Interesting discussion. I still have to get to mistlands, but it sounds like it's place in the overall progression is like mountains biome but with a worse progression curve and a less charming enviroment.
I'll see

Originally posted by Noodle:

Am I alone in this feeling?

I haven't gone that far into Mistlands yet, but from the little I've seen one problem I have with it is the same problem I have with the Swamp:

When will devs learn that the challenge that comes from making it hard to see is a boring challenge players hate?

And what really seems like a shame about it is that the terrain would probably look really cool when boating through it. But it sort of loses that "wow" factor since you can't actually see it.

And yes, I have a wisp around my head for lighting. It doesn't penetrate far enough into the fog to dispell the annoyance of not being able to see far.

Originally posted by vinyblaster:

Mistland is boring and doesn't fit with the rest of the game. The post above is an *excellent* description of how mistland feels to me. I have no desire to explore it further.

Mistland has convinced me that the devs were lucky with the initial release and now they have no clue what to do. The way they f-ed up the crafting/fighting/exploration in mistland is just baffling.

Yes, I'm afraid they ran out of ideas when they released early access.
I don't think it was luck. There was one brain had a great idea and he could develop the game in peace and quiet.

But it seems the vision was finished back then. You can see this in all the placeholders that are still loose ends despite a few updates now (H&H, Mountain, Mistlands). Stone cutter, artisan table and co. for example.

Instead they have started to build a "new road" which again looks like it will a) not be finished b) be a dead end road anyway / Plus they added so many elements just for design reasons, which they clearly stated they would not do.

It pains me that so few people notice/disturb this.

Not to mention the multiplayer server model. The code is a mess and mostly p2p-driven. There are so many problems that need to be addressed, but instead of solving them, they add things that the most part of the playerbase downvoted in their discord.

It's this brazen lie / these empty promises in fireside chat followed by a 180 / this "we work with the community, we love the community" and in the process they move away from the customer/player at the speed of light.

Originally posted by Deranged Rat:

Really, i think the mistlands WOULD be fun, if the games fundemental mechanics actually supported the type of play style Mistlands encourages. Give me the ability to fight on uneven terrain, a much easier time climbing cliffs, being able to swim 10 feet without being drained of stamina, more ways to navigate the mist, a way to make my inventory larger and i'd find it a much more enjoyable experience.

It is truly amazing that one's own maker can no longer connect to his vision and obviously does not know what he is doing.

Some people obviously can't handle success.
They are now creating the game out of a completely different motivation.

And that's exactly what you notice. The drive to create the game before early access was different from the drive after early access. You can read exactly this signature from the added content when you play since then.

Truth is they got lucky and the timing was perfect. There are elements of the game design that are all over the place but the game is still great despite that and so is the Mistlands. It will be even better when they complete the final Mistlands patch in the next month or two.

The magic is most definitely still there, just not for some of you guys. Wait until they finish it and try again. Maybe the magic will return to you.

I don't find the enemies "relatable". Giant ants have a soulless quality to them that I thoroughly dislike. The noise they make really bothers me.

Originally posted by Noodle:

I'll start this by reminding everyone that this is simply a statement of opinion. I encourage you to hold a different opinion, if you do - great - there is no need to insult me because of that (kinda sad that some people need to be reminded of that - but whatever that's a whole different kettle).

I was really excited for mistlands. The teasers that the devs released looks great. What I read about the mechanics sounded cool. I was keen.

Unfortunately, something in the charm of what drew me to Valheim has been lost.

I loved almost everything about the previous 5 biomes; the wonder, the exploration, the challenge - all of it. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is something just "off" about the mistlands that has completely lost me. It's not that hard, the verticality is ok, the art style is interesting, the mist mechanics are great (on paper at least - i do agree with the complaints I've seen that the wisp could be improved a little).

After exploring a good amount of the mistlands and seeing everything there is to see (let's face it - it doesn't take long at all to get to that point), I just dont feel at all interested in the mistlands. I tried to like it, i really did, but it just doesn't do it for me.

Am I alone in this feeling?

Yeah, getting through the mistlands was a struggle for me, i felt like just going to play another game many times. On one hand i really like the look and atmosphere of it, but it truly does exemplify all the issues the game has. Personally, the mist didn't really bother me much as the minimap helped with direction, but the constant cliffs and having to spend most of my time waiting for my stamina to regen to climb further really started to weigh on me.
I gave up on trying to melee fight as this games combat is simply not designed to fight on uneven terrain so i just used the bow the entire time, hiding on cliffs abusing the horrible AI. I also got extremely tired of my inventory becoming full after like 5 minutes, cut down a tree, harvest some plants, kill a few creatures and my inventory is full.

Really, i think the mistlands WOULD be fun, if the games fundemental mechanics actually supported the type of play style Mistlands encourages. Give me the ability to fight on uneven terrain, a much easier time climbing cliffs, being able to swim 10 feet without being drained of stamina, more ways to navigate the mist, a way to make my inventory larger and i'd find it a much more enjoyable experience.

For myself, Mistlands felt like a chore until I got to a turning point - magic.
Not going to build anything but portal outpost there and farms (Kill Gjall then plant). had to resort to an old tactic "trap them in a pit" for seekers (deep enough pit that they can't attack the roof I put over them which in turn keep em from flying out). Just wish the wisplight had an upgrade "Wisp Swarm".

agreed, the core hunt is a pain. and a renewable source of Royal jelly would be great(currently wondering if max skill would enable deadraiser to work without the stuff that needs royal jelly.

i think its normal that the game loses its magic after a while because you get used to all the game mechanics and know how the map generates, so you are less excited because its nothing rly new. i still like to chill in valheim. but i have to say that they shouldnt have nerfed the mistlands.

every biom has its difficulty if your gear is not above it, mountain biome = cold (cant even go there early), swamps = poison, black forest = with low gear very hard and dangerous at night ec. mistlands = no vision. i like the monsters in mistlands, very scary and interesting but why not make the no vision thing more interesting and hide a fiew rare locations there? lets say you have to find 9 parts of an ancient sword, the parts can be on top of a mountain or wherever.

@jonnin i disagree that the mistlands are a region with no compelling reason to farm it. i find the mistlands the main region to farm, thats why i build my new base there. you need sap and it only generates if you are there. hunting the rabbits is also needed + seekers flesh + angler fish ec. and then of course the 2 different mushrooms, both needed for best food/potions. i have a huge farm + sap generators next to my base, the roots will recharge so i just leave 12 sap generators on the same spot and get 120 each harvest ;)

sorry, not that kind of farming. I also have a shroom & sap farm. I meant, no reason to keep exploring to find 'nodes' of metal, trees to cut, or something like red mushroom that can't be grown. Its missing any sort of material that you need a lot of but can't get by just hanging out at your camp. Like swamp has iron and thistle, or plains have tar, and so on. The only thing you need a lot of that does not replenish is marble, and its every 10m so not exactly compelling most people to go on an epic adventure to gather some. You can argue royal jelly is that kind of resource. Ive so far been hesitant to use any of mine beyond one stack of mega heal mead. But having experimented with it (new toon and full bore cheating) I don't think I want to play as a mage anyway. If you want to nuke all day every day, you WILL be exploring the mistlands a lot, almost exclusively to keep your supply up.

I agree with what you said about the @base-farm stuff.

Mistland is boring and doesn't fit with the rest of the game. The post above is an *excellent* description of how mistland feels to me. I have no desire to explore it further.

Mistland has convinced me that the devs were lucky with the initial release and now they have no clue what to do. The way they f-ed up the crafting/fighting/exploration in mistland is just baffling.

Hmm. Ignoring the mist and the mountains for a moment, it felt the same to me otherwise. I came in and tried to grab some new stuff, got jumped and died. Tried to figure out how to handle new enemy, died again and finally figure out what works etc. Then started to really explore, and it felt similar to mountains or swamp in difficulty and getting what I needed.

there are a few key things about the ML that may or may not be part of a whole.
- there is no new metal. For the first time since the meadows. That means no exploration to find it, no adventures hauling it back.... all that stuff
- the new wood is virtually useless. I think I can make one thing in my home with it that is not crafting station, and of course you need a couple stacks for gear and crafting stations. But you don't need 300 stacks of it for wood walls or fancy doors, because there are none. And lets face it, you only need so many stairs.
- That leaves the only bulk construction item as black marble, and its visa'ed (its everywhere you want to be). It can be portaled, so for as much as you want, you can just gather and portal it with minimal real exploration or effort.

that leaves us a zone with no compelling reason to farm it. Once you have the gear, you are truly done, and unless you just *love* refurbishing the BM towers or digging a hobbit hole under the boss area, there isnt much appeal in setting up a base here or spending tons more time in the area. In that regard its a lot like the mountains, which has repeat wood, useless obsidian, gear use only silver... just like the mountains, you spend your time here, and you are done with the area. That isn't new, but it was not the expected result for this biome where we will be stuck for 6 months or more. Worse, the mist mechanic makes hanging out here a chore.

If it had a resource we needed in large quantities that was a some effort to get, or some way to clear enough mist to enjoy the landscape / beauty, it would be worth exploring it for that sweet base location or to farm the materials and so on. As it stands, you can't even see your base once its built if its bigger than yoda's hut, and there isnt anything to do once you have your stuff.

i think that is an incredibly apt statement of the game right now.
Its sad no one will take notice or care. i feel iron gate would once have taken feed back on. But now i feel after the insane sales mid covid, they dnt really care now, its just 'done when its done' yes thats fair, ppl shouldnt have to rush games, but also read early access terms, 'done in a reasonable amount of time' i dont think 6 years is reasonable. (thats 1.5 years for mistlands, 1.5 for fire,1.5 for ice, and 1 for sea biomass and other stuff that was on the original timescape.
personally i feel like the road map went straight out the window when a million sales were hit (but why, why now stick to your guns?). And that has now left the team just kinda going 'shrug', who cares really, it will be done eventually' but i guess im going back to EA again, this want a kick starter, the game was promised 'in good time' its not been produced in good time anymore. 9 months to concept i biome? cmon guys.....that just ridicules.
(for the record im not speaking from a position of ignorance, i have worked in the games industry for over a decade in both desin and art roles, im no spring chicken). i feel i digress though. my point been, the thread creator is correct, iron gate need to pull thier finger out to finish the game they said they would finish, THEN they can lay back chill out cool relaxing playing some B ball outside teh school.

TLDR Iron gate can finish this game in good time, they aren't cus they made a ♥♥♥♥ load of dosh. the quality of the game is great, but you made a promise entering early access to get this stuff done, and you arent holding up to this.

just my 2 cents.

mistland more plain than the plains

Originally posted by Noodle:

Am I alone in this feeling?

No, I'm afraid you are not alone.
But most of those who see it that way don't bother to write it or just stop playing, for whatever reason.

An earlier train of thought of mine - I'll copy/paste this since it's a few pages back, maybe it will help you share your pain a bit:

"Similar experience in our group.
Everyone but 1-2 players lost motivation very quickly.

Don't get it wrong, we had one of the best gaming experiences when we entered Mistlands as a group for the first time and the war of the worlds beast came to attack.
I still believe that many people blame the difficulty or the fog as scapegoat for other missing core mechanics.

But it wasn't the level of difficulty, which on the contrary was sometimes the most motivating thing to keep going. I also found the fog technique very impressive, even if it could be improved a bit.
There are many small but essential things that were core mechanics in the main game, like the progression flow or the reward system, which is practically non-existent in Mistlands.

Even on my solo run now I enjoyed everything till Mistlands a lot more.
Until the end of the plains I have to force myself to turn off the computer so that it won't be 3 o'clock at night again, but once I'm in Mistlands I have to force myself to turn on the computer instead.

No matter how hard I try to love it, something pushes me away. In Mistlands, I suddenly don't know what I'm farming for. It seems like I only have to do the boss quickly because the armor is hardly worth it, the weapons are "okay", but visually also rather poor. Magic itself is a bad design decision from my point of view and I rarely play mages anyway.

You don't really want to build like that in Mistlands either, the only practical use of black marble is the cooking station or a construct that won't damage the base if you set up the refinery.

I could hunt deer forever in the meadows, I like to watch the meat roasting over my fireplace, then chopping wood and hunting again. But in Mistlands I have no desire to hunt rabbits or stay there for very long.

Everything I could build there is nothing I don't already have, it's just placeholders with a different design / no new mechanic / no practical use for anyone. I just replaced my roof on my farmhouse and decorated it with tar, but black marble doesn't fit in there anyway.

I mean... what is the reason to tear off my roof just so it's black and looks better - but I don't have a comfort bonus or anything else for it. I'm supposed to do the same thing again with the marble and stone? But instead of tar pits, grinding for black marble is very unrewarding. What for? It doesn't match in color anyway.

The whole design looks so "Harry Potter"-like, much more fantasy-driven than before. Should I put a black marble pyramid in my Viking village? Where is my motivation? How does that fit in? Everything flashes, everything shines and glows... I now have a viking disco instead of a cozy farmhouse. The cosiness was a huge factor in valheim - "cozy" the new word for building reference / black marble overall tends to be cold and uninviting.

Before Mistlands, you felt like you were slowly upgrading your base/making it more "cozy" / more "homely" - somehow it fit in - granted, the hot tub is questionable, but at least that fits more than a disco ball workbench and not making your main house a flashing fantasy castle.

The whole thing just doesn't fit in for me. And I'm not the only one in our group or other people I talked to.

Mistlands seems like a jumble of brainstorming ideas and casual player needs from the "marketing point of view", some of which have made it into the game thrown together due to their own perplexity, which can't tie up the logical loose ends of the "unfinished feeling Plains biome" nor to their own newly introduced magic. Moreover, they have failed to establish the same sense of progression flow as in the main game. Mistlands feels unexpected but extremely unrewarding while playing compared directly to the preview game stages.

What they have managed to do is implement a great art design and some very brilliant ideas poorly. Mistlands is 80% designer/animation work.

They seem to lack hard on creativity aside from the design aspect and lost the connection to whatever they wanted to do in the first place. Or, what I believe, their ideas were already used up at early access release.

Mistlands looks and feels like a tumor that has grown uncontrolled out of the cells of the main game and has been surgically polished, to make it look like it has developed naturally or better - to make it look like it belongs, but it's a facade."

I didn't really enjoy exploring Mistlands due to how frustrating the mist mechanic is even with the wisp light (torches and mistwalker sword are like... bad). The terrain is too jagged and uneven with shorelines being super sheer so water can be more of a death trap then in other environments.

The progression is off putting as well since a lot of it requires getting 5 purple cores which can be rather rng in both finding a dungeon in the mist (sometimes easier when 2-3 seekers attack you) and getting said cores from the dungeon itself. Feather cape takes too long to fully acquire as opposed to other capes imo (requires finding the dverger extractor, setting up sap collectors, finding a dungeon(s), finding 5 purple cores and then creating / dismantling the 2 buildings needed for the cape.

I feel like the environment could use some spawners for the enemies that drop royal jelly in the outside areas with perhaps an odd seeker to spawn as well.

The things that I did appreciate was having only dverger extractors to find as opposed to a whole new metal that may require multiple trips like iron, silver, etc... and also I like the black marble as a nice building piece. The weapons are alright but oddly you can't fully upgrade them and sometimes the upgrade values in damage are very slight + some balancing could be done.

Magic staffs / 1 crossbow being introduced so late in the game with new skills is slightly off putting to me as well. I feel that their is a slight disconnect.

I'll happily zone out doing nearly anything in the game, but mistlands makes me roll my eyes. it's not that it's hard per se, I have & can do everything I would need to survive there. it's just unpleasant. it hasn't grown on me like the other biomes have done. Swamp has weirdly become my favourite through mastery of its layout and mechanics, in spite of how sorely I hated it at first. I haven't had that with Mistlands, it remains a bothersome chore.

feels more like a weird expansion pack/DLC than something that was always intended as part of the fabric of the game. Mistlands largely disregards not only the previous progression flow, but also the main communicated interests of the players. it's kind of remarkable how much this patch was "mistlands, also fishing is really freaking weird now" and touched not a single variable in any of the content that came before.

it reminds me a little of how the previous small patches were "light armour sets and weird enemies who drop them" - a lump of new materials and the things they make - without adding any depth to the crafting trees from before. or the patch before that, hearth and home, which tried to fix what was never broken (the food-hp-stamina system) while adding super-expensive but purely-cosmetic build pieces.

I think Mistlands lost it for me, however before the nerf patch I completely hooked. I think all that needed changes was to lower gjall spawn. Before the nerfs it felt like a wild challenge and that sold all the mechanics, it made it feel more rewarding to unlock magic than a grindy chore that it is now. Now I have no desire to revisit, grind, or explore since it's just a chore. The best part about this patch now is the fishing, but even that system seems a bit barebones with only 1 or 2 unique recipes for the rest of the game. With plains I somehow still had desire to farm, make chests, tar, food. Black Marble really needs a buff and the nerfs of Mistlands need to be reversed.