Valheim is an amazing open world survival game with some QoL hiccups that can be easily remedied with mods.

In addition to most of your actions having XP and Levels, Valheim has the classic loop of: Gather materials > Upgrade your Gear > Fight Boss > Gather better materials with upgraded gear, rinse and repeat. A very addicting dopamine cycle that feels rewarding.

And for those who want to unwind, the game also provides the player with simple yet effective landscaping tools and a surprisingly complex building system. You can't just place blocks anywhere willy nilly, everything has to have a foundation or support to stay where it is placed. This turns building a large/tall structure into a bit of a puzzle, trying to turn your vision into an actually stable building. There's also farming and animal husbandry that goes hand in hand with landscaping and building to create some visually stunning AND functional bases.

The combat in the game is also fairly good, but has some issues that make it frustrating from time to time. The balance of using stamina for both attacking AND running makes it hard to kite enemies effectively, which makes some fights very exciting. And when you've got a shield, this lets you do one of my favourite moves in video games, parrying! If you time a block right before an enemy attack lands, you parry their attack which stuns them for a short duration. During this stun, your attacks do critical damage as the reward in addition to the enemy being unable to attack during the stun.
The issues that make fighting more annoying are height difference, where if you're fighting on a hill and the enemy is either below or above you, your attacks will very rarely land. There's also surrounding objects, since nearly everything in Valheim takes damage, including buildings, walls, the ground, bushes etc. and doing damage to multiple targets in one attack spreads your damage out, this leads to combat in tight corridors or small buildings a lot slower since your damage is being spread out to random walls or trees.

With Valheim having such a huge open world, it uses portals to aid with long distance back and forth travel. This is incredibly useful to save some time and make the game less of a walking simulator. But for some reason, some of the most important materials that you spend a lot of your time gathering from far away locations are excluded. You cannot bring ores or smelted bars through the portals with you. I can't think of a great reason for this decision other than encouraging multiple bases near some more dangerous areas, but the people that don't wish to do that will simply just build a boat to fill and use that to transport the metals to their home base. And depending on the wind, that trip might take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes of doing barely anything. Thankfully this is easily addressed with mods that make metals transportable through portals, but I wish the vanilla game had at least a command or world setting where it allows you to choose what can go through a portal.

Overall an awesome game with some very minor issues.

This game without mods is kind of boring. This game is still clearly being put together to have a full vanilla experience. I suspect that at the end of content rollout, probably won't hit as satisfactorily what you can get out of these mother fucking mods.

The mods in Valheim make Vlaheim worth talking about, because without them to curate finely-tuned server experiences.

I'm running this game in steam on the open beta playtest version of the game that allows this and that mods to make this run fuckin SICK.

Right now I'm playing in a private server with 15 other people with ValheimPlus and like the other 4 top downloaded mods you can find on rmodman2. It is extraordinarily fun to run through a relatively normie experience with so many quality of life features I cannot list them here; with a buncha guys who love base building, farming mats, and making a wolf breeding pit to create dozens of wolf dogs that destroy everything that wanders close to our fully moated castle town called Piss Village.

I'm so into Valheim I'm going to do a hardcore combat run where the map is turned off, leaving to have to craft physical waypoints to what location you need to go to. It's gonna be insane.

So yeah, vanilla Valheim? Aight.

Modded Valheim? It's now the best survival game.

> be a tiny dev team and release your game after many years in development
> generally a pretty fun game, a bit grindy but it doesn't really bother most people that much when everything is new and they're exploring the world for the first time
> sell millions of copies in the first weeks alone
> don't substantially expand the size of of your dev team with newly acquired wealth, buy a horse instead (real)
> downsize first roadmap for new content because: more players = more bugs and problems found that need taking care of
> majority of people stop playing with the intent of returning for new updates (as is expected)
> tiny dev team struggles with putting out new content at pace they had anticipated and makes basically no change to the regular progression
> big update comes out
> (most) people make new characters/worlds
> menial and grindy stuff that was easy to look past before is now thrust into the foreground, 'I can't wait to get all this [INSERT METAL] for our group so that we can go to the next biome and do it all over again slightly differently!!!'
> get bored

Of course this isn't true for everyone, and I personally think this game is pretty good! I've played a lot of it, but without friends there isn't much of an argument to made for it.. The real shame is how much potential there was (and there still is) for this game to evolve and improve, but with a small team it's a slow process.

Unless they adjust the progression somehow OR ship every new update with a machine that makes me forget everything about the game, I'm not coming back.
But it's probably in a great state if you haven't played it before!

+ fun gameplay and survival.
+ cool nordic backdrop
+ good with friends especially just to chill

- way too much grind, probably to pad out playtime
- the game doesn't really develop, it kinda just stays the same
- progression is too slow paced for me

i do enjoy the Collect And Create Until The Next Boss Unlocks New Content aspect of the game, BUT i do not like how i you need 40 copper per item you need for bronze materials when you can only carry maybe 20 copper per mining trip.

no in-game menu showing you what you've learned to craft???? i don't mind pulling up wikis for a game, but only if the wikis are good. unfortunately, valheim's wikis are not good. not that a game's wiki determines its fun. it's just that when a game's required to have a wiki in order to know wtf im doing, it adds to the game's experience.

i just can't get past this early part of the game without feeling like im wasting my time.