Dear Valheim,

This is neither a love letter nor a vigil, just my subjective experience as a basis for a discussion of criticism of one of the best games of the last few years in my opinion.

After about 500 hours of playtime before H&H and 500 more after, now a few 100 more in Mistlands, i'm really conflicted and admittedly a bit heartbroken.

The vibes that Valheim gave me in the beginning and that kept me awake for nights on end have now turned into the opposite. The same euphoria from last year that forces me now to love the game by any means necessary and tryhard to do so.

After a long self-reflection, unfortunately it's not me and i'm not just tired of it after all that playtime.

I know the game isn't finished when bought. I was aware that everything I love might change and be lost on the way to the finished product, which was also my biggest fear that seems to be coming true now.

It's not that easy to call out everything bad. It's not. And that would not be worthy of the game. The stat and how polished it is when on the other hand the opposite is the case.

Careful - some spoilers ahead.

1. Unlike many others I like the mist as concept as a whole. Especially I like the fresh idea behind the Yagluth item and the progression it offers to explore this new biome with it. It's great to have something different as a "simple key" in the game without touching the core idea and feeling of it. Maybe vision should be tweaked a bit or add some progression, but this is personal preference.

2. Personally I also like the difficult level as a whole and I'm someone who never build walls in survival, I always go the way of direct confrontation when an event occurs and I went well with that in mistlands too. Still, admittedly with many others and my friends, it doesn't feel right compared to the plains somehow. Overall we died not as much as many others, but we died. What breaks the immersion here is the incredibility the game offers at that point. I never had a problem with a weak late game troll for some reason. I don't know why it feels unbelievable this time.

I repeat this is not meant to be a rant, but maybe the whole Starship Troopers / Alienqueen thing doesn't fit right here. Our whole group (most Valheim lovers) admit with this, you should've went with spiders and your first idea + adding the mist which is great.

Solo is much easier, the scaling in Multiplayer seems a bit out of pace and unbalanced / immersive breaking too. But the scaling itself is always the hardest part, so I won't complain especially that point as much. To be fair even developers of CS, LOL or DOTA still balance their game after decades and will never get finished with it.

3. We all loved the way the lore opens slowly with not much information, giving you the feeling you are lost in a new realm after death, building and hunting in after life, find some lore stones here and there. Never give too much information whats ahead. You really figured out the best mixture give us exactly the correct breeze to get lost in this world. I highly respect this! This is a real rare thing these days and was incredibly well done.

On the other hand... now we completed Mistlands. What is the whole Munin/Hugin thing? It doesn't feel right. It feels like fan service. It feels like adding something, because it has to be there. Till Yagluth there is nearly nothing. And then you see them everywhere, but they have nothing to say that grind my gears. Everyone i've talked to has either paid no attention at all (they don't even read the text) or felt the same way I do. So for whom do you add this then, if not correct? I really don't know how you managed to fail with this after that huge start you've done with EA release. This one is a mystery to me.

4. Speaking of mystery: Magic... for Odin's sake... Why? Maybe runes. Maybe enchanted gear. The feather cape is a okay-good thing. Maybe. But why are you trying to turn this brilliant game, where almost nothing feels greatly out of place when it comes to gear development - at mid/endgame - into a WoW-Style firemage artillery kind of thing. You had the best game progression-system in a survival game ever and just the right dose of everything in terms of believability. It's my personal opinion, sure - but I don't dislike that part of the game - I hate it.

Granted, and I'm being fair here, a few of our group liked this very aspect, but these are all people who prefer to "rush" content rather than enjoy it and don't have 1000+ hours like I do. They take this kind of feature, like it for 10 hours and never log in again. Why do you want to make content for this kind of players when you state in your fireside chat you want to make a game for a specific group of players not the casuals? Unfortunately it turned out I am not in this group. It's your game, but you may quietly know that you break my and other players heart (who really love your game) to statisfy players with not even close 5% of our playtime / look at my stats.

5. Crossbow. The new viking sniper rifle without bullet drop. Really - I mean... really? I can't believe that I have to write about this kind of things here now. I really want to know why you add things which are downvoted everytime in your own suggestions chat on your own discord? There were so many good ideas there getting completly ignored... This hurts so much.
Just a few examples: https://i.redd.it/ricjaajk3qp81.jpg

It's not the crossbow or the magic per se I hate so much. It's everything you delete I loved plus everything you are not going to add I would like to see. Over and over. I know it's your game. I respect that. I know this is a very subjective point. I just can't get Valheim and a firemage together in my head. I still can't believe you did this even after playing it.

6. Food system. I understand it's a big part of the game / always was. I never was a fan from turning the first version of it into whatever Hearth&Home update introduced.

Let me explain: The whole upgrade doesn't really add any more variety/strategy, as it turns out we were preparing the same foods before and after. It just feels more forced and less immersive. There are so many new foods in Mistlands.... You only have to prepare a fraction of them and you unlock everything at the same time (no real progress exists). There's really no need to eat a boiled egg except to decorate it in your base. It doesn't make any sense.

If we talk about it now... small offtopic, but the HUD... I really liked everything without numbers counting down like a digital clock timer from your iPhone after the H&H Update. Just sayin'.

In Mistlands, the whole eating system doesn't feel right anymore. Most of it has no practical use to anyone. But this is exactly what you told us in the fireside chat, you don't want unnecessary items added in the game. That's why you don't add random animals that have no benefit to anyone except the aesthetics of flora and fauna. I like this concept. But why adding food which is practical useless then?

7. Because we had it from Progression. Up until Mistlands, you've done a good job so far, but now the development of the items seems completely out of place. We hadn't finished our Mistlands gear until we cleared 4 Mistland areas completely. We found the queen before we found the first core (to be fair / could have been additional bad luck in this case). The last item we made was the feather cape... Every warrior does the smithing table at first. Every viking would do this.

Maybe it's me, but I don't like to dismantle and switch the mats to another building and vice versa every time. So I build something and then that stands for the time being and new workbench felt correct at last somehow. If other playing trying to tell me to dismantle my smithing table for refinery for eitr for workbench for cape, back to smithing table to repair my weapon... I mean... this is the reason you don't added recycling... you stated this point in discord. You see what I mean? Everything feels so inconsistent now.

The feather cape should be the first item you can craft in Mistlands - from a practical point of view - because it's the most usefull item in this biome. And if you don't add cliffs like in mistlands next, you don't need it after. The armor is nearly useless when it comes to stats, even the padded armor appears more advanced/stable/upgraded. It feels like you downgrade your gear with armor even the optic seems downgraded. It's the first time you don't feel progression.

By the way... no big deal, but it's about the German translation: please don't use the Google translator for a game with millions of sales. "Soft tissue" is not "Taschentuch" xD. Was a bit confusing when we first found it. We fueled our refinery with something we would blow our nose with. But that's just FYI, I don't want to harp on translation here.

8. Multiplayer connection:
This game is officially announced/advertised/sold as a multiplayer co-op game. This is one of the - if not THE - main aspect of the game that comes out of every advertisement. The developers are using a peer-to-peer driven server model which is insane in 2022. I was hoping that the development time took this long because they are fixing this problem first. Once 4 players are in the same area and you haven't manually scripted your server dll's, it's almost unplayable from my perspective. If you try to play with 6 friends and do bonemass you have desync and lag, which I last experienced in 56K/ISDN-times back then when I played with 20 people on a battlefield 1942 server. And even that ran more smoothly.

I was pretty sure they were going to fix that, even if it meant rewriting the code. But imagine how many sales this game had. It's unbelievable to have a NASA PC with a fiber connection and have to wait 2 to 5 seconds for the damage calculation. How do you think the X-Box version will go? Are console gamers that undemanding these days?

I mean... it's a co-op game. My PC shouldn't boot faster than my teammate can open a chest on the server. I repeat / this is no rant, this is a fact. And no, I checked everything for weeks, every connection from every client to everyones PC. I invested more time and especially more money by trying to get the server lag free than for the game itself. It's nearly not possible. In turn if you are playing with 2-3 players in one area maximum it works "not perfect" but pretty acceptable. For everyone else who is server host, there is a instruction on google (type "valheim server lag") to raise the send/receive limits a bit, which helps much in some situations, but requieres some script knowledge and trial and error.

Fazit:
Overall it feels like Mistlands lost the connection to Valheim. It feels like a "more fantasy loaded" / new Lord of The Rings adventure which is very good on it's own. I repeat, it's not a bad game, but I wouldn't consider it "Valheim" anymore. It has some really good ideas I liked very much. The mist is great done / it's visual impressive. The concept is great on it's own.

It just feels like you started the next level of a game and with whole new setup but same controls. Just like a cut/a stop, reading the points list and move on. Mistlands and Valheim does not feel like one piece. And now, after I played Mistlands, I see the disconnection between H&H and classic Valheim. My love to the game and resulting naivety from it made it impossible to see this back then.

I really tried to feel it again, but it breaks my heart the direction everything is going. That's a personal preference. I would imagine a lot of other gamers would like just that, but I'm not one of them. I thought they were going to make a game for a small group of hardcore purist gamers (as the developers said in the fireside chat), but it seems they've taken a different path.

Fun fact: Mistlands feels like every "trolling" the game had to offer, or to put it more bluntly - the most annoying things in Valheim, like trolls destroying your base, deers making noise and running away from you, mountain terrain / stamina regeneration, copper mining, cliff fights, fog and co (you know what I mean) have been combined into a new biome together to give us the most annoying experience. But that's not the point of this post, just a little joke with some veracity.

It is what it is. The whole thing about Valheim makes me so emotional. I'm really sad about how everything turned out. One of the best experiences in recent years, one of the best concepts, one of my favorite games ever and now I have to wonder if it's not better to call it quits.

Thank you for reading so far.
Best regards/