I'm going to make a comment before the video ends, because it's not about the review itself. In your disclosure you mentioned the concept of objective reviews. I don't really think that these exist. There are more well-thought-out and nuanced opinions, but no opinion on a game is objectively correct.
Sure, that's a good point, that was worded quite poorly in hindsight. I guess what I actually mean is a review that tries to accurately discuss what the player thinks the game's strengths and weaknesses are. I found very few reviews, positive or negative, that really tried to say anything that wasn't either "best game ever" or "worst game ever". And I guess my video doesn't do much praising of valheim ever, but I felt like in the torrent of overwhelmingly positive reviews that say nothing but good things, maybe talking about the shortcomings of the game would be worth doing for anyone on the fence about getting the game and giving it a try. Maybe my video in conjunction with other reviews might help people make a good choice over the game
@@htwo1 This is why you take the negative review and the positive review and average out a conclusion that's somewhere in the middle. The fact that you got over hyped is your own fault. Same as people who pre-order games. There's many bad practices on the consumers side of the games industry and should be avoided but people will still do these mistakes, often because of some version of FOMO, be it early access or pre-order exclusives, or any number of other factors. Game developers can and should be blamed for introducing these practices but if you keep falling for them it's also on you.
@@HarleyAMV I completely agree with this to be honest. You're right, as a consumer you should take every overly positive review with a pinch of salt, same as every overly negative one. You should look at a decently wide variety of reviews before purchasing. Unfortunately though, I took the bait for valheim. I found very few negative reviews out there, if any, and I expected the game to be much more than I found it to be because of it
You can give objective facts about a game. Objectivity can't exist when it comes to games because yah, certain people like certain things. I guess by giving the game an "objective" review is going into the game blind and experiencing it in the most vanilla and blind way possible.
Maybe if he had used that feature more than traveling in a straight line, he would have found out that swamps can generate way closer to spawn than on his world lol.
You can't teleport with metal ore, but you can teleport with refined metals you're wearing, like weapons and armor. That's the inconsistency that confuses me.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all logically. Which is all the more reason to believe that the only reason it works this way is to elongate the game's run time without adding more content
I agree. This game has so much potential and it was really fun and refreshing for the first few hours (I really love the music and the building system) - but then the grind came and it became really tedious to travel across half of the map (and die here and there -> repeat) looking for multiple swamps, because one (or even two) just aren't enough to get enough iron for two people.
game is tedious and often bullshit and immersion breaking a bronze axe is 8 fucking ingots which means 16 fucking copper and 8 tin i did. the litteral math and it comes out to 336 pounds of metal somehow formed into a tiny fucking axe head smaller than an ingot the bosses are just boring they have like 3 attacks and you just end up getting swarmed by mobs that spawn constantly about 8 feet away from you 24/7 game could actually be fun but they take 10 years to add one biome and 3 mobs and forget to actually balance out the game
Tip: a good way to not have to sail across the entire ocean after dying, is to build an outpost. Where you can set a spawn point and not have to make 30 boats. And it protects your portal
@@beanboy1821 they absolutely do. Which you would know if you tried it. Don't expect it to withstand a siege but if you want to quickly get your stuff without cheats then you need an outpost.
@@beanboy1821 Wood do work with a sunken wall or raised grounds. However, its pretty crap when it comes to the New Biome, the mistlands, because of the Gjals. However, I've found a new way to build a home, inside a boulder. Just dig into the rocks that your roof will be the rock and its donzo, no more gjals blasting your house in mistlands.
@@htwo1 the oceans are a bit dead and boring sometimes, hopefully they add more hostile mobs and treasures/raid events, etc. It would be cool if they added Whirlpools or a Kraken or something.
@@morehumanity that would be pretty cool, although the only worry there is that dying in the middle of the ocean is a pretty miserable experience to put up with
@@htwo1 My internet connection glitched once while I was under full sail in a longboat. Game booted me from server. When I logged back in, the boat had continued forward without me. After drowning and respawning I had to sail the back-up Karve to my grave, then search for the longboat. When I found my ghost ship, I was too cheap to part with either boat, so I had to buff up swimming by leapfrogging them both to the nearest land. Fun times! Hahaha.
I just had my "Nope!" moment with this game, I had heard getting your smelting setup was pretty grindy and one of the worst parts of the game during the black forest and just soldiered through it, had to build a boat to travel 5-6 times the distance I had explored to get to the Elder (I just thought I got unlucky with my seed). Using the last of my copper and tin to smelt the last of my bronze gear, I made the 15ish minute boat ride to the arena that was luckily quite close to the shore, linked a portal with my home base near my boat overseeing the arena, and headed towards the altar. I went into the boss blind and had no idea his moveset, however after about 10 minutes and a few close calls when mobs interrupted us, I peeked around the pilar and fired my final shot into him!.. Success!.. the Elder had dropped his head, a swamp key, and everything seemed good, I had spotted a burial chambers near where I moored my boat on the way to the arena so I thought I'd head inside and get myself a few surtling cores, after a few minutes of clearing that I head back outside and get alerted that swamp creatures were coming to attack the workbench that I had constructed beside my portal and boat, by the time I had got to the shore there were 3 Draugr (an enemy I hadn't even encountered upto that point) smashing both the portal and workbench to pieces, I had no stamina to engage them, and another 2 came from behind and killed me in 2 hits, my portal was destroyed, All of my gear overseas, no crafting materials to make anything near a possible recovery as my gear was within a raid of Draugrs, and all I had was enough to make some troll gear and an antler pickaxe, spend 2 hours pointlessly farming to go and get my stuff again just to go and do it all again in the swamp which I now hear is even worse. Overall, Great for a few hours, Such potential of fun, just too vast, grindy, slow and punishing to keep at it.
Yeah, in Valheim you have to be really safe. Whenever I go to a new biome/Island I always make a shack and maybe a little wall around the portal in case of any raids. AND pro-ish building tip for safe bases (albeit expensive), Raise a large circle of ground that is about as tall as a stakewall so no enemies can get over. I also like to keep the ring of stakewalls for looks. You can build a staircase out of wood, but i like to make a natural tunnel going upwards till i hit the surface. Now, terrain is still destructible but WAAYYYY more durable than any wood wall. its basically cheap stone walls early game. Sorry for ranting and thanks if you read all of that. (P.S. you can now alter many game mechanics with world modifiers like combat difficulty, portal restrictions, and death penalties.)
@@ImagineWagons922 Well, it's a sad & pathetic display of creative incompetence to be honest. The devs have inserted as much fake difficulty as possible and extended playtime by turning the game into a pure time-sink. Do you know why boats are slow? To increas the time you have to invest in the game, moves like that are often done as a forgery to inflate playtime numbers & active players for investors or potential company buyers, along with it there are two more layers of benefits for doing so: First's the psychological effect over people who invest too much time into anything, almost always generating cognitive dissonance that makes the person obsessed with whatver they have invested too much time into, making the person enter a spin of denial that is the primary cause for "fans" of any videogame defending it even when the issues are blatant. Second layer's that too many people see game value solely quantifiable by "hours of entertainment" vs "investment", which creates a loophole where if there's a timesink forgery in a game, tons of people will see it as "1000 hours of playtime, totally worth it" - when in fact it's 950 hours of busy work & afking vs 50h of actual entertainment... Valheim's sort of trash, fun to some extent, can be a nice "minecraft with viking theme simulator" for building, but that's where it ends. Core gameplay's utter garbage, which brings me back to why I play it: to deliberately waste time similar to drawing random crap while I wait in a line, or to just build some creative crap much like I was playing fantasy The Sims, outside of those 2 factors I doubt this should even be considered a videogame in the theory sense of what composes a game. It's pretty much a gametoy like The Sims and other similar with slapped in gaming elements to forcefully inflate playtime, it's that or the devs are the most incompetent developers in history...
You put the finger on why I didn't enjoy this game. And I really wanted to. I didn't even reach the grindy part, I stopped after the first biome. The world felt way too empty and barren for me, and all the tasks (chores) you do feel just meaningless. There is too few items to craft and a very poor variety of resources you can gather in the world. I love exploring so I built a raft and sailed, just to land on the exact biome, and then I realized that that new land had nothing more to offer than where I started from, I just quit.
1 year later (1st playtrough, also with a friend). I can say that every single thing you mentioned is exactly what bothers me (plus the weird building sometimes). Most of the time I just ask myself "Why?". Why are there no real iron ore veins? Why can't I decide if I want to be able to teleport ores in a mostly NON PVP world? Why do I have to sail for hours and hours to find the one stone that shows me where the boss is? They could have at least made it like Core Keeper with the world design, instead they took every opportunity to lengthen the game in one way or the other
When I died on a remote island with the last bed being 1 hour away I started saving the game every 10-30 minutes and if I die on some island, restore the last savegame. It is really ridiculous that you have to create a raft, sail there again with a 90% chance of being one-shot by some swamp archer. Valheim is fun, but the mechanics are just too punishing. Even Dark Souls is not so punishing.
I guess I'm a masochist. I like the challenge, and yet there has been no challenge that has been too much to overcome. If I go and die into a difficult place, it's the right moment to stop playing for a moment, think what went wrong and how to make a successful retrieval trip. With a bit of thinking you can make things easy for yourself in this game. That's what I enjoy, the constant need to bigbrain this game.
@@maltimotoYes and this is what frustrates me most about this community. I was fully geared and prepped to kill Moder had food and supplies and God-tier equipment. Sailing my boat slaying serpents for their meat while I sail 20 minutes to the boss for first time. Its storming and I'm readying to kill another serpent chasing me. I start slowing my boat and turn to get the snake when I realize I'm hurtling straight to a surprise plains shoreline. Before I have a chance to react or equip shield from bow deathsquito 1-shots me. I eat deathsquitos for breakfast, they are easy if fought correctly, but when situations like that happen you lose hours. I already had made a new boat and sailed to a grave before, I just devcommanded back at that point. There was no flaw in prepwork or any other BS the game can just be stupid sometimes.
Your comment about this game feeling like a chore is very accurate. I recently started playing again after about a year, and I am just filled with dread at the prospect of having to harvest resources to build and craft and travel.... It's so much time with so little reward....
I have no complaints about the very long sailing time. It keeps my sanity from falling apart. I just love the sea and the point where storm starts brewing and rocking the boat so hard that I start to really care about all the loot I have in it. For me this mechanic just works and makes me value all the things I carry with me. My only complaint is losing my skill points when I die. Just doesnt make sense.
Almost completely agree; I love the immersive world and I work hard to remain immersed. Adding the risk to death seems, to me, to make me care just a little more about NOT dying - just like a real Viking. I am a PRUDENT Viking - because death is costly.
Specifically looked up a video like this after growing frustrated with Valheim this evening. I think many things about this game can be considered features and not bugs, but some things are really an issue. Especially how punishing it can be. For example, I play with one other person, but mostly tackle things solo. I spent HOURS grinding out the Bronze Age on my own, and after all was said and done, after 80 in game days of exploring grinding building and crafting, i had the best Unupgraded armor I could get and the best weapons, and even the best food according to google. Me and my friend stepped ONE FOOT into the swamp, and were instantly faced with 4 draugr, 3 blob and a wraith. Killed in under a minute. I’m no pro gamer here, but if I can spend 80 in game days preparing and grinding only to get stomped, there’s something wrong. The game is fun in so many ways, but honestly from here on out, I’m using console commands to teleport my ore back to my base. The game is so forgiving in some areas and yet so overly punishing in others that the wastes of time I spend in the game feel like I’m working, not playing.
If there was a wraith it must have been at night. Venture out at sunrise and return home before sunset. The mobs at night are higher level and numerus. You can sleep at night to avoid waiting for your next mission. Make sure you have a good rest buff and keep at it. Most rewarding game I've played in along time, but you have to plan and pick your battles.
fortunately pretty much all of the enemies in the swamp are very easy to spot before they spot you. draugrs dont notice you unless you move quickly near them. Wraiths are glowing super bright and floating in the air, easy to notice. Blobs and leeches aren't as easy to avoid, but luckily a poison resistance poison almost guarantees that you don't die to them (although most players wouldn't think to use them first time entering the swamp)
I’m 3 months late so apologies for that but people who say valheim is super grindy are usually approaching it from the wrong angle. Spending 80 days preparing doesn’t mean you deserve to live in valheim. Fully upgraded armor and weapons are usually at MOST 30% better than the base gear, afaik. Honestly food is almost more helpful a lot of the time since it helps you with both stamina and parrying (based on max health). But really the solution to dying isn’t get better stuff, it’s make better decisions. Don’t go out at night in biomes that are threats to you. Don’t attack enemies for no reason. Don’t wander far from your portals. Don’t go into dangerous biomes without food and a rested buff. Run away not just from fights that are currently overwhelming but also from fights that, if they got overwhelming, you’re fucked. Swamp sucks ass so I’ll use it as an example. If an abomination comes at me and I’m in swamp level gear (troll or root armor for me), I’m not gonna just fight it, I’m gonna bait it to a large dry patch with minimal trees, assuming I’m not trying to cheese it. This means I won’t accidentally roll into the water and get hit by a leech. I won’t get stuck against a tree and a draugr, and I can see them coming more easily. I’m looking around while my stam recovers so I don’t get sneak attacked by an ooze or I have poison resist equipped. These aren’t gear related for the most part, they’re player choices. Being punishing isnt a bug, it’s a feature, as you suggest, and it’s a feature because some players enjoy the difficulty. It’s nice to feel that your actions have consequences. Victory is sweeter when failure is painful and possible.
@@finnbreuner3618 I feel you’re completely wrong. “Player choice” is a real grey area way to put it, that completely puts the ball in my court, and is a fancy way of saying “get good”. It’s not player choice to have the only swamp biome within reasonable sailing distance be surrounded by plains biome (which was the case for us) meaning we just had to pray we could set up a teleport fast enough without getting more or less one shot by 12 dragur, two slimes, and leaches which destroyed our boat the second we set foot on the island. The punishing aspect in my opinion is that if you are unlucky and incapable of “drawing something out to an open area without trees and water” as you suggest, which wasn’t a capability for us, as we were stranded, then in that case you’re left with nothing to be able to go back, and you just have to pray that by the time you’ve grinded out the materials for armor, weapons and food, as well as a new boat, that’s good enough for you not to die even faster next time, by that point you’ll be so tired of the game you’ll have to just give it a week. In every other game of this kind, you can always just try again, with little to no issue, but valheims state essentially ensures that you’ll never move beyond the danger, which is unfulfilling to say the least
I will concede you one thing: even post nerf, the deathsquitos are totally bullshit. Because of how you'll likely have to sail to a swamp on another landmass whilst still wearing bronze gear makes it pretty likely you'll happen upon a deathsquito far earlier than you can face it and it's pretty common for people to go on a long sail to get 1 shotted.
@MIchael Forsythe sure when you've already played the game and know what to expect lol but out of all the sales this game had how many people do you think sailed to another landmass for the first time and turned off their music to listen for deathsquitos
@@MetalliCxZero LOL that's a fair point. I'd watched enough vids to know to steer clear of the plains. In my own case I was just trying to find the Elder early on. I literally sailed for days and days (in game) rounding a huge continent until I finally ran out of food. I landed in what I thought was a safe spot and immediately got squished by a troll as soon as I stepped on dry land. Had to build another boat to sail back. I learned to plan every move like a military campaign from then on. Leave nothing to chance and take it slow. A week later, at home, another troll ambled over and destroyed my dream house that I'd just finished................. live and learn. So I spent tons of time building a base 8m above the sea which is troll-proof. They visit often and I thumb my nose at them. You take your knocks in this game and you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and improve.
@@MetalliCxZero Not sure when they nerfed them, or 'if'. When I first landed at the plains they terrorized me until I learned how to deal with them. I started wearing root chest piece, which really mitigates pierce damage. Their attack patterns are predictable - that's a fact. Just be patient and wait for them to come at you. If you try to run, as most do initially, then yeah you're gonna die lol.
The first time I played it, the first couple hours were really fun. There were new mechanics I was learning, I was building a house and hunting deer, but after those couple hours it became tedious. I was playing with one other person at the time, so it made the grind a bit less painful, but I couldn't help but feel that valheim was best optimized for 4 people or more. Everything we did took hours upon hours of progress, and we had our graves disappear constantly which set us back an hour or two every time it happened. Moving copper, tin, and iron from place to place was so painful even with carts and boats. We didn't even have a swamp biome on our main island and the closest one was 15 minutes away by boat, and you couldn't use portals. It took trip after trip to finally get our iron gear maxed out, and combined with the amount of times we died and had to make a new boat and sail to where we died only added to the frustration. The ocean was big and empty and boring, and once we finished the swamp portion of the game the mountain biome was so disappointing, the time we put in to get to that point didn't feel worth it. All of the bosses looked really cool but were also really easy, except for the fact that all of them were giant hp sponges. Every biome felt like hours of gearing up with tons of set backs and tedious work just to lob arrows at a boss for 15 minutes. None of the buffs you got were that good either. We used eikthyr's for the entire game. But overall I did enjoy the game, I did finish it after all. I just think they have a while before it's a game that I would consider "Balanced and complete"
Totally agree that dying over seas is so discouraging. Me and my friend have almost completely quit this game 3 times due to dying far away without a teleporter to shorten the recovery. It feels more like a second job than a video game sometimes
Why didn't you build a portal when you came ashore? Whenever you step out of your boat there are 2 things you need to do first: 1. Build a workbench. 2. Build a portal. No exceptions, sounds like a preparation problem. And the fact it happened 3 times means you haven't learned from your first experience....
@@dekippiesip we were actually killed by a serpent once, the mosquitos got us before we got to shore once, and the other times we didn’t expect any issue but still died… regardless it’s an awful grind to make so many teleporters
@rumproast portals are actually pretty cheap. You can easily get surtling cores if you are close to a surtling spawner. And you can get a decent amount of fine wood in the meadows(later in the plains in much larger quantities). Also you shouldn't go into the plains early game as everything there is going to one shot you.
The map is awully huge. Which would be great if there were things to discover. But its just a wasteland of trees and rocks. And it all looks the same. There is no reason to go explore, cause you already know there isnt shit
the grind is unbearable. its madness. death punishment is madness. every death is -5% if your skill, the higher your skill, the more you lose. your stuff laying around and needs to be YOLO runned to. im not going through another grind for spare gear. sorry. and thank you for mentioned the mountains. im here after the gameover you mentioned. no more frost resistance. moder flying around with 2 golems and 4 wolves guarding my stuff. gg but the worst thing about the game is the fighting system. its terrible. i dont want to start here. its like darksouls and took all the fun and skill parts out and exchanged it for some number stuff that doesnt make any sense, which forces you to grind more stuff to get bigger numbers
I think you also should have mentioned for terraria that the more you grind the faster you get too. You get way faster mobility the longer you play. Meanwhile in valheim you actually get even slower and slower as the game progresses as items weight more and more, and your armor weighs substantially more as well, and you need tons and tons of more items for basic gear.
The purpose of not being able to transport metal through portals is to encourage players to build forge outposts, so you can craft your armor there. Having to transport new metals by boat all the way back to your base was never a requirement, nor the intention of the developers. It's just an option that a lot of players take, thus giving themselves extra unnecessary tedium. Because remember: It's *only* the metals that can't be transported. Meaning you only need to transport the metals you need for a forge and its upgrades to the outpost. That reduces the entire process to 2 trips. One to build the outpost and one to return to your main base once you're done with the outpost and want to re-use the materials for something else. Also, "the devs put the boss too far away from the spawn"? You just got a bad seed where one of the Bonemass spawners happened to be very far away. And yes, you read that right: *One* of the spawners. Every boss in the game has a few spawners spread around the world. Had you gone in a different direction from spawn, you most likely would've found a much closer Bonemass spawner.
“If you’re starting to see more dislikes, well, it probably just means that your channel is starting to grow out of it’s comfort zone, and that’s okay” -EmpLemon Keep up the great content ❤️
This was a nice reminder not to reinstall the game. I just can't bring myself to restart the grind alone and attempt to experience "the mists" . So many things wrong with this game. My first experience was pretty great though , I sank a good 50 hours into my initial attempt and had 2 or 3 massive beautiful bases. But after killing a bugged out moder that didn't move or attack (after i spent many ingame days prepping the best food and potions plus multiple camps up and down this HUGE mountain) i basically just went yay......and never touched it again. Didn't even care if it was completed or not.
I really like Valheim and I don't agree with everything you stated in this video, but I realise that the grind for metals and boss HP issues that you mentioned, the latter of which really is pure padding, is what has stopped me from progressing past the iron/silver stages. I had a shared server with about 10 of us on there. It was really fun, but as I said the silver grind rolls around and suddenly no one's hopping onto the server. A week later, without hesitation from any of us, we stopped paying for the server.
I know it's been a couple of years since this video and some things have changed but Valheim's success still truly baffles me. It is a profoundly boring game which punishes the player in ways which aren't compelling, interesting, or even productive while offering little to no actual payoff or real reason to continue playing. I've put countless hours into Terraria, Zomboid, Dwarf Fortress etc so I'm no stranger to punishing, grindy, or tedious game mechanics. However, every time I talk myself into trying Valheim again I am overcome with ennui within minutes. I genuinely want to like this game because fantastic games are seemingly hard to come by these days, but I've been forced to concluded the appeal is simply lost on me; surely a failure on my part.
Just to explain my own experience and show that I wasn't in love with Valheim from the start either. I played Valheim entirely on my own and without looking anything up. Solo and Blind. It was quite a nightmare at times and for most of my first playthrough I was stubborn and had the same criticisms as you do. Valheim becomes much easier when you understand how to tackle problems and the smoothest way of progressing you character. I was 30 hours in and had been farming copper and tin for almost 10 hours and made myself bronze tools when I found out that you could cut down Pine with a stone axe and make yourself the Stagbreaker before even attacking the first boss which trivializes burial grounds which I had slugged my way through with only a flint spear, flint axe, and club and only had berries, mushrooms and grilled meat to boost my stats. It didn't get much better from there... My second characters journey was a lot smoother and more enjoyable however. You're wrong about quite a lot here simply because you're not playing correctly which opens you up to quick dismissal which is unfortunate because you do bring up some valid points. (*)Lets first off point out that Valheim was a fluke success by TWO (2) guys... They've made hundreds of millions, practically over-night, off this game. So they absolutely deserve a bit of understanding. Much of your criticism can be dismissed by you simply playing wrong. Should the game have told you how to play? Maybe yes, maybe no... Depends on your personal preference. Dark Souls players would say Valheim does enough hand-holding as it is. Others might think differently. For instance. Teleports. They're not for getting back home quickly. They are for connecting bases. If you go to a new continent. Build a small base. Beds to respawn in. And a portal to go back to your main base to stock back up on gear and food if you need it. If you're going to farm resources in a far off place; build a small base to process the raw materials into gear that can go through the portal, or to consolidate your haul for when you take the boat back to your main base. The world is too big? The map is procedurally generated. The devs don't pick where everything is. You can get a world where everything is really close to the start of the game. They could probably set perimeters to stop things from spawning too far away, but again... TWO devs. - And they haven't finished all the biomes, as you said yourself, so it might end up being a sequence of small skips between the biomes that feel more nature than what it's like today. If you don't like the world you're given, make a new one and transfer your character and all your stuff. The game is extremely grindy. I agree and it absolutely is, but not because it requires too much resources to build things (in my opinion). The worst part by far is to find the monsters and resources you need. I often spend hours just running around looking for monsters and resources long after the monsters and environment has stopped being a threat to me. I watched a streamer spend 3 hours hunting golems only to find 2 golems in that entire time... A simple fix would be to allow you to create a consumable to track specific monsters/resources or to increase their spawn for a limited time. I know it's easy to get caught in a deathloop but I personally I have little to no issue with the death system since your stuff never seem to get deleted. (Coming from Dark Souls which I find to be far too punishing for new players who don't like to look things up, like myself.) The whole game's difficulty lies in grinding and preparation. I was often surprised just how easy the enemies were when you knew how to deal with them. - Which probably is why base building becomes the true endgame for most people :P
@@shadownight848 I can understand having a negative reaction when hearing someone's "playing wrong." People want to think "play anyway you like" but if someone is playing an FPS and decide not to use the mouse to aim, and then blame the game for not giving them the option to aim with the keyboard - You're playing wrong. If you play Minecraft and decide you don't want to use the crafting system - You're playing wrong. All games are built with fundamental functions and how you use those functions is up to you. If you decide not to use certain functions, that's up to you, but you should realize that you're making a choice to play the game in an unintended way. If someone doesn't like the way those functions are designed, as you said, the game isn't for them. There's plenty of games, movies, shows, books, that have very interesting premises, settings, or ideas, but as a whole I don't actually like, but that just means they're not for me. Him ending up in a death loop, getting his portal destroyed, or going back and forth over half the map wasn't due to design flaws of the game, but was the result of how he decided to play the game. There was always alternatives. Build an outpost to protect your portal. Put the portal up in a tree or somewhere enemies can't get to it. Build a new base to use the metal close to here you found it. Build a faster boat with more storage. And so on... Of course, that doesn't mean the game is exempt from criticism. Mining ore take an, objectively, absurd amount of time and there's really no progression in the game to make it significantly faster. Since skills are lost at a flat 5% on death you'll find yourself reaching an equilibrium between how long it takes you to level up skills and how often you die. After just a few hours your skills will be around level 20-30 but most players will probably be stuck somewhere around skill level 40 and 60 for most of the game. It's important to distinguish between criticism and personal preferens.
Comment at 4:35 - There seems to be multiple copies of each boss. So, if you are north of the center of the map and find a location rune, it will point you to the closest boss, which is probably in the northern half of the map. If you found a location rune in the southern half of the map, you might have found Bone Mass a bit closer. I'm not saying the map isn't too f'ing big, but I think it is big for a reason.
I would consider Valheim a good game, but I'll also say that it almost requires multiplayer to keep the fun through the later stages of the game. That being said, it's not a perfect game and the annoyances you mentioned are large subtractors to the game. You mentioned on a few occasions that stamina could be a problem, but lack of stamina is actually one of my major negative points for the game. Especially how a lot of the time you simply have to stop what you're doing to wait for stamina (mining, woodcutting and fighting). One major annoyance for me, is also that your home base gets attacked, which means that you cannot build your base to look the way you want it, but it has to be defendable or it might just get destroyed. In my game I found a 2 star boar on a different island than my home base, so I breed a few of them at the other island. There was no way for me to simply pick up the boar and transport it on my ship, so I had to drag it after my ship with a harpoon, and manage that the line didn't break though the whole sail trip. Once I got it to my home base, a raid occurred, where drakes flew over and killed the boar. I'd also say that mining would be less frustrating, if the ores didn't weigh as much, so you could carry more per trip. Why is it that a silver sword takes something like 45 bars (450 weight) to craft but the sword has almost no weight? Just make it proportional.
Yeah I definitely wouldn't have continued with Valheim if I wasn't in multiplayer. All I can say is that I hope they address these sorts of things since they grind the game to a halt significantly. I never did much building but I can see that being a nightmare. It was a nightmare for me because I didn't WANT to build at all, but had to make it defensible
It will stop the freezing damage only until you leave the fire place's radius, so unless you like the idea of building a fireplace once every 4 feet it's not a very realistic strategy for the entire biome unfortunately. It's only good for specific outposts you might want to create
@@misterchess3254 If your loot is stuck in the mountain then it's definitely a good idea you're right. In that circumstance it's still extremely tedious to do but at least there is an option I guess, as annoying as that option is
Always - ALWAYS keep a spare set of "everything" at home so when you respawn, you can get dressed and head out on a leisurely corpse-run. In mountains, always have a half dozen frost meads and a super-speedy set of gear; you are not going back to fight, just be fast and warm to get your gear while still in "Corpse Run" mode. I found that you sometimes need to LURE Moder far from your original corpse when in "Corpse Run" mode so you can return later and take your time collecting your gear.
Comment at 14:00 - Yep. Enemies prefer to attack portals, crafting structures, and ships for whatever reason. I chalk it up to "magic," but meh. That said, all you need to do is protect them a bit. Building a portal inside a structure is an excellent way to keep enemies from seeing that portal then making a bee-line to destroy it. When I park my longship in a new area, I either find a nearby biome I can easily handle and build a small defensive dock or just park the longship a bit offshore. If you're looking at the plains biome from a longship, your swim skill is probably > 0.
What I hate the most, is the 2 copper + 1 tin ingot = ....... 1 bronze. Then... each bronze ingot is 12kg, to make a axe of 2 kg, you need... 80kg bronze. It is just artificial difficulty, it is total crap. And also the portal you cannot pass with ores is just bad... the slots on a big boat, small.
Valheim is the first game ever that I hated so much that I DELETED from my steam. I did not just uninstalled, but selected support and asked to it to be perma deleted from my account.
Thank you for that perspective. I think you have some valid points there, mainly around the cost of producing late game items. As for the exploration and death systems - I personally think that (based only on the footage) you rushed in. I am playing solo and have died stupidly in @#$%@#^ing cave trolls, resulting in me not waking up for work as I had to spend over an hour figuring out how the get all my stuff over three expeditions, but this means that after the joy of finding the biome I was looking for subsides, I will be spending a few real hours just building a forward base just outside of it, with a well defended portal before I will even test the edge of this unknown place. I think the first two visits to the Black Forest made that VERY clear. As for the metals teleport limitation - I love this! it forces me to be super creative in how am I creating a supply chain infrastructure, which at this point includes a dedicated port, including smelters, and a vast stone road inside my Swamp biome so that I could effectively move my cart around easily. I have never found myself so immersed in a building engine and had such a joy in solving the physical puzzle which is the building structure system, and never believed I will be designing a %@#^ing farm(!!!) in a video game. All in all, I think this is a masterpiece, flawed, but a masterpiece. I can't wait for the full release.
having played this a good year after the video came out i am happy to say that some things are better. i think. the boss location items seem to be everywhere. the bosses seem much closer corpse run buff gives you like 90% damage resist when you loot your grave so you don't die again cooldown on losing skillpoints , so chain deaths are not as bad. enemies have never broke my boat or portal , even with us fighting at them. freezing in mountains can be avoided with fires, though very annoying to use they can be used to recover your gear when out of better options. but, still to much grind, to much boss HP , to high crafting costs. 70lbs of metal to make a 1lb pickaxe? many weapons are just worse than the other kinds. i still like the game, early game mostly . i hope in another year or 2 it will be as good as we all hoped it was.
Comment at 15:00 - Speedrunners in Valheim build a small shelter with a bed near a fight location. You don't need a portal in many scenarios, just a bed. After death, there are some temporary buffs to help you survive. Speedrunners take advantage of a buff called "corpse run" to defeat enemies. The buff is (generally) gained after picking up your stone and has significant damage reduction for a short time. Again, this is something players new to Valheim wouldn't know or even have a clue it exists, so it will be frustrating until the learning curve starts to flatten out.
I disagree with a lot of the points you’ve made. I love the absolute punishment on the deaths, I’ve gotten locked on islands surrounded on plains, and it’s so fun for me to try to figure out a way out of the situation. Except for the ore in the teleporters, why?
Comment at 17:37 - Stamina is really annoying and deadly. That said, I think it is the one thing that balances the game for even the most experienced players. Without stamina, the game's replayability would drop significantly.
Stamina is fkn annoying in this game. You're ALWAYS short on stamina. Because you're chopping down trees or mining and then get attacked. Most of the fight is waiting for your stamina to regenerate.
I've just started playing the game and I agree 100% with everything you said. Once I reached the Black Forest and had to mine copper and tin I realized how absurdly grindy this game was going to be. And it's a damn shame because it does have a lot of potential, but its runtime is padded with so much useless grind and purposely lack of features it's infuriating at times.
I agree with almost everything about the video, but I do want to add that I do find the long sailing periods relaxing at times. If you just got out of a tense encounter in the far away biome you were at, the 10-20 minutes of the wind and waves and slow music can be a refreshing break from the grind
Good video, criticissm is necessary for valheim especially now as it is in early access. Singing this game praises is good, but faults should be noted in order for the game to be a fun experience to its fullest. Hope the devs see this video.
the only thing i disagree with is about the punishment for death. i think the game is too easy.maybe make a mode where u dont drop loot but i wish there was a mode that was a lot harder
Having a 10% skill drop without the no skill drain buff, and no item loss, while also making skills more impactfull, maybe by granting certain perks at high levels, would discourage just throwing yourself at an enemy again and again, and would stop you from loosing all your progress with an unlucky or badly placed death. I currently lost all my progress on a silver tier character because of a badly timed deathsquito that is now guarding my gear deep in a plains biome, where I usually die before I get close. That isn't good game design, it's a quitting point for a lot of players. And though I agree that many enemies should be made harder, with better ai and attacks, many enemies like the deathsquito, should be heavily rebalanced. They can snipe you while you're on a boat next to the plains, they can outrun you when you're attempting to retrieve your items, and they one shot you if you have less than 100 health or strong/pierce resistant armor. But the biggest problem is that the devs are more than likely just enjoying the ridiculous amount of money they made, and have the game on a very low priority atm.
Two years later. I just bought this game some weeks back and agree with you. My pet peeve is something you didn't mention but annoyed the hell out of me -- not being able to make your base have permanent or at least longer lasting light sources from the start, and getting the "you're cold" notification every time you move anywhere in your base even though you have a raging fire going right in the middle. Like sure, that's probably "realistic." But is it satisfying? Nope. It is super irritating. I just got till the bronze age before deciding this game is definitely not for me. I loved Terraria to bits. That one is a much better game, both in the things you could do and the satisfaction you get. Even though it is also grindy, you get rewarded for the grind in much more fulfilling ways than here. Just a lot of game design choices I personally do not jive with.I made a comment expressing my disappointment and decision to stop playing on Reddit and got pommeled by a host of fanboys LOL. Silly me. This game has a lot of potential but is flawed in many ways, and as it is now, even now with the latest update, it is still not enough to keep me playing. I just am not willing to spend that much time on a game that is not fully fleshed out.
There are multiple spawns for each boss, the farther you travel the farthe the boss spawn you find is. The devs made this game for them, they already stated that while they listen to the players they made this game for them. Its an early access survival game with less than 20 devs. If you play games just to beat them you wont enjoy this game, its made to be played with passion, not entirely with bosses in mind
Most of the compkains are skill issue, you can bring the forge to your next location to make items from the raw metal and being mindfull of securing portals the only thing i agree on is loseing skills on death its just generally stupid
just quitted this for the same reasons (and way earlier in my test run). I mean i have a life, and when i play i'd like not be in a working simulator. I'd like to have a fun experience, exploring digital worlds, fighting or whatever. Chopping wood, mining the ground for hours just to build some walls and a roof, running randomly around for hours ... is not fun. But what litteraly killed this pseudo-wannabe-game for me is the abysmal progression system, is the worst ever seen in years, and it's even worse than the latest 7daystodie releases.
Its a well put together, well said, and well argued video. I can see all of your points. I would like to counter on a couple of issues though, and bear in mind this is a year later, after the video was released, and having spent the entire release period (from drop till now,) playing the game. First, the point of the world being too large. It is, but it isn't. What i mean by that is that it is too large for its current content. While being large for the released content though, there is upcoming content for those biomes. The developers, 6 months ago now having released the much anticipated MISTLANDS update, revamped the entire mistlands, filled it in, gave it its own unique mobs, and have overall done an absolutely bang-up job with the content thus far. The more or less empty biomes do have plans for them. They are really at this point place-holders. Is this optimal? Well...maybe not. Probably not, but I understand the choice myself, so I can't fault them on it. Once completely finished, the world will seem a lot smaller. Its too big because at the moment its too empty. Secondly, the issue of non teleport items. It is annoying, but its a mechanic designed to get you to explore more, and dig in less. The game is also about exploration. You aren't meant to sit in your base and wait for Ragnarok to come to you. Ideally, you are supposed to setup many smaller outposts. The teleporters link your outposts. That seems the intuitive way they meant the game to be played. I will admit the dragon egg limitation is dumb though. That just makes no sense and Ill admit it. To the penalties of Death, I would like to say that's mostly been fixed so that you aren't losing a ton of skill points. dropping your inventory sucks but like Minecraft before it, you just kinda work with it. At least there is an auto death marker when you die so you know where it is. And with corpse run and the No penalties buff that you get upon resurrection, you are less likely to die as fast once you recover your body, and even if you do, you don't lose additional skill points. On a side note, remember, your character is already DEAD. That's why your eyes glow. Skills aren't Learned in this game, they are Remembered from your previous life (presumably). This is why dying docks your skills. And why you don't recover them when you pick-up your body. It's lore based. One thing I would like to absolutely agree on is crafting costs, otherwise known as the grind: it is, always has been, and always likely will be, horrendous. I am of course referring to the materials needed for some things. 40 silver for a sword? Or, and hear me out, i could get level 3 wolf armor for that same 40 silver. like, a full set. Silver is absolutely the worst offender but none of the other tiers are really any better either. and you need iron for Every. Single. Tier. once you get it. There are I think only 3 pieces in Mountains, but every piece in Plains and, Mistlands, requires Iron for some unknown reason. Point being the grind is a slog, in a bog, for the rest of the game. I will absolutely join you in hating the grind. in a perfect world, Portals could be toggled to either allow or not allow metals according to preference, and should always allow dragon eggs. Crafting costs should be re balanced. I'm ok with bosses being sponges. Death sucks in every game, and the penalties in this game aren't the worst I've ever seen.
2 years and several updates later, would you give Valheim another go? A few of the issues you have with the game- the grinding for materials and travel time for example, haven't changed, but theres 2 new biomes- the Mistlands and the Ashlands- and you can change the settings of your personal world to allow for different options. You can change portals to allow you to travel with metals, you can increase the resources you receive to ×1.5, ×2, or even ×3 to avoid some of the grinding.
My main issue with the game so far is that the load times are EXTREMELY long when i first started playing (and still to this day) it takes me 10-15 minutes to even get into a session whether its my personal server or a public one
Well of course, that's certainly a given. Every review is all down to the subjective desires of whoever made the review. I'm glad you enjoyed the game, and you clearly aren't alone given its immense popularity. It just frustrated me personally cause it felt so close to being great, yet so far at the same time
I think Valheim should add difficulty and time management? levels. I love survival- but I don’t have the time for grinding THIS hard. I’m also only able to play with friends because I’m bad at fighting systems and usually play my games on easy 🤷🏼♀️
luckily that's a feature that's being worked on!! Creative mode (called Hammer mode) as well as possible sliders that control difficulty and resource yield! They aren't even locked in at world creation, you can change that stuff on the fly! So excited for that!
but yeah, I like that the game punishes you for dying, but having to travel across the world to get your stuff back over and over is very annoying, the same thing happened to me. also I agree that it takes to long to get ores, there is a way to increas drops of ores now, but I wish that just ores themselves were a little more abundant, and as long as they make the ocean more lively and fleshed out, I like that they force you to not fast travel after your done getting what you came for, plus now they do have portals that let you transport ore in late game, which is perfect if they revamp oceans.
as much as i love this game this is quite accurate, they arbitrarily made certain things the way they are just for the sake of not clearing the content too quick
I can definitely understand why you feel the way you do but honestly feel like most of your criticisms come down to you trying to play Valheim like its a different game. I think this comes down to the one main criticism I have with Valheim which is that it wants you to do things that other games often discourage and it doesn't always make it clear. When I first started out with Valheim I had several of the same problems, dying and spending forever getting loot back, traveling forever to get anywhere, moving ore back home for smelting, etc. The thing I have learned since is that you really need to just move your base as you advance in the game. You can get away with not moving your base for the black forest and maybe the swamp if you get lucky and have one very close by but after that you really do need to just make new bases for storing and processing new loot from new biomes. This also makes portals much safer as they are protected by your base around them as opposed to a random portal in the middle of a field. This also makes the game itself feel like less of a grind to me since you are not only upgrading your gear as you go along but also upgrading or outright rebuilding your base which is easy to do since you get all the resources back when using the hammer. Valheim purposefully encourages you to move and explore the world, building new bases as you go. I also find portals are less useful for moving forward to new locations and more useful as a way to quickly return to old bases and locations that you have already conquered for resources you need from them. Still while I view most of what you mentioned in your review as a positive thing rather than a negative I do think your video works well to reveal how Valheim can fail to show new players how they are expected to advance throughout the game.
I’m with you on the sailing and portal restrictions, that’s definitely artificially extending the game time. I had to download a portal mod for this very reason. You guys dying 4 times having portals destroyed?? Come on lol, bring some resources to fence it in?? Not hard. I think you disregard the procedural aspect of the map, and what it means for boss locations, biome sizes etc. The game is EA with 3 unfinished biomes, and I think size of map has to be viewed in that optic. Valheim is a great game, even with a few unnecessary timesinks, but incredible potential, just currently not much replayability.
We tried to fence it in but clearly didn't do a very good job at it, loxes would just maul the fences if we hid behind them or if we portal'd away while they were aggro'd. I mentioned that there's unfinished biomes and I definitely hope that it creates a good reason for the map to be so big too. The boss locations being that far out is random, true, but still frustrating when it happens because there's no reason to go that far otherwise in the game's current state. Which is hopefully changed, of course
@@htwo1 I was lucky that I started my first game on a random map with four of the five bosses relatively close to my starting location, three of them on the same continent (it was pretty big for an island, so I called it a continent, also it looked like a fantasy version of the Americas) and two others one or two islands away. In the finished game, as I understand it, the ocean biome will have its own bossfight, and some areas such as the Mistlands, the Ashlands and the Deep North will require traveling very far to get to them. For me, Valheim is more about the journey than about reaching the goal. So I‘m quite enjoying it. If you‘re more of a goal oriented player, I can see how it might frustrate you. I find it a bit harsh to complain about a lack of content in an early access release, however. I used several mods that bypassed some of the grind, and I still enjoyed all my 1500+ hours in the game - but then, I am also a passionate base builder and in-game architect. And I took pleasure in overpreparing for any venture into a new dangerous area. So I took my sweet time. And enjoyed doing so. And I‘ll probably enjoy doing it all over again on Friday, when Hearth & Home has dropped.
@@htwo1 I think the terrain is the key. I noticed the largest mobs like Lox, Berserkers and Trolls are clumsy as hell with difficult terrain. E.g. just digging a shallow perimeter ditch around a portal stops them getting in. Although a terrain wall is better for the trolls.
@@dennymambo digging a tremch is actually pretty clever I never thought of that lol. But yeah without it the lox's regularly decided that any fortifications i made looked delicious and they'd come and destroy them
@@blablubb4553 I did find building super fun in the game, but I just didn't want to build settlements literally everwhere I went. The hope is that you're right, and these new biomes justify the size of the world a lot more. If they do that would fix a decent number of issues I had with the game, like the boss rng sending you really far out. Yeah its a little harsh to criticise at the moment, but I only did because every review I found called the game a masterpiece. Some people are enjoying exploring for exploring's sake, but ideally it'd be insentivised by the game rather than a goal you have to set yourself.
the complaints about being stranded across the map could be avoided by a couple of simple steps: 1. make a bed somewhere there and it even prompts you when you're aiming at the newly made bed (and imagine me saying this in the turned up echo mode like you used in this video on a couple of occasions) SET SPAWN LOCATION!!!!!!! 2. build a makeshift base around your portal so it isn't offered there on a silver platter to be destroyed. 3. git gud other than that you said in the beginning of this video that your expectations were so high and hyped up, well in general in life it's good if you take everything with a grain of salt and not have any expectation. that's my subjective opinion on your objective opinion
I agree. The grind, the stamina bar, death and not being able to transport ore thru the portal kills me. I have quit for days because of these mechanics. I like the game a lot and i know it is a work in progress but I have to agree with your assessment.
Glad to see I'm not the only one, although some of these things dont seem to be a result of the game being early access. These things are design decisions. Maybe they'll change, but it's not like they're bugs that need ironing out or content that needs to be released
If you guys are taking all that time to schlepp ores around instead of building an ore processing base near the source, then you're making it harder on yourself. Not wrong by any stretch, but there are certainly easier ways to arrange things (i.e., logistics) to minimize these "big" issues. That's all part of the game design--to explore, build outposts, use your options as you progress. If you MUST have everything handled at a single base then yes, you'll have a more difficult time logistically. If portals were wide open then the exploration/base building becomes trivialized. My advice--don't shit on the game and expect it to change to suit your needs--instead, either change your approach or just mod/cheat the system to suit your playstyle. There are ways to work around the limitations if you don't get stuck in the usual achiever mindset.
@@JM-db8ez Building an outpost at every location you visit is a solution, and was a solution I ended up using. But it doesn't really solve the problem entirely. It only really stops you needing to travel back to your main base to make the items you wanted before going to the next location. That time spent is replaced with the time it takes to build the outpost. And building is definitely much more fun than sitting in a boat, I'll give you that, but it still elongates the grind in a way that I felt was unnecessary given how there's not that many item sets in the game. You've mentioned this "achiever mindset" thing a few times and it doesn't make much sense to me. Insentivising the player to do things and giving the player short term AND longterm goals is something that almost every game strives to do. Valheim gives you mostly long term goals with not so many short term ones. it's not about a mindset difference or anything, it's just how basically every game on the market keeps a player engaged. Through the goals they have and the desire to achieve them. Exploration is just of much as a goal you want to achieve as crafting items is.
@@htwo1 You don't need an outpost everywhere you stop...just at those places that are not too close to your main base, if you don't like the whole ore transport mechanism. Or you can use the other option that's part of the game design that uses neither sailing or portals (modded) to move ores. As a content creator and reviewer I would expect that you're aware of more of the game mechanics/options then you exhibit in your video. Lot of mistakes that led to the complaints you have or make things harder than they need to be for an open world sandbox game. Not that anything is *wrong* because there's no right or wrong way to play the game--but if you're going to complain about game mechanics when there are options to mitigate them, or you're simply not managing your character very well, then the opinions become less impactful because of the glaring issues with how you're playing the game. I really just don't think you have gone that deep into the game before getting frustrated. It's advertised as a brutal survival game--and it's not even that brutal, all things considered, but I've played a lot of survival games and this one is comparatively easy unless you do things to make it harder for yourself. Which, based on the video, you do. So it goes. EDIT: To address the "achiever" comment--I say that because your impatience and frustration. You want it your way, you want it easy, you want to "get to your next goal that the game should provide" (which it does, it's just not gift-wrapped...you actually have to do a little work to figure things out, like most survival games). The game is open world, sandbox, with boss goals but nothing beyond that--by design. Your words suggest you need more direction and easier mechanics. You sure you want to play this game? Doesn't sound like it's something you would enjoy, as your video clearly shows, regardless of whether you're managing things well or not. And that's fine if this isn't your style of game--but again, that's not the game's fault, it's just a difference of your preferences and what the game offers. You really should learn the fast transport trick if that's your big hangup, pretty surprised you don't even mention it and use it to "fix" the big world/ore transport issues you so clearly got hung up on.
@@JM-db8ez If I feel the need to have to save and exit out of my world and go to another world just to move my metals around conveniently then I would say the mechanic itself is causing me the issue, its not the lack of knowledge that I'm able to do that. Because yes I know I can do that, but it felt like cutting out a very large chunk of the game which is travel. If i'm going to do a review I don't want to cut anything out so I decided not to do it. The game's difficulty had nothing to do with it, wasn't struggling to figure things out, and it wasn't wanting things "giftwrapped" either. Its that the difficulty doesn't really exist. It's all labourious. it's not particularly "hard" it's just long and arduous seemingly for the sake of it. Again, you're gunna tell me its "just what survival games are like" but that just isn't true at all, this game has little content that is extended over a large number of hours just due to the sheer amount of time it takes to do anything. Survival game is a very broad genre, keep in mind, and your very categorical statements about how it "clearly isn't for me" are enormously misplaced all because I disliked valheim's mechanics in particular. In fact, it's not even the mechanics themselves, it's the sheer amount of time any single event takes to carry out. Even the boss fights have a buhjillion health for no reason. They're not difficult because their attacks are interesting or hard to dodge, but just because the fights are mostly really long. It's a test of endurance. endurance that apparently I didn't have.
Sailing for me is an incredibly relaxing experience, especially when playing with others I can chat with. But I could use more surprises and features on the sea. The ones that exist are cool, but I'd like more. Needing to take time to hunt for bosses can be fun if you like exploring and taking your time. I will say that this aspect would be better if there were more new things to find along the way in familiar biomes separated by distance from one's starting region of islands. There's a few small and appealing surprises, but emphasis on the few. Even slight colour variations of the same biome across the world could give a lot of additional character (though this would mostly be a cosmetic one, others relating to resources and new activities would be the better improvement). But I still enjoy seeing new scenery, even in familiar biomes, since the variations of terrain and object arrangement can make some varied picturesque and unique locations that are fun to scout as you start deciding where to establish forward bases in the world. This is an aspect that definitely makes me feel like a viking explorer. And while I'm doing this, I'm still going to be collecting more needed resources - I'd rather grind for my resources traveling across the world instead of spending too much time in few layouts that become as familiar as the back of my hand. I say this as someone who really likes to take their time in games like these, that only starts play on a new game title every few months, while revisiting older ones, if they have sandbox replayability (which this one does for me). Some people may have a large list of games they wish to play or little time to play a single game, and for these people, I can definitely see where frustration would lie.
There are more than one boss stone of the same type, On my map I had 4 Banemass boss stones and the same goes for the other bosses but to be fair I knew where all the boss stones were because I found a website with a Valheim World Generator so I was able to generate my own world map instead of taking the one the game gives you I would put a link to the site but youtube would only delete my post, The only thing I don't like about the game is your health and stamina depends on what food you eat plus no Pause key
I know that dark souls masochists love this mechanic, but death is MUCH too punishing. If you die in an inconvenient spot, you might as well quit playing or start an entire new game. Dying in the mistland is fkn terrible especially when you have a Gall and 6 ticks camping your body.
This pretty much echoes my feelings about the game. I was sooooo hyped for it when I first heard about it, but the grind was simply too much for me... which is saying a lot because my favorite games all involve a good grind. The portals were equally frustrating since effectively using them meant I would have to virtually build a new base at every single island I sailed to just to HOPE that all the materials I needed could be found and used there immediately. In it's defense, this game worked remarkably well on our server with about a dozen or so friends playing together. Different groups could take on different tasks. But that's not going to be everyone's gaming experience.
One thing I would honestly love is if the game took some points from sea of thieves and made boats more..home like? Let us run around on it, play instruments, look and do stuff. Then again, if you lose that boat it might be sad but that can be adjusted, also I absolutely hate the furnace. Stand next to it and tend to it because it’ll run out of coal soon. Ugh.
I’m glad they fixed all of these issues with world modifications. And I suggest using the seed world generator and use your world seed to see if there was a biomas boss that was closer to
Few things are more revealing/useful to game developers than a 'bad' review lol Personally I like the idea of a huge procedurally generated map that takes awhile to explore, but I definitely agree that despite the cool sailing mechanic, the routine travel can rapidly become tedious. I think a lot of problems would cease to be if they ever get around to fully populating all of the unfinished biomes, including the ocean, with critters and/or items that make it more interesting. The portals are a point of contention. A lot of people want them to allow metal and ore. Other people see them as 'cheating' or ruining the pace of the game and don't like them. To me it would make sense to perhaps make a slightly more expensive version or upgrade that could transport ore. The dying in bumble-feck nowhere halfway across the map from my spawn point with no portal was a 'challenge accepted' point for me. Two things that prevent this issue are using terrain to protect portals and always trying to have a spawn point nearby. E.g. building a 'shack on stilts' outpost with a bed/portal in it on top of a rock. Or just raising/lowering terrain to stop Lox and Trolls from smashing it. Or if you're me, building massive, ridiculously overkill, impenetrable bases and outposts in each biome... My favourite was my 'obnoxious neighbour' Plains fortress right next to a Fuling camp hahaha!
Nice opinion video. I agree with the teleporting of metals. Currently I use a second world to store ore and other items I can't teleport since you can bring carried items between them. I think the weight is enough of a limitation. For instance...*spoilers* ... ... ... ...you can only carry one dragon egg for the most part and you can't teleport with it. Meaning you have to make multiple trips up and down a mountain just to summon a boss. No other boss makes you do this. On the topic of boss summoning items I think they need to work on that too. I have like a million deer trophies, ancient seeds, and withered bones; but dragon eggs and fuling totems are so random they can be really difficult to find if you aren't lucky. They might have fixed this already as I have found more in my new world as opposed to an earlier one I played in with my friend where it took us a few days just to find enough totems to fight Yagluth. That was also when drake trophies were nigh impossible to get as well. I probably killed over 100 drakes and still only had one trophy. Like you said it is in early access still so maybe they will fix a bunch of stuff still, also they seem to be good at listening to community feedback so bringing this stuff up in some of the AMA's or posting on their community hub might get some responses and reasonings of their decisions for the way things are. They did add a mount to the game which I think was a community idea.
Totaly agree with what you said. Was on second boss. Build house to close respawned right by boss who destroyed house then respawned on a different island. After that I just uninstalled. No way was I going to waste hours to get back to him. It feels like they are intentionally trying to waste your time. Very disappointed as this game has so much potential. Just make me feel like I have better things to do with my life the repeat the same content over and over and over and over and over again. After dying the player should be able to choose respawn point from the houses you built.
Love this game. All points you outline that you think makes the game bad is the reason I love it lol. It’s a hardcore survival game and it lives up to it for sure.
Frankly, I agree with a lot here. The boss spawns are often too far away, you sail way too much (though I think making the boat simply faster would be better than making the world smaller), the punishment for death is a bit extreme, especially in some of the later biomes. BUT a lot you bring up is simply a skill issue on your part when you ignore very easy tactics. Freeze on a mountain? Take one second to build a campfire. Stamina drains too fast when fighting mobs? Use a power like Eikthyr or drink stamina potions. Portal gets broken by mobs? Build a small house around it and put it in an adequate location. Or heck, just a bed is enough to set your spawn point. Traveling to a place you "heard" were called Mistlands but couldn't even bother to see if it was developed or not? I mean, come on. I can go on and on. Again, lots of good points but a lot of times it seems like you're just making the game harder for yourself then it needs to be and makes less than bright choices.
Comment at 1:50 - Having done statistical analysis of customer satisfaction surveys, I can absolutely attest there is an inverted bell curve when looking at responses. That is, the expected results of any probability distribution would be a bell curve, with the average being roughly the high point of that curve, and generally around the middle of the curve. When your distribution is off, there is likely something "wrong." For example, if the mean and the median are too far apart, there's probably some anomaly in the data - perhaps some data points that need to be removed (with justification). An inverted bell curve probably indicated exactly what you've stated - the folks on the fence are not bothering to leave a review.
Comment at 10:56 - The devs had said they want folks to build bases at those distant locations rather than teleporting everything around. So, if you go out to Bone Mass' swamp and mine for iron, build a base you can craft from right there. A base doesn't have to be huge either: I've gotten away with a small one-room tree hut and a fenced-in area - so there's not a lot of replacement grinding needed. There's no need to keep going back and forth: Once you make an item from metals, you can take it through the teleporter. Silver can't be teleported, but a silver helm can. That all said, I would like to see some way for there to be the occasional ability to teleport metals. Perhaps beat a boss and get two one-use items you sacrifice to be able to teleport metals or something like that. This way, when you just need it, there's a work-around, but it's not circumventing the devs' intentions.
The problem with this is there’s no guarantee that you’re going to have the ore resources to build the blacksmith that you need. The devs may want players to build forward bases but they didn’t designe the game to incentivize forward bases correctly.
@@will_of_europa With most maps, you can get away with one trip to a swamp biome and build a base with all the pre-iron crafting amenities. Take the resources you need on the boat with you. You can break down your crafting structures from your home base and use those resources for worst-case scenarios since the materials are all recovered. Usually, that's not needed, but I've played some tricky maps - so I know it happens. You can craft all your iron armor and weapons within your swamp base. Tear down most of your swamp base for those crafting station materials as needed. Then load up a longship with plenty of iron and return to your main base. With 18 storage slots plus player inventories, you can haul a lot in each longship trip. You can get it all in one sailing trip to the swamp and one trip back. You might want to make more trips for various reasons, but sailing is slow, and that's the trade-off to consider. For additional trips, you can take longship materials through a teleporter and build the ship in/near the swamp, making for one-way hauling trips as needed. I will agree it is extremely difficult to figure all this out within the first few playthroughs of Valheim. I've been running a lot of "hardcore" runs - where if my toon dies, I delete the toon and the world, then start over. Some maps are just randomly very difficult while other maps are amazingly convenient.
@@RiiDii At what point? If I'm already turned off from the game none of the advice you gave (good advice) even matters. It's simply not worth the time spent to try to have fun in a game actively keeping you from having fun.
@@will_of_europa There's a difference between someone not liking a game and a game being a bad game or having substantive problems. Htwo put this comment right up front: "So this video might rustle some feathers a little bit. But there's a good reason for it." I disagree on the "good reason for it," if he hasn't tried to push past what I've found to be solvable problems. I don't work for the makers of Valheim and they don't pay me to defend their game, so I really couldn't care less. I was just trying to help Htwo and others with some possibly missed solutions that took me a while to either figure out or learn from others. I know from experience when I pushed past a lot of the frustrations, the game became extremely enjoyable. For me, that enjoyment was worth that time spent. It may not be for you, and that's cool.
Half the points are solid. Half the points really aren't. Saying its not good because it's hard isn't really an argument. Too many times this is reasoning for things being bad here. If this was an argument, then I guess the dark souls/elden ring games are bad. So things like "the stamina bar is hard to manage" or "enemies destroy portals" or "different enemies have damage types" aren't arguments. Most of the mistakes you mentioned you made, you kept making. Instead of making the mistake and learning, you kept doing it. So when you make a portal in the plains and it gets wrecked... build a little hut around it. Most of the time you wont have an issue with this. The argument for portals not transporting things is valid. its just extra for the sake of being extra. Some things like this sure. But then you give reasoning for calling out the game on its own even being early access saying there are things besides this, and then have a point to make about sailing far to a biome for nothing (because it isn't finished yet... because its early access) This is not a point. Overall, the game is unforgiving, I agree the punishment is too high if you die far away. But the map being "too big" is not a thing. The game isn't done yet and will have reasons to go out there. And sailing, it has plenty to manage with wind, serpents, storms... oh and its early access... they've said for a while now that oceans will have more. So scrap that. And things like "I jumped a mile out of my boat and couldn't swim back because I was mining on the back of the kraken and it submerged and my stamina was gone due to mining"... No. Sorry, thats just one of the few "negative" things you listed that is literally just filler for the video. 1. Don't jump far out of the boat, go closer to land, early game teaches you that swimming far sucks. 2. The island starts rumbling and foaming around the water before sinking... its a que to pay attention and be ready. If you keep mining, thats on you. I just feel like due to some instances, you had a bad taste in your mouth and attacked things that really don't deserve to be attacked. So, ridiculous amounts of mats for crafting, sure thats a bit much. Portals being halted by materials not being able to go through? yeah, thats another iffy thing. But distance of bosses? hp amounts of an endgame boss? cold effects on a mountain you have to manage, so you run off the mountain with plenty of xp left.. but die because you jump off a high area? nah.
After watching the entire video, my final comment regarding the criticism: As Obi-Wan Kenobi said to Luke about Darth Vader being his father, "many of the truths we hold on to, depend greatly on our point of view." I don't think Valheim is intended for "casual" players who will play once and move on to the next game. Valhelm rewards players who stick with the game long enough to become expert players. In this respect, I believe your criticisms of the game aren't wrong, but rather from a certain point of view. For example, I prefer playing Valheim hardcore-style now. I don't just lose skill points and do a corpse run; I start over from scratch - new toon and new world. Each time I play a new toon and world, I learn so many new things. This is a wonderful reward as I feel a bit like Neo learning how to control the Matrix. I commented along the way how the problems you encountered could be resolved - at least to some extent. Does this mean there isn't grinding? No! The game is centered on the theme of grinding. However, I believe you can get away with a lot less grinding than what you experienced. Does Valheim need improvements? Yes. However, the devs seem to be sticking to their intended design and I'll call that a good thing - even if it doesn't appeal to a lot of players. I'm not implying the devs aren't listening to their target market audience, but they are doing so without trying to be everything to everyone: an approach that has ruined many games.
Eventhough this video is 2 years old, I found it pretty interesting and thus wanted to share my thoughts on the matter. I do agree with most things stated by you i.e.: -Not being able to transport ore through Portals is pretty annoying and stupid (luckily they changed that). -The world is way too vast and boss location stones are too rare (still). -Bosses (after The Elder) have too much health. Especially the Queen (added in the Mistlands expansion). Honestly, who thought it'd be a fun idea to have a boss's health pool exceed your weapon durability? -Not being able to see crafting recepies is rather annoying and inconvenient. But I do disagree with your opinion on grinding and death mechanics. -Death Placing portals without protection in unsafe locations on far away islands is imo a "you" issue, not a game issue. After realizing now harsh the consequences can be, there's no reason to continue being so reckless. Same goes for the mountains. Since the biome is rather small, placing a portal in one or two of the mountain structures will ensure that you get your stuff back, even without frost resist. -Grinding Honestly, yeah the game's pretty grindy and the grind is boring. But to me this was rather a perk, than a let-down because it forces you to make a deccission. How powerful do you want to be vs How much grinding are you willing to do. I do understand that it's not for everyone and I certainly wouldn't want to have that kind of grind in every game. But in Valheim, it lead to me having a more interesting game experience (except for the many hours of tree cutting to gather the ungodly amounts of wood required to build a comfy base).
Agreed. After coming back to this game after a long break, I share the same sentiments. The artificially inflated grind and travel becomes so boring after a while. It's surely not a game I would solo anymore. I'm hardly even interested in the game for that matter because of all the reasons you state.
I saw a video titled honest review of Valheim that has comments turned off. This one, advertised as a negative review, has them on. +1 for that. I will agree that the resources needed for later game items gets pretty damn ridiculous. I've noticed that once you get to mountain tier, items start taking some of every resource needed to craft it, to upgrade it as well. Yes, the worlds are too big for what the game is right now. Plus there seems to be a habit of plains biomes wrapping around swamp biomes and the like on the farther reaches of of world. Like it replaces what should otherwise be meadows, or something. I wish that the islands made a bit more sense when it came to biome levels, like bigger mountains and plains being less common near the center, and more common on the outskirts. Rather than almost every island that isn't in the center of the world containing some plains, and meadows being almost non existent outside of the starter island, and maybe the next island over. I like sailing well enough, though I wish there was more than one oar. That way when the wind isn't with you, the whole group of people can row quickly. I wish there was a bit more to do between islands than watch out for rocks, mine on top of leviathans, and hunt serpents. You really have to prepare, and be careful, when you go to another island. Because yeah, dying on a new island without having a portal set up somewhere safe, is a crushing blow.
I am going to go check if you did one already, but I would love to see you compare Valheim today to this commentary, see how many complaints you had have been addressed.
I'm happy to see at least some criticism about this game. After spending at least 20 hours of mindlessly running back and forth between copper veins or crypts in order to grind the materials for upgrades, all the while being attacked by mobs every 2 minutes, I had enough of the tedium and gave up. Valheim has a lot of charme and i would have loved to build me a fine castle and farm in the meadows, but it simply has too many elements that are deliberately designed to waste your time as much as possible. Maybe it will change with upgrades, but for now, i have no interest in playing any further and do the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Your channel is great btw. Keep it up.
thats the point of most if not all rpg, you do have to grind at some point...if you want better gear...or you just skill up like crazy...which is what I'm doing now..I'm about the same hrs played as you... learn how to manage your stamina...learn how to parry better...learn when to run away...if someone is chasing you in the black forest, at some point they will stop..this happens all the time, they will not go the meadows...except for those that are found in meadows..
I don't agree with everything but many points are understandable. That's why in my reviewed I said: - need a way to teach new players biome order - need a way to change the game difficulty (not adapted to everyone). Game difficulty could affect the grind aspect (lower material costs). Unfortunatly for some players the grind isn't much and for others it is. - a way to fix repetitive death because most of players will just run with nothing to their grave. Repetitive death can be a really high issue when played in solo never got boss location issues. I haven't played mistlands mucht but there might be some fixing in that biome. Overall it's still a great game and most of players will like the 1st 10 hours (you have to accept you prob wont finish all the boss fights)
I so agree on this, while the game hasn't been hard for me at all until I got to plains. Valheim pretty much sucks, and I'm kinda mad that I was fooled to buy the game from the reviews. Only after about 60+ hours I see the problems it has, and only thing I have to say is that this game is ass.
I love Valheim! The sailing is cool, although I agree it can be a bit tedious. Luckily though because I took my time in each biome and made big bases in each of the biomes before moving on to the next I was able to space out my time between each ship voyage. It helped counteract the feeling that sailing was a chore. It felt more fresh every time I’d go sailing because I didn’t do it as often
Imagine if real Vikings whined about "The New World is too far". I love your "like a Viking" approach: build bases as you expand your empire. Just like a Viking.
When the fun slowly fades away and gives room to all the frustration... I was thinking, I can't be the only one, this is just ridiculous! Btw, reminded me exactly of Ark in the first year of early access - anyone who was not cranking up server settings didn't have any idea about the difference between proving your skill and the simplest things just taking stupid amounts of time!
I love mining a whole copper deposit that took almost 1 hr irl. I love sailing long distances to explore new landmass. I love the frustation of died in the middle of the ocean. I. Fuckin. Love It. But I do hate the item restriction of portals. For. No. Fuckin. Reason. So I will hit the like button for the rarity of seeing a different opinion on my youtube suggestion.
As someone with a couple hundred hours in both the vanilla game and modded, I can easily say this critique still holds alot of valid points to this day. I will die on the hill that this game would be an easy sell to anyone if the world was at least 50 smaller. There is currently 7 biomes as of writing, 8 technically but the deep north isn't finished yet. The mistlands and especially the Ashlands will have you sailing IMMENSE distances only to be met by swarms of mobs that if you prepared for them, arent that big of a deal, but the magic comes from leaning and not looking stuff up on your first play through, so naturally you'll have 0 clue what to bring to prepare for where you're going. To add there still is the gigantic punishment for dying, even with the new difficulty modifiers, that most if not all your gear will be outright gone I will say with the new modifiers they've added with the most recent update, you can make the game significantly less grindy. I went from a new character to Ashlands in about a week of playing a few hours a day after work with only 1.5x resources and portaling metals turned on. Still, the massive trips you'll be making to the mist lands and ashlands will be so insanely long, that you'll start to wonder if it's worth it, and what sucks is it kind of is. The new content they've added is sick, but its gatekept by some insane grinds and boring boat trips that get old after 20 minutes of open sea.
My solution to the portals is to: 1. Go to X location and set a portal 2. log off and make a separate world to put your ores in, 3. Rejoin the main world and go home 4. go back to the new world to retrieve your ore 5. and finally be at home with your ore this skips the tedious process but the fact that I have to do this is bad game design
I'm going to make a comment before the video ends, because it's not about the review itself.
In your disclosure you mentioned the concept of objective reviews. I don't really think that these exist. There are more well-thought-out and nuanced opinions, but no opinion on a game is objectively correct.
Sure, that's a good point, that was worded quite poorly in hindsight. I guess what I actually mean is a review that tries to accurately discuss what the player thinks the game's strengths and weaknesses are. I found very few reviews, positive or negative, that really tried to say anything that wasn't either "best game ever" or "worst game ever". And I guess my video doesn't do much praising of valheim ever, but I felt like in the torrent of overwhelmingly positive reviews that say nothing but good things, maybe talking about the shortcomings of the game would be worth doing for anyone on the fence about getting the game and giving it a try. Maybe my video in conjunction with other reviews might help people make a good choice over the game
@@htwo1 This is why you take the negative review and the positive review and average out a conclusion that's somewhere in the middle.
The fact that you got over hyped is your own fault. Same as people who pre-order games.
There's many bad practices on the consumers side of the games industry and should be avoided but people will still do these mistakes, often because of some version of FOMO, be it early access or pre-order exclusives, or any number of other factors.
Game developers can and should be blamed for introducing these practices but if you keep falling for them it's also on you.
@@HarleyAMV I completely agree with this to be honest. You're right, as a consumer you should take every overly positive review with a pinch of salt, same as every overly negative one. You should look at a decently wide variety of reviews before purchasing. Unfortunately though, I took the bait for valheim. I found very few negative reviews out there, if any, and I expected the game to be much more than I found it to be because of it
You can give objective facts about a game.
Objectivity can't exist when it comes to games because yah, certain people like certain things.
I guess by giving the game an "objective" review is going into the game blind and experiencing it in the most vanilla and blind way possible.
Maybe if he had used that feature more than traveling in a straight line, he would have found out that swamps can generate way closer to spawn than on his world lol.
You can't teleport with metal ore, but you can teleport with refined metals you're wearing, like weapons and armor. That's the inconsistency that confuses me.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all logically. Which is all the more reason to believe that the only reason it works this way is to elongate the game's run time without adding more content
I agree. This game has so much potential and it was really fun and refreshing for the first few hours (I really love the music and the building system) - but then the grind came and it became really tedious to travel across half of the map (and die here and there -> repeat) looking for multiple swamps, because one (or even two) just aren't enough to get enough iron for two people.
fax i beat the 5th boss and after i did that i wasn't Fifield like all the little content and all the grinding for what a easy boss like wtf 😂
It would have been so much more fun if we just revived with our leveled up items.
game is tedious and often bullshit and immersion breaking a bronze axe is 8 fucking ingots which means 16 fucking copper and 8 tin i did. the litteral math and it comes out to 336 pounds of metal somehow formed into a tiny fucking axe head smaller than an ingot
the bosses are just boring they have like 3 attacks and you just end up getting swarmed by mobs that spawn constantly about 8 feet away from you 24/7 game could actually be fun but they take 10 years to add one biome and 3 mobs and forget to actually balance out the game
@@Arkolob I just wanted to revive with my items instead of getting one shotted everywhere no matter what armor level.
you dont know the meaning of the word grind.
try playing runescape.
2 years later and nothing's been fixed
Tip: a good way to not have to sail across the entire ocean after dying, is to build an outpost. Where you can set a spawn point and not have to make 30 boats. And it protects your portal
Now you both have to grind for an outpost and you cant teleport with ores.
@@lucaguida4286 Carry wood for an outpost with you and you can’t teleport them anyway
@@acrab7722 wood outposts don't work in any biome with a difficulty higher than the meadows, didn't you watch the video?
@@beanboy1821 they absolutely do. Which you would know if you tried it. Don't expect it to withstand a siege but if you want to quickly get your stuff without cheats then you need an outpost.
@@beanboy1821 Wood do work with a sunken wall or raised grounds. However, its pretty crap when it comes to the New Biome, the mistlands, because of the Gjals. However, I've found a new way to build a home, inside a boulder. Just dig into the rocks that your roof will be the rock and its donzo, no more gjals blasting your house in mistlands.
The world being so big, and having to go on big boating expeditions, are some of the things I love most about the game.
I'm glad you liked it! Like I said, I do think the sailing mechanic is pretty cool. I just felt there was too much of it for my liking
@@htwo1 the oceans are a bit dead and boring sometimes, hopefully they add more hostile mobs and treasures/raid events, etc. It would be cool if they added Whirlpools or a Kraken or something.
@@morehumanity that would be pretty cool, although the only worry there is that dying in the middle of the ocean is a pretty miserable experience to put up with
higher stakes for player, personally i prefer it even with the frustration but i get your point
@@htwo1 My internet connection glitched once while I was under full sail in a longboat. Game booted me from server. When I logged back in, the boat had continued forward without me. After drowning and respawning I had to sail the back-up Karve to my grave, then search for the longboat. When I found my ghost ship, I was too cheap to part with either boat, so I had to buff up swimming by leapfrogging them both to the nearest land. Fun times! Hahaha.
I just had my "Nope!" moment with this game, I had heard getting your smelting setup was pretty grindy and one of the worst parts of the game during the black forest and just soldiered through it, had to build a boat to travel 5-6 times the distance I had explored to get to the Elder (I just thought I got unlucky with my seed). Using the last of my copper and tin to smelt the last of my bronze gear, I made the 15ish minute boat ride to the arena that was luckily quite close to the shore, linked a portal with my home base near my boat overseeing the arena, and headed towards the altar. I went into the boss blind and had no idea his moveset, however after about 10 minutes and a few close calls when mobs interrupted us, I peeked around the pilar and fired my final shot into him!.. Success!.. the Elder had dropped his head, a swamp key, and everything seemed good, I had spotted a burial chambers near where I moored my boat on the way to the arena so I thought I'd head inside and get myself a few surtling cores, after a few minutes of clearing that I head back outside and get alerted that swamp creatures were coming to attack the workbench that I had constructed beside my portal and boat, by the time I had got to the shore there were 3 Draugr (an enemy I hadn't even encountered upto that point) smashing both the portal and workbench to pieces, I had no stamina to engage them, and another 2 came from behind and killed me in 2 hits, my portal was destroyed, All of my gear overseas, no crafting materials to make anything near a possible recovery as my gear was within a raid of Draugrs, and all I had was enough to make some troll gear and an antler pickaxe, spend 2 hours pointlessly farming to go and get my stuff again just to go and do it all again in the swamp which I now hear is even worse. Overall, Great for a few hours, Such potential of fun, just too vast, grindy, slow and punishing to keep at it.
Yeah, in Valheim you have to be really safe. Whenever I go to a new biome/Island I always make a shack and maybe a little wall around the portal in case of any raids. AND pro-ish building tip for safe bases (albeit expensive), Raise a large circle of ground that is about as tall as a stakewall so no enemies can get over. I also like to keep the ring of stakewalls for looks. You can build a staircase out of wood, but i like to make a natural tunnel going upwards till i hit the surface. Now, terrain is still destructible but WAAYYYY more durable than any wood wall. its basically cheap stone walls early game. Sorry for ranting and thanks if you read all of that. (P.S. you can now alter many game mechanics with world modifiers like combat difficulty, portal restrictions, and death penalties.)
@@ImagineWagons922 Well, it's a sad & pathetic display of creative incompetence to be honest. The devs have inserted as much fake difficulty as possible and extended playtime by turning the game into a pure time-sink. Do you know why boats are slow? To increas the time you have to invest in the game, moves like that are often done as a forgery to inflate playtime numbers & active players for investors or potential company buyers, along with it there are two more layers of benefits for doing so: First's the psychological effect over people who invest too much time into anything, almost always generating cognitive dissonance that makes the person obsessed with whatver they have invested too much time into, making the person enter a spin of denial that is the primary cause for "fans" of any videogame defending it even when the issues are blatant. Second layer's that too many people see game value solely quantifiable by "hours of entertainment" vs "investment", which creates a loophole where if there's a timesink forgery in a game, tons of people will see it as "1000 hours of playtime, totally worth it" - when in fact it's 950 hours of busy work & afking vs 50h of actual entertainment...
Valheim's sort of trash, fun to some extent, can be a nice "minecraft with viking theme simulator" for building, but that's where it ends. Core gameplay's utter garbage, which brings me back to why I play it: to deliberately waste time similar to drawing random crap while I wait in a line, or to just build some creative crap much like I was playing fantasy The Sims, outside of those 2 factors I doubt this should even be considered a videogame in the theory sense of what composes a game. It's pretty much a gametoy like The Sims and other similar with slapped in gaming elements to forcefully inflate playtime, it's that or the devs are the most incompetent developers in history...
You put the finger on why I didn't enjoy this game. And I really wanted to. I didn't even reach the grindy part, I stopped after the first biome. The world felt way too empty and barren for me, and all the tasks (chores) you do feel just meaningless. There is too few items to craft and a very poor variety of resources you can gather in the world. I love exploring so I built a raft and sailed, just to land on the exact biome, and then I realized that that new land had nothing more to offer than where I started from, I just quit.
I've joined three communities so far. Each and every time, i never made it half way out of the Meadows due to boredom.
1 year later (1st playtrough, also with a friend). I can say that every single thing you mentioned is exactly what bothers me (plus the weird building sometimes). Most of the time I just ask myself "Why?". Why are there no real iron ore veins? Why can't I decide if I want to be able to teleport ores in a mostly NON PVP world? Why do I have to sail for hours and hours to find the one stone that shows me where the boss is? They could have at least made it like Core Keeper with the world design, instead they took every opportunity to lengthen the game in one way or the other
When I died on a remote island with the last bed being 1 hour away I started saving the game every 10-30 minutes and if I die on some island, restore the last savegame. It is really ridiculous that you have to create a raft, sail there again with a 90% chance of being one-shot by some swamp archer. Valheim is fun, but the mechanics are just too punishing. Even Dark Souls is not so punishing.
I know right, I love the game. But dying 30 mins away with no portal and losing all your gear is just not fun. Thanks for the tip
I guess I'm a masochist. I like the challenge, and yet there has been no challenge that has been too much to overcome.
If I go and die into a difficult place, it's the right moment to stop playing for a moment, think what went wrong and how to make a successful retrieval trip.
With a bit of thinking you can make things easy for yourself in this game. That's what I enjoy, the constant need to bigbrain this game.
Why didn't you have a portal there? Seems like a prep issue more than anything.
@@dekippiesip I died already on the beach, so I didn't even have the chance to create my bed or portal
@@maltimotoYes and this is what frustrates me most about this community. I was fully geared and prepped to kill Moder had food and supplies and God-tier equipment. Sailing my boat slaying serpents for their meat while I sail 20 minutes to the boss for first time. Its storming and I'm readying to kill another serpent chasing me. I start slowing my boat and turn to get the snake when I realize I'm hurtling straight to a surprise plains shoreline. Before I have a chance to react or equip shield from bow deathsquito 1-shots me. I eat deathsquitos for breakfast, they are easy if fought correctly, but when situations like that happen you lose hours. I already had made a new boat and sailed to a grave before, I just devcommanded back at that point. There was no flaw in prepwork or any other BS the game can just be stupid sometimes.
Your comment about this game feeling like a chore is very accurate. I recently started playing again after about a year, and I am just filled with dread at the prospect of having to harvest resources to build and craft and travel.... It's so much time with so little reward....
Why do you leave an unprotected portal in the plains?? 😦
I have no complaints about the very long sailing time. It keeps my sanity from falling apart. I just love the sea and the point where storm starts brewing and rocking the boat so hard that I start to really care about all the loot I have in it. For me this mechanic just works and makes me value all the things I carry with me. My only complaint is losing my skill points when I die. Just doesnt make sense.
I completely agree with your comment
Almost completely agree; I love the immersive world and I work hard to remain immersed. Adding the risk to death seems, to me, to make me care just a little more about NOT dying - just like a real Viking. I am a PRUDENT Viking - because death is costly.
Specifically looked up a video like this after growing frustrated with Valheim this evening. I think many things about this game can be considered features and not bugs, but some things are really an issue. Especially how punishing it can be. For example, I play with one other person, but mostly tackle things solo. I spent HOURS grinding out the Bronze Age on my own, and after all was said and done, after 80 in game days of exploring grinding building and crafting, i had the best Unupgraded armor I could get and the best weapons, and even the best food according to google. Me and my friend stepped ONE FOOT into the swamp, and were instantly faced with 4 draugr, 3 blob and a wraith. Killed in under a minute. I’m no pro gamer here, but if I can spend 80 in game days preparing and grinding only to get stomped, there’s something wrong. The game is fun in so many ways, but honestly from here on out, I’m using console commands to teleport my ore back to my base. The game is so forgiving in some areas and yet so overly punishing in others that the wastes of time I spend in the game feel like I’m working, not playing.
If there was a wraith it must have been at night. Venture out at sunrise and return home before sunset. The mobs at night are higher level and numerus. You can sleep at night to avoid waiting for your next mission. Make sure you have a good rest buff and keep at it. Most rewarding game I've played in along time, but you have to plan and pick your battles.
fortunately pretty much all of the enemies in the swamp are very easy to spot before they spot you. draugrs dont notice you unless you move quickly near them. Wraiths are glowing super bright and floating in the air, easy to notice. Blobs and leeches aren't as easy to avoid, but luckily a poison resistance poison almost guarantees that you don't die to them (although most players wouldn't think to use them first time entering the swamp)
I’m 3 months late so apologies for that but people who say valheim is super grindy are usually approaching it from the wrong angle. Spending 80 days preparing doesn’t mean you deserve to live in valheim. Fully upgraded armor and weapons are usually at MOST 30% better than the base gear, afaik. Honestly food is almost more helpful a lot of the time since it helps you with both stamina and parrying (based on max health). But really the solution to dying isn’t get better stuff, it’s make better decisions. Don’t go out at night in biomes that are threats to you. Don’t attack enemies for no reason. Don’t wander far from your portals. Don’t go into dangerous biomes without food and a rested buff. Run away not just from fights that are currently overwhelming but also from fights that, if they got overwhelming, you’re fucked. Swamp sucks ass so I’ll use it as an example. If an abomination comes at me and I’m in swamp level gear (troll or root armor for me), I’m not gonna just fight it, I’m gonna bait it to a large dry patch with minimal trees, assuming I’m not trying to cheese it. This means I won’t accidentally roll into the water and get hit by a leech. I won’t get stuck against a tree and a draugr, and I can see them coming more easily. I’m looking around while my stam recovers so I don’t get sneak attacked by an ooze or I have poison resist equipped. These aren’t gear related for the most part, they’re player choices. Being punishing isnt a bug, it’s a feature, as you suggest, and it’s a feature because some players enjoy the difficulty. It’s nice to feel that your actions have consequences. Victory is sweeter when failure is painful and possible.
@@finnbreuner3618 I feel you’re completely wrong. “Player choice” is a real grey area way to put it, that completely puts the ball in my court, and is a fancy way of saying “get good”. It’s not player choice to have the only swamp biome within reasonable sailing distance be surrounded by plains biome (which was the case for us) meaning we just had to pray we could set up a teleport fast enough without getting more or less one shot by 12 dragur, two slimes, and leaches which destroyed our boat the second we set foot on the island. The punishing aspect in my opinion is that if you are unlucky and incapable of “drawing something out to an open area without trees and water” as you suggest, which wasn’t a capability for us, as we were stranded, then in that case you’re left with nothing to be able to go back, and you just have to pray that by the time you’ve grinded out the materials for armor, weapons and food, as well as a new boat, that’s good enough for you not to die even faster next time, by that point you’ll be so tired of the game you’ll have to just give it a week. In every other game of this kind, you can always just try again, with little to no issue, but valheims state essentially ensures that you’ll never move beyond the danger, which is unfulfilling to say the least
I never understood people complaining that a game is too difficult, literally get good
I will concede you one thing: even post nerf, the deathsquitos are totally bullshit. Because of how you'll likely have to sail to a swamp on another landmass whilst still wearing bronze gear makes it pretty likely you'll happen upon a deathsquito far earlier than you can face it and it's pretty common for people to go on a long sail to get 1 shotted.
With a buckler, deathsquito's are a joke. Turn off the music and use your ears - you can hear them coming and their attacks are quite predictable.
@MIchael Forsythe sure when you've already played the game and know what to expect lol but out of all the sales this game had how many people do you think sailed to another landmass for the first time and turned off their music to listen for deathsquitos
@MIchael Forsythe also idk if this comment was before or after they nerfed them
@@MetalliCxZero LOL that's a fair point. I'd watched enough vids to know to steer clear of the plains. In my own case I was just trying to find the Elder early on. I literally sailed for days and days (in game) rounding a huge continent until I finally ran out of food. I landed in what I thought was a safe spot and immediately got squished by a troll as soon as I stepped on dry land. Had to build another boat to sail back. I learned to plan every move like a military campaign from then on. Leave nothing to chance and take it slow. A week later, at home, another troll ambled over and destroyed my dream house that I'd just finished................. live and learn. So I spent tons of time building a base 8m above the sea which is troll-proof. They visit often and I thumb my nose at them. You take your knocks in this game and you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and improve.
@@MetalliCxZero Not sure when they nerfed them, or 'if'. When I first landed at the plains they terrorized me until I learned how to deal with them. I started wearing root chest piece, which really mitigates pierce damage. Their attack patterns are predictable - that's a fact. Just be patient and wait for them to come at you. If you try to run, as most do initially, then yeah you're gonna die lol.
I think it's notable that when I look for really good map seeds, most of the ones fans list are starter islands with most or all boss altars on them.
The first time I played it, the first couple hours were really fun. There were new mechanics I was learning, I was building a house and hunting deer, but after those couple hours it became tedious. I was playing with one other person at the time, so it made the grind a bit less painful, but I couldn't help but feel that valheim was best optimized for 4 people or more. Everything we did took hours upon hours of progress, and we had our graves disappear constantly which set us back an hour or two every time it happened. Moving copper, tin, and iron from place to place was so painful even with carts and boats. We didn't even have a swamp biome on our main island and the closest one was 15 minutes away by boat, and you couldn't use portals. It took trip after trip to finally get our iron gear maxed out, and combined with the amount of times we died and had to make a new boat and sail to where we died only added to the frustration. The ocean was big and empty and boring, and once we finished the swamp portion of the game the mountain biome was so disappointing, the time we put in to get to that point didn't feel worth it. All of the bosses looked really cool but were also really easy, except for the fact that all of them were giant hp sponges. Every biome felt like hours of gearing up with tons of set backs and tedious work just to lob arrows at a boss for 15 minutes. None of the buffs you got were that good either. We used eikthyr's for the entire game. But overall I did enjoy the game, I did finish it after all. I just think they have a while before it's a game that I would consider "Balanced and complete"
The game would be 100% more fun if mining was speed up significally and everything required less metal
@@feba33 They could just give you infite stamina when you're chopping or mining. As long as you're not in combat that is
I am begining to think whoever came up with the system to get iron has some kind of psychiatric problem possibly involving toilets.
Totally agree that dying over seas is so discouraging. Me and my friend have almost completely quit this game 3 times due to dying far away without a teleporter to shorten the recovery. It feels more like a second job than a video game sometimes
Why didn't you build a portal when you came ashore? Whenever you step out of your boat there are 2 things you need to do first:
1. Build a workbench.
2. Build a portal.
No exceptions, sounds like a preparation problem. And the fact it happened 3 times means you haven't learned from your first experience....
@@dekippiesipare portals fun to make?
@RevPerdueJosh it takes less than 10 seconds to make while it can save you hours of playtime getting your gear, so yeah they're essential.
@@dekippiesip we were actually killed by a serpent once, the mosquitos got us before we got to shore once, and the other times we didn’t expect any issue but still died… regardless it’s an awful grind to make so many teleporters
@rumproast portals are actually pretty cheap. You can easily get surtling cores if you are close to a surtling spawner. And you can get a decent amount of fine wood in the meadows(later in the plains in much larger quantities).
Also you shouldn't go into the plains early game as everything there is going to one shot you.
The map is awully huge. Which would be great if there were things to discover. But its just a wasteland of trees and rocks. And it all looks the same.
There is no reason to go explore, cause you already know there isnt shit
the grind is unbearable. its madness.
death punishment is madness. every death is -5% if your skill, the higher your skill, the more you lose. your stuff laying around and needs to be YOLO runned to. im not going through another grind for spare gear. sorry. and thank you for mentioned the mountains. im here after the gameover you mentioned. no more frost resistance. moder flying around with 2 golems and 4 wolves guarding my stuff. gg
but the worst thing about the game is the fighting system. its terrible. i dont want to start here. its like darksouls and took all the fun and skill parts out and exchanged it for some number stuff that doesnt make any sense, which forces you to grind more stuff to get bigger numbers
I think you also should have mentioned for terraria that the more you grind the faster you get too. You get way faster mobility the longer you play. Meanwhile in valheim you actually get even slower and slower as the game progresses as items weight more and more, and your armor weighs substantially more as well, and you need tons and tons of more items for basic gear.
my guy you just got very unlucky that the boss spawned that far
The purpose of not being able to transport metal through portals is to encourage players to build forge outposts, so you can craft your armor there. Having to transport new metals by boat all the way back to your base was never a requirement, nor the intention of the developers. It's just an option that a lot of players take, thus giving themselves extra unnecessary tedium. Because remember: It's *only* the metals that can't be transported. Meaning you only need to transport the metals you need for a forge and its upgrades to the outpost. That reduces the entire process to 2 trips. One to build the outpost and one to return to your main base once you're done with the outpost and want to re-use the materials for something else.
Also, "the devs put the boss too far away from the spawn"? You just got a bad seed where one of the Bonemass spawners happened to be very far away. And yes, you read that right: *One* of the spawners. Every boss in the game has a few spawners spread around the world. Had you gone in a different direction from spawn, you most likely would've found a much closer Bonemass spawner.
10:03 "Enemies rarely bother you" He says whilst on corpse equiped with a scale shield and full iron gear lmao.
“If you’re starting to see more dislikes, well, it probably just means that your channel is starting to grow out of it’s comfort zone, and that’s okay” -EmpLemon
Keep up the great content ❤️
This was a nice reminder not to reinstall the game. I just can't bring myself to restart the grind alone and attempt to experience "the mists" . So many things wrong with this game. My first experience was pretty great though , I sank a good 50 hours into my initial attempt and had 2 or 3 massive beautiful bases. But after killing a bugged out moder that didn't move or attack (after i spent many ingame days prepping the best food and potions plus multiple camps up and down this HUGE mountain) i basically just went yay......and never touched it again. Didn't even care if it was completed or not.
I really like Valheim and I don't agree with everything you stated in this video, but I realise that the grind for metals and boss HP issues that you mentioned, the latter of which really is pure padding, is what has stopped me from progressing past the iron/silver stages.
I had a shared server with about 10 of us on there. It was really fun, but as I said the silver grind rolls around and suddenly no one's hopping onto the server. A week later, without hesitation from any of us, we stopped paying for the server.
I know it's been a couple of years since this video and some things have changed but Valheim's success still truly baffles me. It is a profoundly boring game which punishes the player in ways which aren't compelling, interesting, or even productive while offering little to no actual payoff or real reason to continue playing. I've put countless hours into Terraria, Zomboid, Dwarf Fortress etc so I'm no stranger to punishing, grindy, or tedious game mechanics. However, every time I talk myself into trying Valheim again I am overcome with ennui within minutes. I genuinely want to like this game because fantastic games are seemingly hard to come by these days, but I've been forced to concluded the appeal is simply lost on me; surely a failure on my part.
Well said man
I love the game, might be baffling to you, but who cares-.
@@ndexer Exactly, and just keep on loving it. I'm kinda jealous to be honest, wish I could get into it.
Just to explain my own experience and show that I wasn't in love with Valheim from the start either.
I played Valheim entirely on my own and without looking anything up. Solo and Blind.
It was quite a nightmare at times and for most of my first playthrough I was stubborn and had the same criticisms as you do.
Valheim becomes much easier when you understand how to tackle problems and the smoothest way of progressing you character.
I was 30 hours in and had been farming copper and tin for almost 10 hours and made myself bronze tools when I found out that you could cut down Pine with a stone axe and make yourself the Stagbreaker before even attacking the first boss which trivializes burial grounds which I had slugged my way through with only a flint spear, flint axe, and club and only had berries, mushrooms and grilled meat to boost my stats.
It didn't get much better from there...
My second characters journey was a lot smoother and more enjoyable however.
You're wrong about quite a lot here simply because you're not playing correctly which opens you up to quick dismissal which is unfortunate because you do bring up some valid points.
(*)Lets first off point out that Valheim was a fluke success by TWO (2) guys... They've made hundreds of millions, practically over-night, off this game. So they absolutely deserve a bit of understanding.
Much of your criticism can be dismissed by you simply playing wrong.
Should the game have told you how to play? Maybe yes, maybe no... Depends on your personal preference. Dark Souls players would say Valheim does enough hand-holding as it is. Others might think differently.
For instance. Teleports. They're not for getting back home quickly. They are for connecting bases.
If you go to a new continent. Build a small base. Beds to respawn in. And a portal to go back to your main base to stock back up on gear and food if you need it.
If you're going to farm resources in a far off place; build a small base to process the raw materials into gear that can go through the portal, or to consolidate your haul for when you take the boat back to your main base.
The world is too big?
The map is procedurally generated. The devs don't pick where everything is. You can get a world where everything is really close to the start of the game. They could probably set perimeters to stop things from spawning too far away, but again... TWO devs.
- And they haven't finished all the biomes, as you said yourself, so it might end up being a sequence of small skips between the biomes that feel more nature than what it's like today.
If you don't like the world you're given, make a new one and transfer your character and all your stuff.
The game is extremely grindy. I agree and it absolutely is, but not because it requires too much resources to build things (in my opinion).
The worst part by far is to find the monsters and resources you need. I often spend hours just running around looking for monsters and resources long after the monsters and environment has stopped being a threat to me.
I watched a streamer spend 3 hours hunting golems only to find 2 golems in that entire time...
A simple fix would be to allow you to create a consumable to track specific monsters/resources or to increase their spawn for a limited time.
I know it's easy to get caught in a deathloop but I personally I have little to no issue with the death system since your stuff never seem to get deleted. (Coming from Dark Souls which I find to be far too punishing for new players who don't like to look things up, like myself.)
The whole game's difficulty lies in grinding and preparation. I was often surprised just how easy the enemies were when you knew how to deal with them.
- Which probably is why base building becomes the true endgame for most people :P
@@shadownight848 I can understand having a negative reaction when hearing someone's "playing wrong."
People want to think "play anyway you like" but if someone is playing an FPS and decide not to use the mouse to aim, and then blame the game for not giving them the option to aim with the keyboard - You're playing wrong.
If you play Minecraft and decide you don't want to use the crafting system - You're playing wrong.
All games are built with fundamental functions and how you use those functions is up to you.
If you decide not to use certain functions, that's up to you, but you should realize that you're making a choice to play the game in an unintended way.
If someone doesn't like the way those functions are designed, as you said, the game isn't for them.
There's plenty of games, movies, shows, books, that have very interesting premises, settings, or ideas, but as a whole I don't actually like, but that just means they're not for me.
Him ending up in a death loop, getting his portal destroyed, or going back and forth over half the map wasn't due to design flaws of the game, but was the result of how he decided to play the game.
There was always alternatives.
Build an outpost to protect your portal. Put the portal up in a tree or somewhere enemies can't get to it. Build a new base to use the metal close to here you found it. Build a faster boat with more storage.
And so on...
Of course, that doesn't mean the game is exempt from criticism.
Mining ore take an, objectively, absurd amount of time and there's really no progression in the game to make it significantly faster.
Since skills are lost at a flat 5% on death you'll find yourself reaching an equilibrium between how long it takes you to level up skills and how often you die. After just a few hours your skills will be around level 20-30 but most players will probably be stuck somewhere around skill level 40 and 60 for most of the game.
It's important to distinguish between criticism and personal preferens.
Comment at 4:35 - There seems to be multiple copies of each boss. So, if you are north of the center of the map and find a location rune, it will point you to the closest boss, which is probably in the northern half of the map. If you found a location rune in the southern half of the map, you might have found Bone Mass a bit closer. I'm not saying the map isn't too f'ing big, but I think it is big for a reason.
I would consider Valheim a good game, but I'll also say that it almost requires multiplayer to keep the fun through the later stages of the game. That being said, it's not a perfect game and the annoyances you mentioned are large subtractors to the game.
You mentioned on a few occasions that stamina could be a problem, but lack of stamina is actually one of my major negative points for the game. Especially how a lot of the time you simply have to stop what you're doing to wait for stamina (mining, woodcutting and fighting).
One major annoyance for me, is also that your home base gets attacked, which means that you cannot build your base to look the way you want it, but it has to be defendable or it might just get destroyed. In my game I found a 2 star boar on a different island than my home base, so I breed a few of them at the other island. There was no way for me to simply pick up the boar and transport it on my ship, so I had to drag it after my ship with a harpoon, and manage that the line didn't break though the whole sail trip. Once I got it to my home base, a raid occurred, where drakes flew over and killed the boar.
I'd also say that mining would be less frustrating, if the ores didn't weigh as much, so you could carry more per trip. Why is it that a silver sword takes something like 45 bars (450 weight) to craft but the sword has almost no weight? Just make it proportional.
Yeah I definitely wouldn't have continued with Valheim if I wasn't in multiplayer. All I can say is that I hope they address these sorts of things since they grind the game to a halt significantly. I never did much building but I can see that being a nightmare. It was a nightmare for me because I didn't WANT to build at all, but had to make it defensible
For the mountain biome, it takes about 10 seconds to build a campfire, which will stop the freezing damage
It will stop the freezing damage only until you leave the fire place's radius, so unless you like the idea of building a fireplace once every 4 feet it's not a very realistic strategy for the entire biome unfortunately. It's only good for specific outposts you might want to create
@@htwo1 it is faster than brewing new frost resistance, which is the only other alternative if your loot is stuck on the mountain
@@misterchess3254 If your loot is stuck in the mountain then it's definitely a good idea you're right. In that circumstance it's still extremely tedious to do but at least there is an option I guess, as annoying as that option is
@@htwo1 its 5 rocks and some sticks, not that tideous, you can bring like a stack and your good, not that bad compared to the alternative
Always - ALWAYS keep a spare set of "everything" at home so when you respawn, you can get dressed and head out on a leisurely corpse-run.
In mountains, always have a half dozen frost meads and a super-speedy set of gear; you are not going back to fight, just be fast and warm to get your gear while still in "Corpse Run" mode.
I found that you sometimes need to LURE Moder far from your original corpse when in "Corpse Run" mode so you can return later and take your time collecting your gear.
Comment at 14:00 - Yep. Enemies prefer to attack portals, crafting structures, and ships for whatever reason. I chalk it up to "magic," but meh. That said, all you need to do is protect them a bit. Building a portal inside a structure is an excellent way to keep enemies from seeing that portal then making a bee-line to destroy it. When I park my longship in a new area, I either find a nearby biome I can easily handle and build a small defensive dock or just park the longship a bit offshore. If you're looking at the plains biome from a longship, your swim skill is probably > 0.
What I hate the most, is the 2 copper + 1 tin ingot = ....... 1 bronze.
Then... each bronze ingot is 12kg, to make a axe of 2 kg, you need... 80kg bronze. It is just artificial difficulty, it is total crap.
And also the portal you cannot pass with ores is just bad... the slots on a big boat, small.
Valheim is the first game ever that I hated so much that I DELETED from my steam. I did not just uninstalled, but selected support and asked to it to be perma deleted from my account.
Thank you for that perspective.
I think you have some valid points there, mainly around the cost of producing late game items.
As for the exploration and death systems - I personally think that (based only on the footage) you rushed in.
I am playing solo and have died stupidly in @#$%@#^ing cave trolls, resulting in me not waking up for work as I had to spend over an hour figuring out how the get all my stuff over three expeditions, but this means that after the joy of finding the biome I was looking for subsides, I will be spending a few real hours just building a forward base just outside of it, with a well defended portal before I will even test the edge of this unknown place.
I think the first two visits to the Black Forest made that VERY clear.
As for the metals teleport limitation - I love this! it forces me to be super creative in how am I creating a supply chain infrastructure, which at this point includes a dedicated port, including smelters, and a vast stone road inside my Swamp biome so that I could effectively move my cart around easily.
I have never found myself so immersed in a building engine and had such a joy in solving the physical puzzle which is the building structure system, and never believed I will be designing a %@#^ing farm(!!!) in a video game.
All in all, I think this is a masterpiece, flawed, but a masterpiece.
I can't wait for the full release.
having played this a good year after the video came out i am happy to say that some things are better. i think.
the boss location items seem to be everywhere.
the bosses seem much closer
corpse run buff gives you like 90% damage resist when you loot your grave so you don't die again
cooldown on losing skillpoints , so chain deaths are not as bad.
enemies have never broke my boat or portal , even with us fighting at them.
freezing in mountains can be avoided with fires, though very annoying to use they can be used to recover your gear when out of better options.
but, still to much grind, to much boss HP , to high crafting costs. 70lbs of metal to make a 1lb pickaxe? many weapons are just worse than the other kinds. i still like the game, early game mostly . i hope in another year or 2 it will be as good as we all hoped it was.
The main gimmick of valheim is being inconvenient
Comment at 15:00 - Speedrunners in Valheim build a small shelter with a bed near a fight location. You don't need a portal in many scenarios, just a bed. After death, there are some temporary buffs to help you survive. Speedrunners take advantage of a buff called "corpse run" to defeat enemies. The buff is (generally) gained after picking up your stone and has significant damage reduction for a short time. Again, this is something players new to Valheim wouldn't know or even have a clue it exists, so it will be frustrating until the learning curve starts to flatten out.
Hah true
You can turn on ore teleporting, and tweak alot of different things you don't like in the world settings tab
Thats wasnt available when he made this video although there was a mod for it back then
I disagree with a lot of the points you’ve made. I love the absolute punishment on the deaths, I’ve gotten locked on islands surrounded on plains, and it’s so fun for me to try to figure out a way out of the situation. Except for the ore in the teleporters, why?
Comment at 17:37 - Stamina is really annoying and deadly. That said, I think it is the one thing that balances the game for even the most experienced players. Without stamina, the game's replayability would drop significantly.
Stamina is fkn annoying in this game. You're ALWAYS short on stamina. Because you're chopping down trees or mining and then get attacked.
Most of the fight is waiting for your stamina to regenerate.
I've just started playing the game and I agree 100% with everything you said.
Once I reached the Black Forest and had to mine copper and tin I realized how absurdly grindy this game was going to be. And it's a damn shame because it does have a lot of potential, but its runtime is padded with so much useless grind and purposely lack of features it's infuriating at times.
I agree with almost everything about the video, but I do want to add that I do find the long sailing periods relaxing at times. If you just got out of a tense encounter in the far away biome you were at, the 10-20 minutes of the wind and waves and slow music can be a refreshing break from the grind
Yeah but 10-20 minutes? No thanks
Are you low in iq? Serious question
Oh man. I'm still in the very beginning and I thought it was grindy just getting animal pelts. I had no idea how grindy it gets. Thank you.
Good video, criticissm is necessary for valheim especially now as it is in early access. Singing this game praises is good, but faults should be noted in order for the game to be a fun experience to its fullest. Hope the devs see this video.
Still %100 correct a year later.
And 2 years later
2 years later and bro is still spitting facts
the only thing i disagree with is about the punishment for death. i think the game is too easy.maybe make a mode where u dont drop loot but i wish there was a mode that was a lot harder
Having a 10% skill drop without the no skill drain buff, and no item loss, while also making skills more impactfull, maybe by granting certain perks at high levels, would discourage just throwing yourself at an enemy again and again, and would stop you from loosing all your progress with an unlucky or badly placed death. I currently lost all my progress on a silver tier character because of a badly timed deathsquito that is now guarding my gear deep in a plains biome, where I usually die before I get close. That isn't good game design, it's a quitting point for a lot of players. And though I agree that many enemies should be made harder, with better ai and attacks, many enemies like the deathsquito, should be heavily rebalanced. They can snipe you while you're on a boat next to the plains, they can outrun you when you're attempting to retrieve your items, and they one shot you if you have less than 100 health or strong/pierce resistant armor. But the biggest problem is that the devs are more than likely just enjoying the ridiculous amount of money they made, and have the game on a very low priority atm.
I love this game, yet it makes me very mad at times where i need to stop playing.
Two years later. I just bought this game some weeks back and agree with you. My pet peeve is something you didn't mention but annoyed the hell out of me -- not being able to make your base have permanent or at least longer lasting light sources from the start, and getting the "you're cold" notification every time you move anywhere in your base even though you have a raging fire going right in the middle. Like sure, that's probably "realistic." But is it satisfying? Nope. It is super irritating. I just got till the bronze age before deciding this game is definitely not for me. I loved Terraria to bits. That one is a much better game, both in the things you could do and the satisfaction you get. Even though it is also grindy, you get rewarded for the grind in much more fulfilling ways than here. Just a lot of game design choices I personally do not jive with.I made a comment expressing my disappointment and decision to stop playing on Reddit and got pommeled by a host of fanboys LOL. Silly me. This game has a lot of potential but is flawed in many ways, and as it is now, even now with the latest update, it is still not enough to keep me playing. I just am not willing to spend that much time on a game that is not fully fleshed out.
There are multiple spawns for each boss, the farther you travel the farthe the boss spawn you find is. The devs made this game for them, they already stated that while they listen to the players they made this game for them. Its an early access survival game with less than 20 devs. If you play games just to beat them you wont enjoy this game, its made to be played with passion, not entirely with bosses in mind
Most of the compkains are skill issue, you can bring the forge to your next location to make items from the raw metal and being mindfull of securing portals the only thing i agree on is loseing skills on death its just generally stupid
Also you useing horrible food items boar meat in the plains wtf are you doing
just quitted this for the same reasons (and way earlier in my test run). I mean i have a life, and when i play i'd like not be in a working simulator. I'd like to have a fun experience, exploring digital worlds, fighting or whatever. Chopping wood, mining the ground for hours just to build some walls and a roof, running randomly around for hours ... is not fun.
But what litteraly killed this pseudo-wannabe-game for me is the abysmal progression system, is the worst ever seen in years, and it's even worse than the latest 7daystodie releases.
Its a well put together, well said, and well argued video. I can see all of your points. I would like to counter on a couple of issues though, and bear in mind this is a year later, after the video was released, and having spent the entire release period (from drop till now,) playing the game.
First, the point of the world being too large. It is, but it isn't. What i mean by that is that it is too large for its current content. While being large for the released content though, there is upcoming content for those biomes. The developers, 6 months ago now having released the much anticipated MISTLANDS update, revamped the entire mistlands, filled it in, gave it its own unique mobs, and have overall done an absolutely bang-up job with the content thus far. The more or less empty biomes do have plans for them. They are really at this point place-holders. Is this optimal? Well...maybe not. Probably not, but I understand the choice myself, so I can't fault them on it. Once completely finished, the world will seem a lot smaller. Its too big because at the moment its too empty.
Secondly, the issue of non teleport items. It is annoying, but its a mechanic designed to get you to explore more, and dig in less. The game is also about exploration. You aren't meant to sit in your base and wait for Ragnarok to come to you. Ideally, you are supposed to setup many smaller outposts. The teleporters link your outposts. That seems the intuitive way they meant the game to be played. I will admit the dragon egg limitation is dumb though. That just makes no sense and Ill admit it.
To the penalties of Death, I would like to say that's mostly been fixed so that you aren't losing a ton of skill points. dropping your inventory sucks but like Minecraft before it, you just kinda work with it. At least there is an auto death marker when you die so you know where it is. And with corpse run and the No penalties buff that you get upon resurrection, you are less likely to die as fast once you recover your body, and even if you do, you don't lose additional skill points. On a side note, remember, your character is already DEAD. That's why your eyes glow. Skills aren't Learned in this game, they are Remembered from your previous life (presumably). This is why dying docks your skills. And why you don't recover them when you pick-up your body. It's lore based.
One thing I would like to absolutely agree on is crafting costs, otherwise known as the grind: it is, always has been, and always likely will be, horrendous. I am of course referring to the materials needed for some things. 40 silver for a sword? Or, and hear me out, i could get level 3 wolf armor for that same 40 silver. like, a full set. Silver is absolutely the worst offender but none of the other tiers are really any better either. and you need iron for Every. Single. Tier. once you get it. There are I think only 3 pieces in Mountains, but every piece in Plains and, Mistlands, requires Iron for some unknown reason. Point being the grind is a slog, in a bog, for the rest of the game. I will absolutely join you in hating the grind.
in a perfect world, Portals could be toggled to either allow or not allow metals according to preference, and should always allow dragon eggs. Crafting costs should be re balanced. I'm ok with bosses being sponges. Death sucks in every game, and the penalties in this game aren't the worst I've ever seen.
2 years and several updates later, would you give Valheim another go? A few of the issues you have with the game- the grinding for materials and travel time for example, haven't changed, but theres 2 new biomes- the Mistlands and the Ashlands- and you can change the settings of your personal world to allow for different options. You can change portals to allow you to travel with metals, you can increase the resources you receive to ×1.5, ×2, or even ×3 to avoid some of the grinding.
thx for the validation, the positive reviews baffled me, this game could have been vastly better with just little amount of tweaks, but here we are
My main issue with the game so far is that the load times are EXTREMELY long when i first started playing (and still to this day) it takes me 10-15 minutes to even get into a session whether its my personal server or a public one
This is all YOUR OPINION based upon YOUR DESIRED PLAYSTYLE. Therefore, I appreciate that you have an opinion. I just cannot agree that it is mine.
Well of course, that's certainly a given. Every review is all down to the subjective desires of whoever made the review. I'm glad you enjoyed the game, and you clearly aren't alone given its immense popularity. It just frustrated me personally cause it felt so close to being great, yet so far at the same time
You seem quite frazzled trying to project that onto others
I think Valheim should add difficulty and time management? levels. I love survival- but I don’t have the time for grinding THIS hard. I’m also only able to play with friends because I’m bad at fighting systems and usually play my games on easy 🤷🏼♀️
luckily that's a feature that's being worked on!! Creative mode (called Hammer mode) as well as possible sliders that control difficulty and resource yield! They aren't even locked in at world creation, you can change that stuff on the fly! So excited for that!
the boss locations are random, you just got really unlucky with bonemass.
but yeah, I like that the game punishes you for dying, but having to travel across the world to get your stuff back over and over is very annoying, the same thing happened to me. also I agree that it takes to long to get ores, there is a way to increas drops of ores now, but I wish that just ores themselves were a little more abundant, and as long as they make the ocean more lively and fleshed out, I like that they force you to not fast travel after your done getting what you came for, plus now they do have portals that let you transport ore in late game, which is perfect if they revamp oceans.
as much as i love this game this is quite accurate, they arbitrarily made certain things the way they are just for the sake of not clearing the content too quick
I can definitely understand why you feel the way you do but honestly feel like most of your criticisms come down to you trying to play Valheim like its a different game. I think this comes down to the one main criticism I have with Valheim which is that it wants you to do things that other games often discourage and it doesn't always make it clear. When I first started out with Valheim I had several of the same problems, dying and spending forever getting loot back, traveling forever to get anywhere, moving ore back home for smelting, etc. The thing I have learned since is that you really need to just move your base as you advance in the game. You can get away with not moving your base for the black forest and maybe the swamp if you get lucky and have one very close by but after that you really do need to just make new bases for storing and processing new loot from new biomes. This also makes portals much safer as they are protected by your base around them as opposed to a random portal in the middle of a field. This also makes the game itself feel like less of a grind to me since you are not only upgrading your gear as you go along but also upgrading or outright rebuilding your base which is easy to do since you get all the resources back when using the hammer. Valheim purposefully encourages you to move and explore the world, building new bases as you go. I also find portals are less useful for moving forward to new locations and more useful as a way to quickly return to old bases and locations that you have already conquered for resources you need from them.
Still while I view most of what you mentioned in your review as a positive thing rather than a negative I do think your video works well to reveal how Valheim can fail to show new players how they are expected to advance throughout the game.
I’m with you on the sailing and portal restrictions, that’s definitely artificially extending the game time. I had to download a portal mod for this very reason. You guys dying 4 times having portals destroyed?? Come on lol, bring some resources to fence it in?? Not hard. I think you disregard the procedural aspect of the map, and what it means for boss locations, biome sizes etc. The game is EA with 3 unfinished biomes, and I think size of map has to be viewed in that optic. Valheim is a great game, even with a few unnecessary timesinks, but incredible potential, just currently not much replayability.
We tried to fence it in but clearly didn't do a very good job at it, loxes would just maul the fences if we hid behind them or if we portal'd away while they were aggro'd. I mentioned that there's unfinished biomes and I definitely hope that it creates a good reason for the map to be so big too. The boss locations being that far out is random, true, but still frustrating when it happens because there's no reason to go that far otherwise in the game's current state. Which is hopefully changed, of course
@@htwo1 I was lucky that I started my first game on a random map with four of the five bosses relatively close to my starting location, three of them on the same continent (it was pretty big for an island, so I called it a continent, also it looked like a fantasy version of the Americas) and two others one or two islands away. In the finished game, as I understand it, the ocean biome will have its own bossfight, and some areas such as the Mistlands, the Ashlands and the Deep North will require traveling very far to get to them. For me, Valheim is more about the journey than about reaching the goal. So I‘m quite enjoying it. If you‘re more of a goal oriented player, I can see how it might frustrate you. I find it a bit harsh to complain about a lack of content in an early access release, however. I used several mods that bypassed some of the grind, and I still enjoyed all my 1500+ hours in the game - but then, I am also a passionate base builder and in-game architect. And I took pleasure in overpreparing for any venture into a new dangerous area. So I took my sweet time. And enjoyed doing so. And I‘ll probably enjoy doing it all over again on Friday, when Hearth & Home has dropped.
@@htwo1 I think the terrain is the key. I noticed the largest mobs like Lox, Berserkers and Trolls are clumsy as hell with difficult terrain. E.g. just digging a shallow perimeter ditch around a portal stops them getting in. Although a terrain wall is better for the trolls.
@@dennymambo digging a tremch is actually pretty clever I never thought of that lol. But yeah without it the lox's regularly decided that any fortifications i made looked delicious and they'd come and destroy them
@@blablubb4553 I did find building super fun in the game, but I just didn't want to build settlements literally everwhere I went. The hope is that you're right, and these new biomes justify the size of the world a lot more. If they do that would fix a decent number of issues I had with the game, like the boss rng sending you really far out. Yeah its a little harsh to criticise at the moment, but I only did because every review I found called the game a masterpiece. Some people are enjoying exploring for exploring's sake, but ideally it'd be insentivised by the game rather than a goal you have to set yourself.
the complaints about being stranded across the map could be avoided by a couple of simple steps:
1. make a bed somewhere there and it even prompts you when you're aiming at the newly made bed (and imagine me saying this in the turned up echo mode like you used in this video on a couple of occasions) SET SPAWN LOCATION!!!!!!!
2. build a makeshift base around your portal so it isn't offered there on a silver platter to be destroyed.
3. git gud
other than that you said in the beginning of this video that your expectations were so high and hyped up, well in general in life it's good if you take everything with a grain of salt and not have any expectation.
that's my subjective opinion on your objective opinion
I agree. The grind, the stamina bar, death and not being able to transport ore thru the portal kills me. I have quit for days because of these mechanics. I like the game a lot and i know it is a work in progress but I have to agree with your assessment.
Glad to see I'm not the only one, although some of these things dont seem to be a result of the game being early access. These things are design decisions. Maybe they'll change, but it's not like they're bugs that need ironing out or content that needs to be released
If you guys are taking all that time to schlepp ores around instead of building an ore processing base near the source, then you're making it harder on yourself. Not wrong by any stretch, but there are certainly easier ways to arrange things (i.e., logistics) to minimize these "big" issues. That's all part of the game design--to explore, build outposts, use your options as you progress. If you MUST have everything handled at a single base then yes, you'll have a more difficult time logistically. If portals were wide open then the exploration/base building becomes trivialized. My advice--don't shit on the game and expect it to change to suit your needs--instead, either change your approach or just mod/cheat the system to suit your playstyle. There are ways to work around the limitations if you don't get stuck in the usual achiever mindset.
@@JM-db8ez Building an outpost at every location you visit is a solution, and was a solution I ended up using. But it doesn't really solve the problem entirely. It only really stops you needing to travel back to your main base to make the items you wanted before going to the next location. That time spent is replaced with the time it takes to build the outpost. And building is definitely much more fun than sitting in a boat, I'll give you that, but it still elongates the grind in a way that I felt was unnecessary given how there's not that many item sets in the game. You've mentioned this "achiever mindset" thing a few times and it doesn't make much sense to me. Insentivising the player to do things and giving the player short term AND longterm goals is something that almost every game strives to do. Valheim gives you mostly long term goals with not so many short term ones. it's not about a mindset difference or anything, it's just how basically every game on the market keeps a player engaged. Through the goals they have and the desire to achieve them. Exploration is just of much as a goal you want to achieve as crafting items is.
@@htwo1 You don't need an outpost everywhere you stop...just at those places that are not too close to your main base, if you don't like the whole ore transport mechanism. Or you can use the other option that's part of the game design that uses neither sailing or portals (modded) to move ores. As a content creator and reviewer I would expect that you're aware of more of the game mechanics/options then you exhibit in your video. Lot of mistakes that led to the complaints you have or make things harder than they need to be for an open world sandbox game. Not that anything is *wrong* because there's no right or wrong way to play the game--but if you're going to complain about game mechanics when there are options to mitigate them, or you're simply not managing your character very well, then the opinions become less impactful because of the glaring issues with how you're playing the game. I really just don't think you have gone that deep into the game before getting frustrated. It's advertised as a brutal survival game--and it's not even that brutal, all things considered, but I've played a lot of survival games and this one is comparatively easy unless you do things to make it harder for yourself. Which, based on the video, you do. So it goes.
EDIT: To address the "achiever" comment--I say that because your impatience and frustration. You want it your way, you want it easy, you want to "get to your next goal that the game should provide" (which it does, it's just not gift-wrapped...you actually have to do a little work to figure things out, like most survival games). The game is open world, sandbox, with boss goals but nothing beyond that--by design. Your words suggest you need more direction and easier mechanics. You sure you want to play this game? Doesn't sound like it's something you would enjoy, as your video clearly shows, regardless of whether you're managing things well or not. And that's fine if this isn't your style of game--but again, that's not the game's fault, it's just a difference of your preferences and what the game offers. You really should learn the fast transport trick if that's your big hangup, pretty surprised you don't even mention it and use it to "fix" the big world/ore transport issues you so clearly got hung up on.
@@JM-db8ez If I feel the need to have to save and exit out of my world and go to another world just to move my metals around conveniently then I would say the mechanic itself is causing me the issue, its not the lack of knowledge that I'm able to do that. Because yes I know I can do that, but it felt like cutting out a very large chunk of the game which is travel. If i'm going to do a review I don't want to cut anything out so I decided not to do it. The game's difficulty had nothing to do with it, wasn't struggling to figure things out, and it wasn't wanting things "giftwrapped" either. Its that the difficulty doesn't really exist. It's all labourious. it's not particularly "hard" it's just long and arduous seemingly for the sake of it. Again, you're gunna tell me its "just what survival games are like" but that just isn't true at all, this game has little content that is extended over a large number of hours just due to the sheer amount of time it takes to do anything. Survival game is a very broad genre, keep in mind, and your very categorical statements about how it "clearly isn't for me" are enormously misplaced all because I disliked valheim's mechanics in particular. In fact, it's not even the mechanics themselves, it's the sheer amount of time any single event takes to carry out. Even the boss fights have a buhjillion health for no reason. They're not difficult because their attacks are interesting or hard to dodge, but just because the fights are mostly really long. It's a test of endurance. endurance that apparently I didn't have.
Sailing for me is an incredibly relaxing experience, especially when playing with others I can chat with. But I could use more surprises and features on the sea. The ones that exist are cool, but I'd like more.
Needing to take time to hunt for bosses can be fun if you like exploring and taking your time. I will say that this aspect would be better if there were more new things to find along the way in familiar biomes separated by distance from one's starting region of islands. There's a few small and appealing surprises, but emphasis on the few. Even slight colour variations of the same biome across the world could give a lot of additional character (though this would mostly be a cosmetic one, others relating to resources and new activities would be the better improvement).
But I still enjoy seeing new scenery, even in familiar biomes, since the variations of terrain and object arrangement can make some varied picturesque and unique locations that are fun to scout as you start deciding where to establish forward bases in the world. This is an aspect that definitely makes me feel like a viking explorer. And while I'm doing this, I'm still going to be collecting more needed resources - I'd rather grind for my resources traveling across the world instead of spending too much time in few layouts that become as familiar as the back of my hand.
I say this as someone who really likes to take their time in games like these, that only starts play on a new game title every few months, while revisiting older ones, if they have sandbox replayability (which this one does for me). Some people may have a large list of games they wish to play or little time to play a single game, and for these people, I can definitely see where frustration would lie.
There are more than one boss stone of the same type, On my map I had 4 Banemass boss stones and the same goes for the other bosses but to be fair I knew where all the boss stones were because I found a website with a Valheim World Generator so I was able to generate my own world map instead of taking the one the game gives you I would put a link to the site but youtube would only delete my post, The only thing I don't like about the game is your health and stamina depends on what food you eat plus no Pause key
I know that dark souls masochists love this mechanic, but death is MUCH too punishing.
If you die in an inconvenient spot, you might as well quit playing or start an entire new game.
Dying in the mistland is fkn terrible especially when you have a Gall and 6 ticks camping your body.
This pretty much echoes my feelings about the game. I was sooooo hyped for it when I first heard about it, but the grind was simply too much for me... which is saying a lot because my favorite games all involve a good grind. The portals were equally frustrating since effectively using them meant I would have to virtually build a new base at every single island I sailed to just to HOPE that all the materials I needed could be found and used there immediately.
In it's defense, this game worked remarkably well on our server with about a dozen or so friends playing together. Different groups could take on different tasks. But that's not going to be everyone's gaming experience.
Before you get on that ship, pack fine wood and surtling cores. Problem solved. Vacation 101.
One thing I would honestly love is if the game took some points from sea of thieves and made boats more..home like? Let us run around on it, play instruments, look and do stuff. Then again, if you lose that boat it might be sad but that can be adjusted, also I absolutely hate the furnace. Stand next to it and tend to it because it’ll run out of coal soon. Ugh.
I’m glad they fixed all of these issues with world modifications. And I suggest using the seed world generator and use your world seed to see if there was a biomas boss that was closer to
2 years after you still hit the nail ine head with this one. Absolutely mediocre game
aout leaving gear stranded. you're supposed to bring mats for a small outpost+portal as soon as you reach your destination. or make a bed ;)
Few things are more revealing/useful to game developers than a 'bad' review lol
Personally I like the idea of a huge procedurally generated map that takes awhile to explore, but I definitely agree that despite the cool sailing mechanic, the routine travel can rapidly become tedious. I think a lot of problems would cease to be if they ever get around to fully populating all of the unfinished biomes, including the ocean, with critters and/or items that make it more interesting. The portals are a point of contention. A lot of people want them to allow metal and ore. Other people see them as 'cheating' or ruining the pace of the game and don't like them. To me it would make sense to perhaps make a slightly more expensive version or upgrade that could transport ore.
The dying in bumble-feck nowhere halfway across the map from my spawn point with no portal was a 'challenge accepted' point for me. Two things that prevent this issue are using terrain to protect portals and always trying to have a spawn point nearby. E.g. building a 'shack on stilts' outpost with a bed/portal in it on top of a rock. Or just raising/lowering terrain to stop Lox and Trolls from smashing it. Or if you're me, building massive, ridiculously overkill, impenetrable bases and outposts in each biome... My favourite was my 'obnoxious neighbour' Plains fortress right next to a Fuling camp hahaha!
Nice opinion video. I agree with the teleporting of metals. Currently I use a second world to store ore and other items I can't teleport since you can bring carried items between them. I think the weight is enough of a limitation. For instance...*spoilers*
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...you can only carry one dragon egg for the most part and you can't teleport with it. Meaning you have to make multiple trips up and down a mountain just to summon a boss. No other boss makes you do this. On the topic of boss summoning items I think they need to work on that too. I have like a million deer trophies, ancient seeds, and withered bones; but dragon eggs and fuling totems are so random they can be really difficult to find if you aren't lucky. They might have fixed this already as I have found more in my new world as opposed to an earlier one I played in with my friend where it took us a few days just to find enough totems to fight Yagluth. That was also when drake trophies were nigh impossible to get as well. I probably killed over 100 drakes and still only had one trophy.
Like you said it is in early access still so maybe they will fix a bunch of stuff still, also they seem to be good at listening to community feedback so bringing this stuff up in some of the AMA's or posting on their community hub might get some responses and reasonings of their decisions for the way things are. They did add a mount to the game which I think was a community idea.
homie you have to build outposts to protect your portals and ships your playthrough wouldn't have been nearly as frustrating if you did this
Totaly agree with what you said. Was on second boss. Build house to close respawned right by boss who destroyed house then respawned on a different island. After that I just uninstalled. No way was I going to waste hours to get back to him. It feels like they are intentionally trying to waste your time. Very disappointed as this game has so much potential. Just make me feel like I have better things to do with my life the repeat the same content over and over and over and over and over again. After dying the player should be able to choose respawn point from the houses you built.
Love this game. All points you outline that you think makes the game bad is the reason I love it lol. It’s a hardcore survival game and it lives up to it for sure.
The things he's moaning about are the things I'm looking forward to experiencing when it comes out on Xbox
Frankly, I agree with a lot here. The boss spawns are often too far away, you sail way too much (though I think making the boat simply faster would be better than making the world smaller), the punishment for death is a bit extreme, especially in some of the later biomes. BUT a lot you bring up is simply a skill issue on your part when you ignore very easy tactics. Freeze on a mountain? Take one second to build a campfire. Stamina drains too fast when fighting mobs? Use a power like Eikthyr or drink stamina potions. Portal gets broken by mobs? Build a small house around it and put it in an adequate location. Or heck, just a bed is enough to set your spawn point. Traveling to a place you "heard" were called Mistlands but couldn't even bother to see if it was developed or not? I mean, come on. I can go on and on. Again, lots of good points but a lot of times it seems like you're just making the game harder for yourself then it needs to be and makes less than bright choices.
Comment at 1:50 - Having done statistical analysis of customer satisfaction surveys, I can absolutely attest there is an inverted bell curve when looking at responses. That is, the expected results of any probability distribution would be a bell curve, with the average being roughly the high point of that curve, and generally around the middle of the curve. When your distribution is off, there is likely something "wrong." For example, if the mean and the median are too far apart, there's probably some anomaly in the data - perhaps some data points that need to be removed (with justification). An inverted bell curve probably indicated exactly what you've stated - the folks on the fence are not bothering to leave a review.
Comment at 10:56 - The devs had said they want folks to build bases at those distant locations rather than teleporting everything around. So, if you go out to Bone Mass' swamp and mine for iron, build a base you can craft from right there. A base doesn't have to be huge either: I've gotten away with a small one-room tree hut and a fenced-in area - so there's not a lot of replacement grinding needed. There's no need to keep going back and forth: Once you make an item from metals, you can take it through the teleporter. Silver can't be teleported, but a silver helm can.
That all said, I would like to see some way for there to be the occasional ability to teleport metals. Perhaps beat a boss and get two one-use items you sacrifice to be able to teleport metals or something like that. This way, when you just need it, there's a work-around, but it's not circumventing the devs' intentions.
The problem with this is there’s no guarantee that you’re going to have the ore resources to build the blacksmith that you need. The devs may want players to build forward bases but they didn’t designe the game to incentivize forward bases correctly.
@@will_of_europa With most maps, you can get away with one trip to a swamp biome and build a base with all the pre-iron crafting amenities. Take the resources you need on the boat with you. You can break down your crafting structures from your home base and use those resources for worst-case scenarios since the materials are all recovered. Usually, that's not needed, but I've played some tricky maps - so I know it happens. You can craft all your iron armor and weapons within your swamp base. Tear down most of your swamp base for those crafting station materials as needed. Then load up a longship with plenty of iron and return to your main base. With 18 storage slots plus player inventories, you can haul a lot in each longship trip. You can get it all in one sailing trip to the swamp and one trip back. You might want to make more trips for various reasons, but sailing is slow, and that's the trade-off to consider. For additional trips, you can take longship materials through a teleporter and build the ship in/near the swamp, making for one-way hauling trips as needed.
I will agree it is extremely difficult to figure all this out within the first few playthroughs of Valheim. I've been running a lot of "hardcore" runs - where if my toon dies, I delete the toon and the world, then start over. Some maps are just randomly very difficult while other maps are amazingly convenient.
@@RiiDii At what point? If I'm already turned off from the game none of the advice you gave (good advice) even matters. It's simply not worth the time spent to try to have fun in a game actively keeping you from having fun.
@@will_of_europa There's a difference between someone not liking a game and a game being a bad game or having substantive problems.
Htwo put this comment right up front: "So this video might rustle some feathers a little bit. But there's a good reason for it."
I disagree on the "good reason for it," if he hasn't tried to push past what I've found to be solvable problems. I don't work for the makers of Valheim and they don't pay me to defend their game, so I really couldn't care less. I was just trying to help Htwo and others with some possibly missed solutions that took me a while to either figure out or learn from others. I know from experience when I pushed past a lot of the frustrations, the game became extremely enjoyable. For me, that enjoyment was worth that time spent. It may not be for you, and that's cool.
Half the points are solid. Half the points really aren't. Saying its not good because it's hard isn't really an argument. Too many times this is reasoning for things being bad here. If this was an argument, then I guess the dark souls/elden ring games are bad. So things like "the stamina bar is hard to manage" or "enemies destroy portals" or "different enemies have damage types" aren't arguments. Most of the mistakes you mentioned you made, you kept making. Instead of making the mistake and learning, you kept doing it. So when you make a portal in the plains and it gets wrecked... build a little hut around it. Most of the time you wont have an issue with this.
The argument for portals not transporting things is valid. its just extra for the sake of being extra. Some things like this sure.
But then you give reasoning for calling out the game on its own even being early access saying there are things besides this, and then have a point to make about sailing far to a biome for nothing (because it isn't finished yet... because its early access) This is not a point.
Overall, the game is unforgiving, I agree the punishment is too high if you die far away. But the map being "too big" is not a thing. The game isn't done yet and will have reasons to go out there. And sailing, it has plenty to manage with wind, serpents, storms... oh and its early access... they've said for a while now that oceans will have more. So scrap that.
And things like "I jumped a mile out of my boat and couldn't swim back because I was mining on the back of the kraken and it submerged and my stamina was gone due to mining"... No. Sorry, thats just one of the few "negative" things you listed that is literally just filler for the video. 1. Don't jump far out of the boat, go closer to land, early game teaches you that swimming far sucks. 2. The island starts rumbling and foaming around the water before sinking... its a que to pay attention and be ready. If you keep mining, thats on you.
I just feel like due to some instances, you had a bad taste in your mouth and attacked things that really don't deserve to be attacked. So, ridiculous amounts of mats for crafting, sure thats a bit much. Portals being halted by materials not being able to go through? yeah, thats another iffy thing. But distance of bosses? hp amounts of an endgame boss? cold effects on a mountain you have to manage, so you run off the mountain with plenty of xp left.. but die because you jump off a high area? nah.
Nobody even complained that No mans Sky is too big. Now this guy thinking Valheim is big.
Tedious =/= hard
After watching the entire video, my final comment regarding the criticism: As Obi-Wan Kenobi said to Luke about Darth Vader being his father, "many of the truths we hold on to, depend greatly on our point of view."
I don't think Valheim is intended for "casual" players who will play once and move on to the next game. Valhelm rewards players who stick with the game long enough to become expert players. In this respect, I believe your criticisms of the game aren't wrong, but rather from a certain point of view. For example, I prefer playing Valheim hardcore-style now. I don't just lose skill points and do a corpse run; I start over from scratch - new toon and new world. Each time I play a new toon and world, I learn so many new things. This is a wonderful reward as I feel a bit like Neo learning how to control the Matrix. I commented along the way how the problems you encountered could be resolved - at least to some extent. Does this mean there isn't grinding? No! The game is centered on the theme of grinding. However, I believe you can get away with a lot less grinding than what you experienced.
Does Valheim need improvements? Yes. However, the devs seem to be sticking to their intended design and I'll call that a good thing - even if it doesn't appeal to a lot of players. I'm not implying the devs aren't listening to their target market audience, but they are doing so without trying to be everything to everyone: an approach that has ruined many games.
Eventhough this video is 2 years old, I found it pretty interesting and thus wanted to share my thoughts on the matter.
I do agree with most things stated by you i.e.:
-Not being able to transport ore through Portals is pretty annoying and stupid (luckily they changed that).
-The world is way too vast and boss location stones are too rare (still).
-Bosses (after The Elder) have too much health.
Especially the Queen (added in the Mistlands expansion). Honestly, who thought it'd be a fun idea to have a boss's health pool exceed your weapon durability?
-Not being able to see crafting recepies is rather annoying and inconvenient.
But I do disagree with your opinion on grinding and death mechanics.
-Death
Placing portals without protection in unsafe locations on far away islands is imo a "you" issue, not a game issue.
After realizing now harsh the consequences can be, there's no reason to continue being so reckless.
Same goes for the mountains. Since the biome is rather small, placing a portal in one or two of the mountain structures will ensure that you get your stuff back, even without frost resist.
-Grinding
Honestly, yeah the game's pretty grindy and the grind is boring.
But to me this was rather a perk, than a let-down because it forces you to make a deccission.
How powerful do you want to be vs How much grinding are you willing to do.
I do understand that it's not for everyone and I certainly wouldn't want to have that kind of grind in every game.
But in Valheim, it lead to me having a more interesting game experience (except for the many hours of tree cutting to gather the ungodly amounts of wood required to build a comfy base).
"Steam missing the objective Review" meanwhile the title of the video being that it is bad
Agreed. After coming back to this game after a long break, I share the same sentiments. The artificially inflated grind and travel becomes so boring after a while. It's surely not a game I would solo anymore. I'm hardly even interested in the game for that matter because of all the reasons you state.
I saw a video titled honest review of Valheim that has comments turned off. This one, advertised as a negative review, has them on. +1 for that.
I will agree that the resources needed for later game items gets pretty damn ridiculous. I've noticed that once you get to mountain tier, items start taking some of every resource needed to craft it, to upgrade it as well.
Yes, the worlds are too big for what the game is right now. Plus there seems to be a habit of plains biomes wrapping around swamp biomes and the like on the farther reaches of of world. Like it replaces what should otherwise be meadows, or something. I wish that the islands made a bit more sense when it came to biome levels, like bigger mountains and plains being less common near the center, and more common on the outskirts. Rather than almost every island that isn't in the center of the world containing some plains, and meadows being almost non existent outside of the starter island, and maybe the next island over.
I like sailing well enough, though I wish there was more than one oar. That way when the wind isn't with you, the whole group of people can row quickly. I wish there was a bit more to do between islands than watch out for rocks, mine on top of leviathans, and hunt serpents.
You really have to prepare, and be careful, when you go to another island. Because yeah, dying on a new island without having a portal set up somewhere safe, is a crushing blow.
I am going to go check if you did one already, but I would love to see you compare Valheim today to this commentary, see how many complaints you had have been addressed.
I'm happy to see at least some criticism about this game. After spending at least 20 hours of mindlessly running back and forth between copper veins or crypts in order to grind the materials for upgrades, all the while being attacked by mobs every 2 minutes, I had enough of the tedium and gave up. Valheim has a lot of charme and i would have loved to build me a fine castle and farm in the meadows, but it simply has too many elements that are deliberately designed to waste your time as much as possible. Maybe it will change with upgrades, but for now, i have no interest in playing any further and do the same repetitive tasks over and over again.
Your channel is great btw. Keep it up.
thats the point of most if not all rpg, you do have to grind at some point...if you want better gear...or you just skill up like crazy...which is what I'm doing now..I'm about the same hrs played as you...
learn how to manage your stamina...learn how to parry better...learn when to run away...if someone is chasing you in the black forest, at some point they will stop..this happens all the time, they will not go the meadows...except for those that are found in meadows..
I don't agree with everything but many points are understandable. That's why in my reviewed I said:
- need a way to teach new players biome order
- need a way to change the game difficulty (not adapted to everyone). Game difficulty could affect the grind aspect (lower material costs). Unfortunatly for some players the grind isn't much and for others it is.
- a way to fix repetitive death because most of players will just run with nothing to their grave. Repetitive death can be a really high issue when played in solo
never got boss location issues. I haven't played mistlands mucht but there might be some fixing in that biome.
Overall it's still a great game and most of players will like the 1st 10 hours (you have to accept you prob wont finish all the boss fights)
I so agree on this, while the game hasn't been hard for me at all until I got to plains. Valheim pretty much sucks, and I'm kinda mad that I was fooled to buy the game from the reviews. Only after about 60+ hours I see the problems it has, and only thing I have to say is that this game is ass.
I love Valheim! The sailing is cool, although I agree it can be a bit tedious. Luckily though because I took my time in each biome and made big bases in each of the biomes before moving on to the next I was able to space out my time between each ship
voyage. It helped counteract the feeling that sailing was a chore. It felt more fresh every time I’d go sailing because I didn’t do it as often
Imagine if real Vikings whined about "The New World is too far". I love your "like a Viking" approach: build bases as you expand your empire. Just like a Viking.
The biggest problem with Valheim is the graphics and the fact that you get slowed when swinging a sword.
I love all the things that you dont
When the fun slowly fades away and gives room to all the frustration... I was thinking, I can't be the only one, this is just ridiculous!
Btw, reminded me exactly of Ark in the first year of early access - anyone who was not cranking up server settings didn't have any idea about the difference between proving your skill and the simplest things just taking stupid amounts of time!
I love mining a whole copper deposit that took almost 1 hr irl. I love sailing long distances to explore new landmass. I love the frustation of died in the middle of the ocean. I. Fuckin. Love It.
But I do hate the item restriction of portals. For. No. Fuckin. Reason.
So I will hit the like button for the rarity of seeing a different opinion on my youtube suggestion.
As someone with a couple hundred hours in both the vanilla game and modded, I can easily say this critique still holds alot of valid points to this day. I will die on the hill that this game would be an easy sell to anyone if the world was at least 50 smaller. There is currently 7 biomes as of writing, 8 technically but the deep north isn't finished yet. The mistlands and especially the Ashlands will have you sailing IMMENSE distances only to be met by swarms of mobs that if you prepared for them, arent that big of a deal, but the magic comes from leaning and not looking stuff up on your first play through, so naturally you'll have 0 clue what to bring to prepare for where you're going. To add there still is the gigantic punishment for dying, even with the new difficulty modifiers, that most if not all your gear will be outright gone
I will say with the new modifiers they've added with the most recent update, you can make the game significantly less grindy. I went from a new character to Ashlands in about a week of playing a few hours a day after work with only 1.5x resources and portaling metals turned on. Still, the massive trips you'll be making to the mist lands and ashlands will be so insanely long, that you'll start to wonder if it's worth it, and what sucks is it kind of is. The new content they've added is sick, but its gatekept by some insane grinds and boring boat trips that get old after 20 minutes of open sea.
My solution to the portals is to:
1. Go to X location and set a portal
2. log off and make a separate world to put your ores in,
3. Rejoin the main world and go home
4. go back to the new world to retrieve your ore
5. and finally be at home with your ore
this skips the tedious process but the fact that I have to do this is bad game design
✨ portal ✨