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Impressions: Enshrouded 1.0
After 118 hours of Valheim, it’s time for me to play the games I should be playing find another survival crafting game. Enshrouded 1.0 it is!
About two years ago, I was pretty down on Enshrouded generally. At the time, I had just came off of Nightingale, which expanded the boundaries of the survival crafting envelope in interesting ways. Enshrouded… did not. At least, not visibly. Coming back into Enshrouded after half a dozen updates and the 1.0 release, I was cautiously optimistic.
The results after 30 hours are… inconclusive.
I have rewritten this post four times already, oscillating between “X but worse” and “doing its own thing.” For example, the game has a lot of “Valheim but worse” vibes. There are light attacks and heavy attacks and a dodge/parry mechanic with bonus break/overpower; there are food buffs you can stack as long as they are different; it is important to be both rested and not wet. However, it is also very much not like Valheim in an arguably larger amount of ways. You can fast travel at any time you are not actively in the Shroud; there are no building physics, and you can easily have floating bases; there are XP and levels and skill trees and random loot and gem enhancements. So… closer to an Action RPG then? Yeah, maybe. But it does have the slower things, attacks are limited to like four buttons, and some rather cleverly hidden treasure chests (etc).
What I can confidently say is that if you come into Enshrouded with expectations, you will be disappointed. If you don’t, you won’t. Probably.
For myself, I am in the “no longer disappointed” category. It took a while to get here. One consistent bit of friction is how much of the gameplay seemingly revolves around stopping the flow and returning back to your base. Item durability is awful, your bag space is limited considering the various amount of bits it gets stuffed with, and pretty much everything seems designed around doing something, porting home to offload, and then porting back and doing something else. I suppose you could technically ignore some of those things by deleting resources instead of hoarding everything, and also bringing a Workbench with you for repairs when you plop down a new “base” (which creates a spawn/teleport point). Or, you know, just turn off durability altogether in the Settings menu.
Having said that, Enshrouded is gorgeous. The lighting, the terrain, the fine details in the grass, enshroomed Shrouded areas, the caves, the skyboxes, all of it. The vistas are particularly amazing, and even more so for the fact that you can actually travel to everything that you can see. This is less unique in 2026 than it was in Skyrim – you can go everywhere in Valheim and Palworld and ARK too – but it is still appreciated.
Also, the music is extremely good. It’s sweeping when you need to be swept, claustrophobic when claustroed, and segues smoothly between each. I especially like how the voiceover for the notes you find will pause once you get in combat. There are some games that won’t, or will start the whole thing over again, or other annoying variations.
Anyway, that’s Enshrouded thus far. I’m going to continue playing as long as I’m experiencing a nominal amount of fun, but I’m not inclined to push through once the fun ends like I did with Valheim.
Valheim Complete
After a very long and otherwise boring final fight, I have been welcomed into the halls of Valhalla. I logged 47 hours in Valheim back in the pre-Mistlands Early Access dayd, so that puts me at… 118 hours played in 1.0 from a fresh start to the victory lap home at the end of (in-game) Day 250.
To provide some necessary context, I played Valheim with zero mods. However, I did change resource drops to 1.5x, the Death Penalty to Casual (keep equipped items), and Portals set to allow all items (which includes metal). Per the game notes, that last option “circumvents the progression and exploration of the world as it is intended.” Which is kind of hilarious in the context of the game already taking 118 hours to beat, let alone how much more time it would take having to sail across the world with a ship full of iron ore every time.
Actually, this is something I want to talk about in finer detail.
In case you haven’t played Valheim… well, why the hell are you reading this post? Anyway, here’s the deal: fairly early after you defeat the first boss, you unlock the ability to craft portals. Plop one down, give it a unique name, then go exploring wherever and plop down a second portal, give it the same unique name, and bam. Instant teleportation between those two points. The rub is that both metal ore and metal ingots cannot go through the portal; if either of those things are in your inventory, the portal simply does not work. If you commit to a single mega-base, that means every ore run requires you to travel by cart or boat all the way back the hard way. Alternatively, you could theoretically set up a series of forward operating bases (FOBs) in each biome, smelting and crafting any new ores onsite. Ore/Ingots are bad, but finished weapons or armor is fine.
Back in Early Access, I did play the “intended” way, largely because I don’t think there was another option. It works to a point. The logistical trouble comes later on, when you are no longer on the same continent as your primary base. As the tiers progress, you can’t just slap down a Forge or Workbench and build the latest gear. Instead, you are going to need to craft ancillary furniture like Forge Bellows or a Grinding Wheel to “level up” the Forge and unlock new recipes. And this furniture requires older resources like Copper or Chain (etc), which means you either need to bring some with you from your stash, or go raid earlier biomes on the new continent, which means potentially more FOBs, and so on.
What you will notice is that none of this is particular hard. Or tricky. Or mentally challenging whatsoever. There is the constant fear of death, as by default you drop literally everything on your person. Were you deep in hostile territory and not yet plopped down a destination portal? Well, good luck! You can attempt the classical corpse run to retrieve your gear, and Valheim actually throws you a bone with a massive damage reduction upon picking up your stuff… but it does so mostly because it still requires you to equip the gear, which is not instant.
I actually played with the default Death Penalty in this 1.0 run, up until I got to the Mountain biome. Up there, the cold deals damage every second unless you have Frost Resistance from a cape or Mead consumable. So, I died and dropped all my best gear, did a corpse run with a belly full of Mead and second best gear, died again, and… realized that I had nothing else. No more gear, no more Mead. I would either have to continue making corpse runs in the hopes of luring away the mobs loitering around my corpse – which is totally an extra “fuck you” the devs put in – or practically start back over with sticks and stones. Eventually, I did “corpse hop” enough to get my original gear down the mountain, but I thereafter reduced the penalty to the lowest setting. Which still does drop everything but your equipped armor and whatever you were actively using in your hand, but at least it is not as (emotionally) devastating.
Nevertheless, even a default death penalty is a solvable problem: by outrageous, repetitive, mind-numbing grinding. Unlock that newest tier of gear and craft a set? Great! Now craft another full set or three. Pepper the landscape in FOBs and portals until you need an Excel sheet to document your portal naming conventions. You can type stuff on the map itself, if you can stand the clutter.
The bottom line is that the “intended” way of playing Valheim is apparently only for those who enjoy spending 500 hours playing the equivalent of an extraction shooter.
Or, hear me out: playing with other people.
Bosses gain more HP when multiple players are around, but know what doesn’t scale up? The fact that more players equals more carry weight, more inventory slots, more simultaneous boats, more help defeating mobs guarding your corpse. Sure, technically more players means twice as many meals and ingots need to be farmed as normal. But you probably don’t need each player to have 2+ suits of backup gear because the odds of both (or all) players go down is lower. Also, division of labor means that someone else can be crafting or cooking at home while others are out gathering resources. Everything is easier.
That is a whole lot of words to seemingly justify my difficulty slider decisions, in what is technically a single-player game. What I wanted to point out is that I actually appreciated the design vision the Valheim devs had for the game. I just don’t think the execution landed well in a solo world.
And, well, exploration kinda sucks in Valheim too; there are not very many unique POIs in the biomes, or secret biomes, or special gear, or any particular reason to suspect a particular Black Forest is any different than the last six Black Forests you walked through. You do technically get XP for killing mobs with specific weapons, but the practical effects each of each level up are hard to divine, and hardly matter anyway until you reach certain (invisible) breakpoints.
Anyway, I do give Valheim credit for some its systems, like keeping food/cooking important from Day 1 all the way to the endgame. The soundtrack is excellent, even though there is only like 1 song per biome. Combat feels weighty and important. There are a large variety of weapons and playstyles possible. The building system is fantastic and coherent. The Grappling Hook and Feather Cape combo is immensely satisfying.
At the same time, the survival crafting genre has gotten a lot more crowded in the intervening years. The old guard continue to get updates, and the newcomers bring genre-based Quality of Life improvements that practically poison the well. It’s 2026 and you can’t automatically pull mats from your chests? Or auto-sort them? There is something to be said about immersion, but conveniently no one is talking about going back to checkpoint-based saves or how you can repair gear for free even in Valheim. It all just feels very silly to ask the player to waddle across the floor with 1000 pounds of metal in their inventory just to preserve… what, exactly? The Viking magic? Meanwhile, I’ll be over here zipping around like Spiderman because it’s faster than traveling by boat, before getting to my Greydwarf spawner/Blood Magic farm outpost because actually raising the skill any legitimate way is almost impossible.
So, yeah, Valheim. It’s worth trying out if you’re a genre fan, but don’t feel bad if you don’t like it.
Mistlands Complete
Just wanted to make a quick note here that I have completed the Mistlands in Valheim.
You know, for all the people complaining about the Mistlands, I found it surprisingly… fine.
As the name suggests, the entire region in shrouded in fog all the time. Your original access to the biome is soft-gated by your ability to craft an accessory that clears a 10m bubble around yourself to let you see where you’re going. After felling the first Yggdrasill sapling, you unlock a recipe for creating a sort of wisp-based standing torch that clears out a 20m bubble wherever it is dropped. Maybe this torch was buffed for the 1.0 release or something, but its existence – and my extensive experience playing Minecraft – meant the mists were simply a matter of spamming the torches everywhere. So, I did. And it was fine.
In fact, I would say it is more than fine: the Mistlands has been fantastic. It might even be my favorite biome thus far. You have obviously been able to see the giant roots of Yggdrarsill in the sky since Day 1 in the Meadows; in the Mistlands though, you can tap its very roots. You scavenge the petrified bones of ancient giants, cracking open their skulls to mine their Soft Tissue (i.e. brains) so you can feed it into a woodchipper-like machine to distill its essence to make magic gear. Their enormous helms and swords can be broken down for Copper and Iron too. The Gjall legit evoked a primal, Silent Hill-level of fear with its fog horn warning cry in the distance.
Look at those screenshots.
Anyway, I will say that the Queen fight was some outrageous bullshit. I have the death penalty set to the lowest level, which means I get to keep any equipped gear. Even then, it took like twelve deaths across five in-game days to make any meaningful progress. I can’t even imagine running around naked, chased by 30 bugs, trying to retrieve your corpse on the 3rd floor or whatever. Several times I got pushed into a corner with the spit attack, which then spawns a bunch of grubs, which prevented me from leaving said corner. Then I died. It is possible I should have been using the 2H hammer or whatever, but I literally had zero skill in the weapon, so I stuck with magic and 1H hammer + shield.
Anyway, I eventually won. And now onwards to the Ashlands.
Valheim “Exploration”
I’m going to come out and say it: Valheim’s “exploration” is shit.
It may come as somewhat of a shock, but I am not an Explorer. Per se. I enjoy survival crafting games, and one of the biggest decisions you make in them is where you want to build your base. As such, I will happily traverse the world in search for the perfect location, and am always reevaluating the merits of better ones. Coming across rare resources, especially ones that regenerate, tickles my fancy. Nary a waterfall escapes examination for secret caves. I do pause for sunsets.
At the same time, rearranging a room with four objects doesn’t generate an infinite amount of novelty.
Valheim will procedurally generate a world for you with appropriate biomes scattered about, and then randomly populate those biomes with progression-required resources/POIs (points of interest). It is not enough to find just any Swamp, you must find a Swamp with a Sunken Crypt, before getting access to enough Scrap Iron to build better gear. This particular aspect is annoying, but not backbreaking.
What quickly becomes backbreaking is the additional layer of RNG: locating the randomly-assigned boss-locator tablet, which only appears in certain randomly-distributed POIs a percentage of the time. It is not enough to find an abandoned stone tower in the Mountains, you must find enough to get enough dice rolls to have one spawn the tablet.
The variability is a problem, but not the biggest one. The problem is how you can be “done” with all the progression in a biome and yet still have to spend several real-life hours “exploring” for these POIs. Meanwhile, there is nothing new for you to encounter. Is the terrain different? Sure. But that’s it. Maybe you find a better location for reconstructing a Plains base or whatever, but are you really going to move everything right as you’re looking for the Plains boss so you can head to the next biome? Certain POIs will have treasure chests, but the contents of them are all standard resources. None of the hostile mobs you encounter will be any different than the ones you defeated hours ago with worse gear.
The initial foray in the unknown? Premium tier. Walking into a new biome for the first time is a terrifying experience. What should you be looking for? How deadly could a “Deathsquitto” really be (spoilers: very)? Progression feels good as you slowly upgrade your armor and weapons, making the dangers a little bit less so.
But then… there’s a gap. Sometimes a gulf, between you and even locating the boss you have prepared yourself to tackle. And Valheim nevertheless requires you to drudge around for… some reason. Ambiance? Hubris? Maybe they expect you to die and lose all your gear and then need to re-smelt all the ore and collect all the resources all over again somewhere else? It’s dumb.
I did not think it was possible to create an exploration system worse than Starfield, but the Valheim devs did it. Because at least in Starfield, it wasn’t required.
I’m currently in the Mistlands, and do you know how things have went thus far? The very first place I docked my boat had the POI that you need to raid for progression material. And inside that same POI was the tablet that showed me the boss location. Do you know what it didn’t have? Enough progression material to actually build the crafting tables to make the new weapons/armor/etc. Sounds like the reverse problem to what I had earlier, right? But this time I will be rewarded for my hunt for another POI with access to all kinds of new weapons and armor. Even if I have to go to a completely different Mistlands area, the carrot is still on the stick. In just about every other biome up to this point, the carrot was long gone, and it was just all stick. And that’s shit design, IMO.
I do (thus far) appreciate what the devs have been able to accomplish with Valheim given its spartan design. This does not feel like a game that only takes up 4.23 GB of space. Nevertheless, I do feel like they have hewn things a bit too much to the bone. If it goes against their design principles to have a sort of “pity timer” that will guarantee the boss tablet by the third POI or some way to spend a bunch of resources to divine the location yourself, it would be helpful to at least pepper some random useful shit across these biomes we slog through.
Valheim’s Subtle, Genius Design
I am going to complain about Valheim later, but before I do so, I wanted to get some words out in praise of some of its subtler elements of genius design. Specifically, there are two main elements: food and base-building. I’m going to talk about both as someone still in the Plains biome.
Counter-intuitively, in many survival-crafting games food is usually an afterthought. There might be a time period right at the beginning where you are scrounging for edibles anywhere you can, but thereafter hunger is just another meter you manage. Or more accurately, a meter you forget about completely until it is actively flashing at you. Certain “late-game” foods might provide specific buffs to damage or whatever, but it is clearly a bonus reward to encourage you to treat the design with more seriousness than it ever truly merits.
This is not at all the case with Valheim: your next meal is always top of mind at every stage of the game. And it achieves this, ironically, with no technical penalty for not eating. You will never starve to death in Valheim. Instead, you will… just have the default amount of HP and Stamina. Which is fine for a minute in the early game, but becomes a brutal setback nearly anywhere else.
In Valheim, you have three “slots” for food. Each piece of food grants you some amount of extra HP, Stamina, and healing per interval. However, you can’t just eat the same thing three times, as the food slots are mutually exclusive. This automatically elevates the food/cooking system way past almost all traditional survival crafting games, into the realm of Green Hell and similar ones that track individual macros like Protein and Carbs. Unlike the super technical ones though, Valheim doesn’t care if you eat the same three (unique) dishes each day, nor does it bear the same burden of UI overhead. Food just gives the same three stats in varying amounts, for varying amounts of time. Want to subsist on just Turnips and Onions and Onion Soup? Go for it… but good luck not getting one-shot in the next biome.
As a sidebar, I also appreciate what Valheim does (thus far) when it comes to obsoletion of materials as you progress. After defeating a boss, you typically unlock something that allows you to process the next biome’s materials, which you need in order to take on the next boss. That’s pretty standard. What has been nice though, is that food/equipment still makes use of older ingredients in fairly rational ways. Some might find this grindy to have to head back into the Swamp for Iron or Blood Bags or whatever, but I appreciate the (usually) measured approach of some items requiring older mats.
Finally, I want to talk about the meat (ahem) of the genius design: the campfire.
Real talk, Valheim slaughtered the sacred cow that almost every survival game raised without even knowing it, e.g. fires producing smoke. In almost every other game, you start by building a 2×2 box for a base, and throw everything inside… including the campfire. After all, rain will put a camp fire out, and you cannot fast-forward the night without being within a certain radius of a lit fire. In Valheim, however, unventilated fires also produce smoke, which creates a damaging debuff which can kill you.
And that’s it. One simple change elevates the game beyond many of its peers in the genre. Not because it’s realistic (it is), but because of what it changes about how the player approaches base design. My own progression went something like this:
- Builds a 2×2 square box… ouch, getting smoked out
- Builds a 3×3 box with the center tile open… and it rained
- Get annoyed, place the campfire outside with a janky lean-to protecting it
- Get annoyed standing in the rain to cook my own food. Hmm.
- Put campfire back in the middle of 3×3 box, create a 1×1 elevated roof. It works!
- Get annoyed accidentally walking into campfire so many times
- Tear down wall in back corner, place campfire there, with a “range hood”. It works!
- ???
- Realize why (fantasy) Viking architecture all looks like the way it does
It may not seem revolutionary that a game with Viking-themed set pieces ends up encouraging players to build Viking-looking bases. But consider how the genre’s bar for successfully encouraging anything beyond a wooden survival cube is practically nonexistent. The closest I have felt to such an inspired synergy between mechanics and aesthetics was Nightingale, which wore its Valheim inspirations on its lanternpunk sleeve.
In any case, my compliments to the devs on these two, specific points.
Valheim 1.0 – It’s All Coming Back
In another distraction from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I started back up the new Valheim 1.0.
Although I had previously played for apparently 46.7 hours, it had been such a long time since then that I had forgotten everything there was about Valheim. Well, almost everything. I remembered that you can’t build a camp fire inside of your hut, but that was about it. Seriously, it was Day 3 before I built up the courage to kill a boar, as I had imagined them being some tough enemy for which I would need to defeat with a bow. As it turns out, they die in almost one hit, and drop the material you needed to craft a bow. I must have been thinking about all those blog posts about Windrose…
After defeating the first boss and heading into the Black Forest, antler-pickaxe in hand, I started to feel the familiar shape of outrageous bullshit. I was able to find Tin ore along the coastlines fairly quickly. Copper took a lot longer, as I had forgotten what it looked like (mossy boulder identical to other mossy boulders). Neither of the resources would do me any good though, without the red cubes inside the Burial Mounds. Which are in the Black Forest. Just not in any of your Black Forests.
I already linked them, but in my prior Valheim experience, I had to “explore” and essentially discard five Swamps and seven Mountains before finding those biome-specific resources. So, I guess hitting up seven different Black Forests in 1.0 is still par for the course. Fantastic. I suppose I should count myself lucky that any Burial Mounds spawned on my starting island at all; I have heard tale of people having to sail to new lands on the slow, beginning raft just to smelt ore.
It’s just ridiculously frustrating in what feels like a genuinely unique way. If I’m playing Terraria or Minecraft or ARK or whatever else, I’m not expecting Copper Nodes in the very first rock I crack open, or even the first place I look. In that respect, searching forever and then finding literally five Burial Mounds within 100 feet of each other is not a completely uncommon genre staple. The key difference with Valheim then is… well, the outrageous slog of it all. Playing Terraria is fun and engaging. Running/walking through environments, avoiding all combat because it’s pointless, is not.
And actually, I’m finding combat almost entirely unavoidable. Things might be different now that I have decked myself out in troll-skin armor (raises Sneakiness), but smaller mobs in Valheim don’t ever appear to leash or otherwise de-aggro. Found that out the hard way, several times, while spending in-game days looking for Burial Mounds. Nope, you need to stop what you are doing and defeat every trash mob you encounter and throw away its pointless loot, lest you get caught on some logs or stumble into a spawning nest.
Again, I’m not necessarily asking for a chicken in every pot. It would probably be a very short game if you found the dungeon at the entrance of the every new biome you walked into. But I am not exactly sure that the way Valheim handles exploration overall is especially fun. Specifically, the overland part. Sailing is it’s own thing, and I can see the fun in provisioning for adventure, setting up return portals, the tension between moving your entire base versus setting up outposts, etc. Running around by foot is just running around. That and the godawful trash mobs, which will only grow more annoying, I know.
We’ll see how it goes. This initial (re-)experience was very bad, but now that I have a Smelter and am (slowly) cranking out Bronze ingots? I having some… if not fun, at least some satisfaction. Copper/Tin/Bronze opened up so many recipes that I am slowly planning out my upgrades, testing new weapons, and spending some time improving my Viking crib. Which you wouldn’t necessarily notice just looking at it, but that’s because I’m giving it the old college try before following a base build video.
I recall the Swamp being a relatively miserable experience, and that’s what I have to look forward to after defeating the boss of the Black Forest. Then comes Mountains, which I believe was fine. Then… the Plains? Mosquitoland? Never actually quested in there after finishing the Mountains, so that will be all new. Assuming I make it. Which I probably will. Maybe.
Gaming News Roundup
A lot of gaming news came out this week. Here is what I have been keeping an eye on.
Fable (Feb 2027)
I never got into the Fable series back in the day, as they were XBox exclusives for a long while. Technically, the first and third entries are in my Steam library, but Fable 3 crashing during an auto-save didn’t cut it in 2016, let alone a decade later. What is cutting things, is this 30-minute gameplay trailer.
The systems presented are very gamified, as I am sure the originals were as well, but I was impressed nonetheless with the overall game vibe. “Romance any random NPC” telegraphs that romance isn’t that deep, but maybe that doesn’t matter if you take a shining to a particular barkeep or general narrative. No doubt there will be forum posts detailing RimWorld-esque grotesqueries such as swooning the orphan whose parents you murdered for no reason.
But you know what? Good on them. When you build a sandbox, sometimes you are going to uncover some buried shit.
Anyway, I’m excited. It’s also going to be on Game Pass, so there’s that too.
Palworld 1.0 (July 10th)
After my original forays into Palworld two years ago, I have not touched the game since. While the zeitgeist has moved on, I was waiting for precisely this particular bit of news, e.g. a version 1.0 release. I do not have grand delusions that any developer takes versioning seriously, but if you are going to pick a particular point in time to make final determination as to the quality of a game, I figure 1.0 is about as good as anything.
You can watch the latest trailer here. It has nothing on the very original teaser trailer, but then again, nothing else really could.
Valheim 1.0 (September 9th)
Same deal as Palworld. Played for almost 50 hours five years ago, and stopped once I ran out of Early Access road (and encountered placeholder monster drops). I have some concerns about what I have heard about the Mistlands experience already in the game, but we shall see. Trailer here.
Abiotic Factor: Entropic Break (Autumn 2026)
I almost didn’t include this one, as I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. Specifically, Abiotic Factor is getting a DLC released later this year. Which is good! But I spent nearly 160 hours playing the game already, and I’m not certain whether I want (or am able to be) sucked in back in. Trailer here.
The Unknown
It’s a cliche, but I was thinking about “there’s nothing scarier than the unknown.” I find this to be literally true, although I haven’t asked whether its the case for people with, e.g. arachnophobia or similar.
In thinking about it though, “the unknown” isn’t exactly what I’m afraid of. Rather, the unknown is simply a placeholder for existing or imaginary fears. And since its a placeholder, it becomes dynamic and mutable based on whomever is experiencing it. This is handy in games, movies, etc.
What brought this up initially was my playing through Dead Island 2’s DLC content, Haus. The base game has plenty of jump scares – sometimes frustratingly unintentional, when zombies materialize from thin air – but Haus leaned into the whole creepy psychological nightmare house schtick. Which is fine, whatever. But I had a moment, in a particularly creepy room, where I thought “Oh, I bet they’re going to do X!” In this case, X is an overly-elaborate amalgamation of scenes from Silent Hill, Dead Space, and similar, that I won’t be getting into; solve for your own damn X.
Thing is, the devs couldn’t do it. The language of action necessary to do X wasn’t in the game. This isn’t Dead Space where an air duct could burst open and a giant tentacle kill you instantly if you fail the Quick Time Event. There are just… zombies, who attack you in predictable ways. Do the zombies crawl out of small sewer grates and other unexpected places? Sure. But zombies are zombies in Dead Island 2. I can panic when a Burster appears in close proximity, but that is a known hazard.
When you don’t know what the game can do, that’s when it’s scariest.
I’m reminded of when I first played Valheim, so long ago. The game was Early Access (still is), made by a small group of people (still is), and they were trying different things. For example, I don’t know of any other survival game in which chopping down trees requires my complete attention, lest I be crushed.
So, there I was, setting sail for the first time in search of… whatever. Vaguely, I knew about the existence of Serpents from Reddit posts, but not necessarily what they looked like, what their attack patterns were, or whether you could see them coming, outrun them, etc. And after a while of sailing, I started to think maybe they weren’t in the game at all.
Somehow, that actually made the situation worse. I started feeling uneasy any time I came across darker water, or other anomalous phenomenon (real or imagined). Wouldn’t it be just the worst if you were sailing along, oblivious, and then a dark shadow beneath your boat yawned, teeth the size of spears sprouting from the waves, while you and your boat disappear in an agonizing instant? Just me?
Anyway, as you can imagine, it was fun times when I encountered my first Leviathan and it sunk beneath the waves after my incessant barnacle trimming. This is it, I’m going to be eaten! It wasn’t. But for that first moment, it could have been, and Valheim got me.
Then lost me when I searched seven mountain ranges for a single goddamn silver node. Not bitter.
Too Early to Access
Early Access games are such a double-edged sword, right?
Conceptually, they are pretty brilliant. Games are risky projects that typically only give you a chance at profits years after development. With Early Access, you can release whatever you have handy – “Minimum Viable Product” in the gaming parlance – and gain money while you finish building out the rest of the game. Plus, sometimes you might actually get a piece of actionable feedback from the customers that changes the direction of the game. Win-win for the developer.
For me personally, Early Access games are Lose-Win at best.
I do not typically replay games. Between Humble Bundles and Epic Store giveaways and being a periodic MMO player, I have accumulated a largely insurmountable stockpile of games that makes it difficult to “justify” playing even ones I like a second time. So when I do buckle down and play an Early Access title, whatever stage of development it is in is typically the only version I experience. Which can sometimes be fine – not every game makes it out of Early Access. But many times I recognize that things are not fine, as I end up experiencing a worse version of an incomplete game that would have been a lot more fun had I waited.
There are a few exceptions to the rule. Well, one and a half: roguelikes and survival titles. Roguelikes, by their very nature, are “replayed” many times. I started playing Slay the Spire back when there were just two characters, for example, and continue(d) to play it now that there are four. Oxygen Not Included, RimWorld, and 7 Days to Die are in similar boats… that encourage or at least don’t punish re-boating.
Some survival games land further away from the roguelike spectrum and otherwise do not necessarily lend themselves towards repeated play. I have zero desire to play Valheim again, for example, until it is much closer to final release. Is there much of a practical difference between Valheim and 7 Days to Die? It’s hard to articulate, but the latter is more viscerally entertaining and a more varied experience. Both have procedurally-generated maps and such, but how many different bases are you going to create in Valheim really?
I bring all this up because a really, really want to play My Time at Sandrock. Which, you guessed it, just hit Early Access last week. A sequel of sorts to the original My Time at Portia, it has everything I want: basically being a sequel to a game I already put 108 hours into. Everything except… not being done.
What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“Early Access will begin with the single-player story model: players will be able to play some of the first act of the game’s story and have access to romance and friendship missions as we implement them.”
I can’t do it. Even if I imagined that I would pick one of the townsfolk to romance that had already been implemented, the “risk” is too great. “Risk” being uncharitably defined as making a choice that could result in a less satisfy gaming experience in the likely-only opportunity to play the game. Which is neurotic, I know, considering developers add choices to games to allow the opportunity for more people to enjoy themselves. But this brain meat is what I’m working with, so… yeah.
Incidentally, the other reason I’m bringing up this topic is because I was clued into a pre-Early Access game called Life Not Supported that’s basically Raft in space. As in, floating around and picking up space trash to build a space boat. Which reminded me that I spent 8 hours in Raft and enjoyed it and got the itch to play some more only to find that it is still in Early Access itself. And there’s a dev blog from January saying that Chapter 3 is delayed and they’ll be retooling the whole game once it comes out and I’d be better off not playing it until that occurs. At least, that’s the implication. Sigh.
Ashlands and the North
Oct 20
Posted by Azuriel
Still playing Valheim. I fully completed the Ashlands, and am on the final stages of the, er, final stage: Deep North. My original plan was to just simply wait until I finished the game before making this post, but I have been struggling to find the motivation to do either of those things.
The Ashlands, as the Mistlands before it, was not nearly as bad as everything I heard about it. Which is because they subsequently nerfed it. Back in 2018 I wrote a post called The Internet is Forever… Wrong, and that remains relevant today. Whenever I go out and search for Valheim information on whether X weapon or Y staff is worth creating, nearly every search result or Youtube video is from 2 years ago and referring to stats or functions that have changed half a dozen times in the interim. There are filtering options available, yeah, but precious few search results afterwards.
That said, the Ashlands is definitely still hostile territory. The seas are boiling, all wildlife is hostile, stuff will catch fire randomly. And then there is the lava. Good lord, the lava. I actually appreciated the challenge of the lava at first. You can clearly see buildings suspended in the lava, so I tried to build pillars made of the same material. Nope, they crumble instantly. Then I tried to terraform the ground up. Nope, now there is a raised pillar of lava. It would have been rather silly if you could defeat the Ashlands with a hoe, but you never know with survival games.
By the next session though, the Ashlands was basically over. Trying to get the Flametal Ore from the spires in the center of lava fields is an engineering challenge. And it used to be harder, with the spires sinking after a few minutes! Just stealing entire chests full of the ore from forts with big green beacons highlighting their position? Much easier. Then it was just a matter of defeating the next iteration of the devs’ latest attempt to get you to quit the game from their bullshit boss design: Fader.
Fader is an exercise in deep boredom and frustration. Every 30 seconds, the boss creates multiple 11m zones of fire under your feet. If you are in melee range, the fire prevents from hitting the boss anymore, so you have to move out. Every 25 seconds, meteors rain down from the sky. Every 45 seconds, the boss calls adds, some of which are ranged bow users. There are more abilities, but those three themselves often meant the following loop:
I eventually figured out that if I just kept running around at range, I could bait the fire to drop at range, and then maybe possibly get 3-4 melee hits in before some other bullshit happened. Bullshit being getting staggered by meteors, adds I didn’t kill, random other Ashland mobs who wandered into the boss area, getting launched into the lava by an Askvin, etc.
And props to the devs for making corpse retrieval as painful as physically (and emotionally) possible, even on the “easiest” difficulty. I’m not just talking about getting your corpse from the lava right next to a boss fight. I’m talking about how all these attacks create a lot of rock debris, which your character automatically picks up. So, when you run back to your corpse and try to hit “collect all”… you can’t do it. Or when it does work, you are overburdened and are desperately chucking things out of your inventory while under literal fire so you can move at normal speeds.
In any case, once my inventory and outside adds were taken care of, Fader eventually dies like the boring boss it is. Onward to the North!
…in which I am fighting Greydwarves and skeletons again? The upgraded troll is indeed upgraded, but nothing there is remotely at the same level as what I just got through. Which is kinda weird, right?
Thinking about it though, I started to realize something that had been bothering me since Mistlands. Specifically, how disjointed the newer biomes have felt in comparison with the originals. The Mistlands felt like a feature-rich biome, with more things than average: new enemies, new ways to get older resources, an entirely new item type (Eiter-fueled), the Grappling Hook, neutral NPCs, and so on. Ashlands? Not so much. The Deep North is similar, with recycled enemies, and random schematic grinding for some reason. Want to get the Vanguard set? Buckle up and kill certain Jotun for your 3% chance of a random one dropping!
I dunno. Maybe it is just me being done with the game way before the game is done. I have one more McGuffin to grab before I can summon the final boss, and then however long that takes to defeat. I’ve crafted like two items from this final tier, being in no particular hurry to make more as the enemies are dying just fine. In the Plains and Mistlands, I was fighting for my life for every upgrade. Not so much in Ashlands and Deep North.
Onwards and upwards, I guess.
Posted in Commentary, Impressions
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Tags: Ashlands, Deep North, Done Before It's Over, Emotional Damage, Valheim