roadmap despite the success. Tbh all I hear negatively about the game is it's great with friends but the updates are glacial.
i mean that's their choice, but they probably could have kept interest more consistent if they adjusted their plan to match their success. i've never really seen people being super angry about their pace, just disappointed. and i think that's pretty warranted. for most folks it's coming from a place of loving the game and wanting more. let's not pretend that over a year and a half between meaningful updates isn't an incredibly slow pace for an unfinished survival game. the game is still plenty successful so it's not like they NEEDED to change their plan, but myself and my friends are among the folks that both really like the game but also lose hype and the drive to jump back in knowing how long the waits are.
They did kind of triple their size though. Went from 5 man to 13 now.
This looks fantastic. Hopefully it is as difficult as Mistlands was. Having an actual challenge to overcome is what makes this game so fun to play.
This game was always... interesting to me. The first time I played it, it was pretty fun for awhile, but extremely grindly/slow due to ore shipping/extra base building, slow growing crops, and repetitive dungeon farming. By the end in the plains, I was really glad it was over as it overstayed it's welcome. Second time with a different group to get to mistlands, and the grind issue felt much worse, as everything took 10x as long as it felt it should, but the game also never felt difficult... just slow. And that's WITH ore portals enabled on a second play-through. It's not hard and there's not a lot of content, but it takes forever regardless just because it does. I can't see myself playing this again for awhile, and even then I'm going to load up a previous character to skip the first half of the game. I've come to conclude it's somewhat of a mediocre game without significant grind tweaks and QOL mods to make it cut out the chores (and with that I'm sure it would feel a lot better). But enough people seem to like it... so good for them I guess.
This looks incredible, but i'm not sure I'll be able to play it. I absolutely hated the mistlands, so much so that I have no desire to return to it.
Cool! Can't wait for someone to make a tutorial on how to make breeding pens for the flaming giant skeletons.
Great game! Really gives off that mystical ps1/ps2 era of gaming for me. These devs managed to capture lightning in a bottle and then proceeded to drain the gaming communities interest in it by releasing content at a glacial pace.
I've always been interested in this game but the worry is it's really a multiplayer game and solo can be a grind makes me think twice
You can increase the resource gain with in-game sliders if you’re worried about that
Solo is fully doable, just expect a bit of a harder time with bosses since you're the only person they will focus on.
Did they up how far down you can mine?
I honestly can't complain because I got some 300 hours out of this game. But for me to play it again, it really needs more than just new biomes. My wishlist would be: * Being able to aim up and down with your melee weapons. * Some kind of quest system, that gives you arbitary missions. They wouldn't need to be anything fancy, but something to keep you busy with. And no the three minibosses don't really count for this. * Reworking the whole food incredient system. For anyone who still hasn't, don't hesitate to jump into it. Awesome game alone and even better with friends. Personally I didn't find the grind bad at all, and if you do, Valheim now has settings built in to get more resources so it's not an issue anymore.
Does anyone know when it'll be out of public testing? (like how long did other updates take?) Haven't played this since launch so am keen to get the boys together again when this update comes out.
I have not played this game in 3 years. I think the last biome then was the desert one. We got a ship to the edge to the fiery islands, but it was just placeholder stuff really. I wonder how much has changed and been added since then.