izigame.me

I do kind of like Valheim. I have played it for over 200 hours after all. I love the concept, but playing this game sometimes feels like putting firecrackers up your ass, and dragging your balls across broken shards of glass for hours upon hours. There are many good things about this game, but also many bad things which I will elaborate on. This game can become extremely tedious, especially on vanilla settings. The vanilla settings are not good. The game lacks quality of life features big time. I will mostly be pointing out the negative things about this game because almost no one else seems to be doing it.
There are so many small little annoying things in this game that doesn't seem too difficult to fix. For example: it is impossible to hit enemies that are slightly bellow you or higher up than you on the ground, whilst those enemies can hit your big puff sized hitbox from any angle. The spear hits above the smaller enemies causing you to miss your attacks. NPCs can be very difficult to find. You can play for a 100 days without finding Haldor because the spawns are random and the map is enormous. You need Haldor for the max carry weight upgrade. There is also no inventory slot for your gear, so you have to have all your armor in what is already from before a tiny little inventory.
This is in combination with a max carry weight of only 450kg (which is nothing in this game.) You constantly have to throw away items from your inventory when you are out and exploring. If you die in some difficult biome you will sometimes have to use cheat commands to retrieve your gear, because the monsters who killed you stay on your body. Good luck if you died far away from your home and your portal got destroyed. Occasionally the game will randomly crash, and you will lose a bunch of progress because the world only saves once every 30 minutes, unless you manually press the save button yourself. Many of the mobs have the same "hit you and run around" copy paste AI.
Another complaint I have is that it's not possible to automatically sort your items and quick stack to nearby chests. There are so many different items in this game and item stacks are too small. You have to spend way too much time sorting everything out. In Terraria you click on a simple button to quick stack to nearby chests, problem solved. It is that simple, and I have seen many other people complain about this as well, but the developers have still not done anything about this. Please, for the love of god, add a stack to nearby chests feature, and make maximum item stacks bigger. The workbench crafting range is also way too small. The number one mod for Valheim is about QoL features. That should speak for itself.
Instead of fixing these issues the developers came out with a new biome update (that took 3 years by the way) called mistlands. This biome looks cool and the art is amazing, but in terms of playability it is the worst biome in the game because there are tall mountains everywhere, and zero visibility because of the mist. You have to keep in mind that there is a stamina system in the game that severely limits your character in every way. You are left with zero stamina after a little bit of running and jumping, even with the best food and stamina boosting effects. Also, does sneaking and using the garden hoe really have to consume stamina?
When you have zero stamina you have to wait multiple seconds to recover all your stamina again, and in the meantime you can't really do much except walk. The mistlands biome is a severe pain and impossible to traverse without running and jumping, because of all the hills and mountains. You run and jump, wait 5 seconds, then run and jump again. Over and over. Then all of the sudden a bunch of high hitting enemies will come out of the mist and practically one shot you, hitting through your shield somehow. I don't think it is a good idea to have high hitting mobile mobs in combination with very low visibility, and a difficult to traverse terrain.
As I said earlier, this game can be quite tedious. At least 40% of my hours in this game is spent on mundane traveling. 30% are spent on mining rocks, and 20% are spent on sorting chests / eating food. Traveling with a boat from one island to another island (depending on your destination) can take around 15 minutes or much more. You sit there in your boat and just look at the screen for those 15 minutes. It's like watching paint dry. Some people say that they like this, but I suspect that they have a second monitor to entertain themselves with. But at the very least you can set up portals around the world after you arrive to your destination.
Remember to check the "travel through portal with ore" setting in your world modifier. If you don't, then you will be in for the most extreme boredom of your life. You will have to manually travel back to your base by foot / boat, which can take half an hour or longer. For whatever reason, this is the vanilla settings, and I as a beginner did not immediately realize that I could change this. I quit the game and returned when I found out that I could change it. This wasn't even a feature when Valheim launched back in 2021, but luckily they changed that. I am glad that you do listen to the community, to some degree at least.
The fun parts of the game consists of exploring the worlds different biomes for the first time. You have different dungeons, caves, crypts etc. I have always liked the idea of leveling up your character and becoming stronger. I do like acquiring a new weapon or an armor set, but it just takes way too long. Visually Valheim is very beautiful, the music is amazing, hunting is nice, it is rewarding to build, but there are a bunch of problems in this game that are not considered problems, but instead labeled as features. I don't want to have to download third party mods in order to have fun playing Valheim. If random modders can make the game better, then the Valheim developers sure as hell can do it too.
The community consists of a lot of angry cultists that don't want to acknowledge that there are any problems at all. All valid criticism of the game is brushed off as "get better" or "be more creative." Many of them will resort to the only thing they know how to do: name calling etc. Ok, let's put that aside for now. Valheim is meant to be challenging, and in some ways it is, but there is also a difference between a game that is challenging and a game that is tedious. Not having any inventory space is not a challenge. Sailing for 15 minutes whilst staring at the screen is not a challenge. Running out of stamina in the mistlands biome every 5 seconds is not a challenge. It is tedious.
I also have a feeling that the developers of Valheim purposefully drag out and artificially extend their game. For example: an iron sword costs 20 iron to make, whilst a silver sword costs 40 silver and 5 iron to make, for no reason at all. Which again, it takes forever to acquire those pieces of iron and silver. There are a bunch of weapons that you don't really get to try out, unless you want to spend an absurd amount of time pressing mouse 1 on rocks all day. That to me is a sign of bad game design when you "cannot" craft all the weapons that you might want to use, and upgrade them fully.
But don't misunderstand, Valheim is a good game at its core, but there are a lot of problems that needs fixing. I very much like challenging games, but there is a difference between a game that is challenging and a game that is tedious. I think the developers have the wrong focus, adding new shitty biomes instead of fixing the actual problems. Some features that would help: add a skill tree where you can level up your stamina and other skills. Add a feature to disable stamina. Add more inventory space. Add a slot for your armor. Add hotkeys for potions. And seriously, please add a "stack to nearby chests" feature.
Valheim is a gem that is just waiting to be polished, so polish it.