The only "insane" thing were (and still are) the 2* seeker soldiers. Everything else was unexceptional, but now the enemy behavior is simply broken for some of the new mobs. I don't miss the original iteration but I do want seekers and gjall to have proper combat behavior.

Originally posted by Gisbert:

In Mistlands you no longer have rewards, you just collect and hoard everything. We were facing the Queen and didn't even have 5 cores yet. Then at the end of the biome you unlock stuff you don't need anymore.

Sounds like case of poor RNG or poor exploration efforts. Doing away with the Queen doesn't unlock anything "you don't need anymore" except the Forsaken power. Everything in each existing biome can be found, gathered and farmed before defeating the boss, so your version of the "core mechanics" is pretty colored, to say the least, and doesn't have anything to do with the inconsistent changes implemented in the post-Mistlands patch.

Originally posted by Webbman:

From what i gather the black cores was a last minute addition and they ran out of time so i imagine that will be addressed in the new year as will the difficulty balance and a few other loose ends like equipment upgrades. That being said you can find any of the bosses before your ready to fight them so that's nothing new.

lets be objective here though. All the previous biomes had much simpler gameplay loops than mistlands. Mistlands has more weapons, more enemies and more enemy mechanics, and more options, more farmables, and more build pieces than any other biome they made.

my feeling is that no matter what they did, just because it took a long time, some players were never going to be happy with it no matter what they achieved, which if you look at the details was alot with this update.

Me and my bud had a blast playing through so my advice is to not let your expectations get the better of you.

I am objective - as far as possible, because game development is a kind of art.
My review is not a pent up rage of delivery delays or other happenings around the game. It is purely about the gaming experience.

Mistlands is so far the most beautiful biom with the most attention to detail, but at the same time the least enjoyable and the least motivating in terms of replayability.

You can clearly see that 80% of all resources were "wasted" on the visuals, but only a small part on logical consistency and how the biom should fit into the rest of the game. In germany you would say "not everything that glitters is gold".

That are facts with measurable values in reality. You just have to play it.

Look at the most objective reviews after the early access release and compare to the mistlands release. Limit your research to the reviews with arguments and subtract from trolls and flamers.

Speak to people who are honest to themselves.
Both flaming/trolling and defending developers or praising prodcuts which are just mediocore by any means necessary and additionally attacking people who try to improve things even more they love with arguments and real criticism, is the direct path to an autoimmune disease which the society already has.

"Close enough" is not good enough for me and should not be a benchmark to anyone. By far not.
Wasted potential is far worse on the long run than someone who really can't do it any better.

You clearly see what the Valheim devs were capable of if you look to the initial release of the game. For some reason that is gone and what 80%+ of the community does now doesn't motivate them to bring their passion back. Maybe the passion is gone after the initial success, nothing unusual these days. But in the event that it isn't, the behavior of the community doesn't help anyone.

Even worse, if this continues, they will drop the game after the xbox release. If not officially, then motivationally. Perhaps mistlands was already half a community troll instead of getting the maximum out of it.

So why does everyone keep doing things where everyone loses instead of aiming for a win-win situation? Honest criticism without malicious intent behind it harms no one. And if you are still willing to give your best, you have the necessary information first hand, the consumer to focus on - it doesn't get any better than this if you care about your product.

the only thing thats gone is your passion. It was a great update and in a couple of patches theyll have it all worked out.

Hello people :)
Please keep the tread on topic. Opinions are good, personal attacks are not.

Originally posted by Gisbert:

In Mistlands you no longer have rewards, you just collect and hoard everything. We were facing the Queen and didn't even have 5 cores yet. Then at the end of the biome you unlock stuff you don't need anymore.

Sounds like case of poor RNG or poor exploration efforts. Doing away with the Queen doesn't unlock anything "you don't need anymore" except the Forsaken power. Everything in each existing biome can be found, gathered and farmed before defeating the boss, so your version of the "core mechanics" is pretty colored, to say the least, and doesn't have anything to do with the inconsistent changes implemented in the post-Mistlands patch.

Originally posted by Rhapsody:

Originally posted by Gisbert:

In Mistlands you no longer have rewards, you just collect and hoard everything. We were facing the Queen and didn't even have 5 cores yet. Then at the end of the biome you unlock stuff you don't need anymore.

Sounds like case of poor RNG or poor exploration efforts. Doing away with the Queen doesn't unlock anything "you don't need anymore" except the Forsaken power. Everything in each existing biome can be found, gathered and farmed before defeating the boss, so your version of the "core mechanics" is pretty colored, to say the least, and doesn't have anything to do with the inconsistent changes implemented in the post-Mistlands patch.

I agree with your first part. We really had bad luck. The first infested mine we explored gave as the location of the queen which was nearby without any cores.

But aside from that, we needed to explore another mistlands area and 4 more mines to get a total of 9 cores. We crafted the smithing table first, because that seems to fit us the most, at least if you have not let yourself be spoiled (better weapons and stuff).

Maybe it's our playstyle but we don't dismantle buildings to use ingredients for other stuff and then convert back again over and over. So we built a nice place for the new smithing table, but all we could craft was the spear and a crossbow of what had practical use for us. All other recipes were hidden behind Eitr, which we could not know at that time.

So we discovered a third mistlands area, before we even saw the refinery. And even then we didn't know about the feather cape which would make exploring so much better, because we built the workbench last (what absolutely makes sense, if you don't know the feather cape exists), when we had already conquered 4 mistlands completely and the other players were standing impatiently in front of the queen.

Compare this to the previous biomes and you will find that with a small patch of dark forest that has 1-2 copper deposits and some tin on it, you can already make all the basic equipment without upgrading, craft a plow and plant fields, etc.

You gather more of the ressources and upgrade your gear while exploring and conquer more area of the biome and while searching for the boss which felt like natural progression. Iron, silver, black metal the same.

This can be considered a core mechanic, as this flow of progress is present throughout the whole game, but stops when you reach the Mistlands which was added last.

We've never had so much stuff flying around in our chests that we didn't know what it was for and didn't learn about its use until just before we bossfight and had already conquered practically all of the mistlands we found at that time.

So in Mistlands there is in fact a blatant lack of a steady flow of progress compared to the previews game, regardless of whether we have been unlucky or not, especially since it is not that hard to get the same unlucky we had. We played from scratch so we felt this stop of progression in direct comparison.

So Valheim was always difficult when entering an unknown area the first time. It was always hard like Mistlands - we all felt this a good thing. But give that boys a cookie instead of nerfing the difficult.

Take out the difficulty level with a patch to compensate for the missing progression system is the wrong way.
Or to put it more clearly:
Taking out another part of the core mechanics to compensate for an already missing part, is like amputating a broken arm.

That the developers don't understand what the community wants anymore is one thing, but what shocks me more are the players themselves. In our group it was clear, we didn't even talk about it much - everyone noticed it immediately, there was no discussion about it in relation to this forum. It is so obvious what mistlands has on offer and what is lacking in comparison.

It seems to me that many of those who cried about the difficulty were simply looking for a scapegoat because they don't care why it's less fun, they just realize it is. This is just my opinion, but if this update had a steady flow of progression, much players would have cried less about the level of difficult.

First time Mistlands was maybe a little bit harder as first time swamps. You also get 2 star elite draugr at spawner in bronze gear and you are always wet - I can tell you how much fun this was... but overall it felt worth it after the first crypt nearby.

It's more fun to die in the first crypt when you unlock your first new gear and the stone cutter.

From what i gather the black cores was a last minute addition and they ran out of time so i imagine that will be addressed in the new year as will the difficulty balance and a few other loose ends like equipment upgrades. That being said you can find any of the bosses before your ready to fight them ( eikthyr!) so that's nothing new.

lets be objective here though. All the previous biomes had much simpler gameplay loops than mistlands. Mistlands has more weapons, more enemies and more enemy mechanics, and more options, more farmables, and more build pieces than any other biome they made. Compare the gjall to the troll or abomination or golem. This thing is like an aircraft carrier for ticks and firebombs and has a weakspot. Nothing before that was so fleshed out. Trolls had a log sometimes. The skulls and dverger camps combined with the sap root system was way more than they ever offered with any biome.

I get that the mist might have been overdone a little, or at least the tools to deal with the mist underdeveloped. That i can get. Also the Black cores need a little work. I never thought it was too hard though the spawns were a little too aggressive. The patch did overcorrect so i imagine it will go back the other way on the next one.

my feeling is that no matter what they did, just because it took a long time, some players were never going to be happy with it no matter what they achieved, which if you look at the details was alot with this update.

Me and my bud had a blast playing through so my advice is to not let your expectations get the better of you.

Yeah its faceroll traveling now. No nervous bug hunting. They mades seekers stupid ring runners as other monsters. Dis...

The only "insane" thing were (and still are) the 2* seeker soldiers. Everything else was unexceptional, but now the enemy behavior is simply broken for some of the new mobs. I don't miss the original iteration but I do want seekers and gjall to have proper combat behavior.

The combat in mistlands is like anything else in Valheim, you just figure a way to game the AI. Nothing new. For me it's the terrain and poor visibility that makes mistlands suck. I just find it so boring jumping around trying to find something of use. Just got bored of it very quickly. Kind of disappointing, I found the challenges of mountains and plains more interesting.

Originally posted by spamrock2:

The combat in mistlands is like anything else in Valheim, you just figure a way to game the AI. Nothing new. For me it's the terrain and poor visibility that makes mistlands suck. I just find it so boring jumping around trying to find something of use. Just got bored of it very quickly. Kind of disappointing, I found the challenges of mountains and plains more interesting.

Valheim has always been punishing, but at the same time very rewarding.

I cursed while mining the first copper vein and was constantly interrupted by trolls/gray dwarves, but every ingot I burned made me progress and get stronger. It just felt like it's worth to go through all this and sooner or later you outscaled the enemys depending on your adapting/skill level additional.

In Mistlands you no longer have rewards, you just collect and hoard everything. We were facing the Queen and didn't even have 5 cores yet. Then at the end of the biome you unlock stuff you don't need anymore.

If you take out the progress, all that's left is the torture without the rewarding aspect.
This is one of many core mechanics where Mistlands has lost touch with its main game.

Originally posted by mziven:

Great update and the Devs were definitely right to nerf the Mistlands but I do feel like they went a bit to far. I miss the crazy aggression of the seekers and feeling overwhelmed. I have over 300 hrs in this game and I was afraid to go out into the mists after dark! I haven't experienced that sensation since my first time being in the plains biome. Haha. I do hope the difficulty of the mists is adjusted to make it slightly more challenging.

I miss the feeling of steady progression as you explore through a biome, instead of getting everything at once after finishing it.

I also miss the practical use of many new items/ressources, which are supposed to be one of the highest priorities for the developers and the reason why they do not randomly replenish the flora and fauna of the base game, according to their own fireside talk - here: https://i.ibb.co/TYPcRQ3/123.png

Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUxrOEVMoUQ

But yes - absolutely agree - the nerf to that extent was unnecessary.

I totally agree, the update killed all the interest of the Mistlands. It was indeed too hard but gave a feeling of challenge, while now it is so easy that it is almost boring...

There is a temporary solution to this, you can select default_old version from Beta menu.

Originally posted by Megacouillator:

while now it is so easy that it is almost boring...

Are you saying that in context of using mistland items, or just plains-level gear/food? Multiplayer or solo?

I don't know what the difficulty was before, and I wouldn't say that it's overly difficult now, but I would not call it boring running around solo in the dark in plains-level gear.

I actually felt a sense of relief yesterday leaving mistlands through an active fuling village! :-)