izigame.me

After 3000+ hours of this game... I cannot recommend it. I know it is Early Access but several changes they have made and the new Ashlands Biome has me question their direction and the "type" of game they are making.

Valheim was this brutal yet cozy viking survival game in escencially a viking purgatory. It was steeped in some lore and low fantasy with some magic but fairly rare. The game progresses nicely but things start to take a drastic turn in the Mistlands and gets worse with Ashlands.

Mistlands adds Mages: glass canons for the most part but if played right they are pretty powerful compared to a Viking.
Ashlands is my real issue;
- Siege mechanics are broken and siege weapons from Mistlands and Ashlands are pretty useless. Balistae target everyone or 1 mob, they suck at shooting mobs but kill vikings nicely. The battering ram is good for breaking walls and the catapult is the top siege weapon and completely useless as it will only damage the forts in the ashlands... and not even the mobs in Ashlands. However, you don't even need to build siege weapons for the forts in Ashlands, you can just build a platform and cheese the fort, the take all the goodies, pointless.
- Mages get OP in Ashlands with 3+ new staves, one of which summons a powerful undead fire troll which kills everything.
- Vikings suck, I show up with my Ashlands gear, sword and board and I might as well just eat popcorn as my mage buddies flatten everything in Ashlands.... I thought this was a Viking game, not a high fantasy Mage game.
- The new boat, which you have to use to get to Ashlands is ridiculously huge and you need to sail in very tight spaces.. was this a Dev joke?
- Mob Density and respawn in Ashlands is ridiculously high, hours spent clearing an area you just cleared to progress... the grind is very annoying.
- Everything hits extremely hard to the point that any latency will get you killed.
- Ashlands is poorly optimized, the biome eats FPS, performance suffers if you want nice graphics.
- The end boss is nearly impossible to kill unless you are a Mage... what happened to Vikings?
- I run a server, lag is unforgiving. I even spoke with Smiffie, a Dev, in their discord about their networking and they have no plans to address it and say it is connection issues. They say the game was never meant to be multiplayer and best games are 2-3 people not more. Even with 2-3 in the same continent latency is awful due to their network architecture and packet handling (from what I understand). This is with everyone on fibre and 60ms ping to server. The Server is not the master, the clients are which makes for some interesting duping mechnics or deletion mechanics based on latency or disconnects from the server. If you want to play with more the 5 people in the same zone in Ashlands.... good luck, you will wake up dead.

Singleplayer game with multiplayer capability... sorta. The game has such a robust build engine that playing alone is a shame and this game naturally lends it's self to play with others, however, either the engine or the coding will not allow it to do so without major performance hits or lag. The Dev's have no intention of optimizing or revisiting the network architecture, this is from conversation with Smiffie.

Each new biome is taking longer and longer to develop. Mistlands was a full year out from Hearth and Home and was definitely well done even with the Mage addition. Ashlands was 1.5years after and well... feels broken and rushed. The siege mechanics are shockingly disappointing.

Power curve from biome to biome its exponential leaving me wondering what the Deep North will be like.

I was sold the idea that Valheim was a cozy casual yet brutal survival game and I fell it love with it; however, after recent developments and the direction or directionlessness of Ashlands, the flaws I used to over look are now glaring. Combat is annoying due to poor hitbox mechanics, so many great weapons that suck because if you are not on the same level, you can't hit the mob but it can kill you. Stamina system is awful... spend most of your time walking in circles trying to regain stamina to hit a mob which gets worse the better your weapons as they use more stamina to hit. To make matters worse, stamina is the same regen rate, so if you have 50 or 250, it regens at the same fill rate, so having more stamina means you need to wait longer for it to refill... this feels like a punishment.

The game is ambitious, has heart but feels like it is severely lacking in direction. Instead of fixing issues with the game or tweaking things like combat or network architecture they introduce cross-play and Mac...

I am all for indie studios but IG's recent changes to the game I have loved for years..... I cannot recommend it to anyone until they address the following;
- power gap between mages and non-mages
- Network Architecture.. it is game breaking in the Ashlands
- Combat, specifically hitbox and stamina
- a road map....