Why is game given a pass on bad story telling? You wouldn't accept that you bike could fly if you just peed on it.

If you say that it's an iron, bronze, or stone thing it should behave like one.

Originally posted by Emelio Lizardo:

Why is game given a pass on bad story telling? You wouldn't accept that you bike could fly if you just peed on it.

If you say that it's an iron, bronze, or stone thing it should behave like one.

That's a strawman argument. I gave my reasons in my post above.

Originally posted by Emelio Lizardo:

Gamey things should be avoided in design.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "Gamey", but this is, in fact a game.

If this were something like Flight Sim, I would agree with you that the goal should be realism, but it's not. The most important aspect of most games is balance.

There are currently aspects of the game that I assume are there to add more realism, such as the added knockback of blunt weapons, that (IMO) throw off the balance and make the game less fun.

It's a game, designed by artists. It did not grow organically on a tree. Everything in it is artificial.

The extra stamina usage is to punish those that yolo around and die all the time and therefore have lower skill levels, and who don't want to get better food and better armor moving from biome to biome. You should be gaining at least 10 skill levels per biome to keep up with new weapons and their attendant stamina usage. Their game, their rulez.

I can't even get into the aforementioned artificiality regarding game design. Unless you want a game you play while sitting on real grass, maybe pushing frogs around, what you get is a magical world designed by artists and rendered in zeroes and ones, on a computer.

What is "artificially difficult" compared to just "difficult"?

Originally posted by Emelio Lizardo:

There is no justification for the higher stamina requirement of an iron weapon. In fact it should probably be less.

For the swords, technically there is. The bronze sword is a gladius while the iron sword is a typical longsword. Makes sense you'd use more stamina to swing a longer sword.

Originally posted by Emelio Lizardo:

Unless the stamina increase exists solely to punish the user.

Welcome to Valheim, and the design philosophy followed by the devs.

Originally posted by Emelio Lizardo:

Yes I have better stamina but the nature of the weapons does not rationally support a larger stamina requirement. This is simply an arbitrary penalty and I hate those.

As is the damage increase, its as arbitrary.

Also how is some white berries or icecream is more nutritious than cooked meat. I hate how games arbitrarly set stuff like that too. Stamina should just be fixed to one number and every weapon of similar type should use same stamina!

And all weapons should do the same damage, Damage numbers are arbitrary. And all enemies should look the same, and act the same, and do the same damage.

- All numbers are arbitrary, it is a game. :-)

But with Iron weapons you still do more damage for roughly the same stamina.

It has nothing to do with logic and realism. It´s just balanced this way to make the game more punishing and artificially difficult.

Yes I have better stamina but the nature of the weapons does not rationally support a larger stamina requirement. This is simply an arbitrary penalty and I hate those. The features of a device should follow the nature and material of that device.

Iron is both lighter and stronger than Bronze, and there is no rational reason for it to demand more stamina in its use. Copper is far superior to stone in handling requirements and should be far less demanding of stamina.

Refined weapons should have less of a stamina demand than cruder versions.

Gamey things should be avoided in design.

Bronze is only slightly heavier than iron (~10%) but bronze was more supple and less brittle than early iron weapons. To make them useful early iron weapons had to be heavier than an equivalent bronze weapon. The advantage of iron weapons was that iron was cheap and plentiful while bronze was expensive. When people figured out how to get a fire hot enough to add sufficient carbon to iron to make it as supple as bronze (early steel). The lighter steel weapon had to be swung harder to do the same amount of damage that the equivalent bronze weapon did.

The advantage of the steel weapon over the bronze weapon (but not the iron weapon) was that the steel weapon held a sharper edge and held it for longer. The bronze weapon's advantage was that it did not corrode or rust like iron and steel weapons.

While they require more stamina than weapons of the bronze tier, you should have more stamina from the next tier of food now, and probably have higher weapon skills to help mitigate the stamina drain on use

The advantage hard metal weapons have over softer ones are that you can put more force into the blow.

So while this is definitely a "game" mechanic. You can think of it as better weapons allowing you to spend more effort while keeping within the limits of given weapon.

We can think of harder weapons as being sharper therefore having more damage, but IRL it does not really work that way. Swords arent actually that sharp, its all about ergonomics and how much force you can put on the target. Stiffer metals offer significant advantage here.

The advent of heavy weapons and armor had just as much to do with metals as wealth of army employers being big enough to support dedicated soldier jobs that could reach and remain fit enough to employ them, as well as all the logistical requirement around it.