They sounded like 'real' people to me. Pragmatic and have retained a sense of humor.

I found it humorous listening to them. Mainly because it seems to me they were addressing some of the concerns, or whines depending on how you look at it, coming from the community forums.

I -wish- every game had developers like these. What cool people.

I have listened to tons of developers talk about their creations, but I am so completely impressed with Iron Gate. I hope we get to see many, many more games once Valheim has been finished.

Just wanted to say "Thank you", for taking the time to do the Fireside Chat and giving everyone and inside look at the imaginations behind the masterpiece.

Nice video, another good insight to what their doing and what their plans are 👍

wow,just came back to see this - deserves a "bro fist award" from me

Very informative. Thank you.

cant wait for a fresh run.

All mobs being adjusted, that's very good to hear. Also yay more reason to make a Mountain base!

I dont have 30 min, since Im at work LOL. Can someone summarize this for me?

It does seems ok. Not the best update to be waiting for, but still sound nice. And with that info about improved biomes, I kinda hope for a mini boss, we haven't been told or even hinted about :P

Originally posted by neuroperson:

I dont have 30 min, since Im at work LOL. Can someone summarize this for me?

They really didn't show anything, there was just a lot of talking about how they want to approach things, sticking to the vision of the game along with a fair bit of semantics. Things like they aren't nerfing things they're reducing them in power so they aren't world breaking. Ya know, six of one half dozen of the other.

There was a point that things essentially weren't changed in a vacuum, eg food changes came along with creature balancing, which came along with weapon performance tweaks. So it's more of a swath of interdependent changes.

There was a quick blurb about how they didn't make valheim to appeal to everyone, only a small demographic, while they hope people at large can enjoy it.

They did cover a few kinda technical concerns people might have regarding any potential changes to the world generation that might happen. Which was a pretty standard, the world only generates the new content when it generates new areas. So if you've already been somewhere it's fixed to how it generated under the old system.

Much like the title would suggest there was just kind of a chat.

Here is a summary extract of what they told. IT HAS BEEN shortened and EDITED (by me) to be not too long. To get the full text, you have to listen to the video or get the YT subtitles.

The Devs are speaking with the Community Manager :

"What is Hearth & Home really?

It was originally thought to be just us tweaking the food system and adding some missing food recipes.
And then it kind of exploded into something much more.
We needed to balance food throughout the biomes.
And then, and then as time went by we progressively added more and more stuff organically that we felt was missing in the game, and didn’t really fit with the next update, the Mistlands update.
And we thought, why not add this now? So it actually grew into something much larger than we originally thought.

how do you actually, how do you actually build these, this kind of roof? What kind of materials do we need ? Do we need another type of wood or whatever ? And… yeah. [laughs] And that turned into, you know, more stuff and new enemies, and new mechanics.

I think a big misconception is, like, “Just put in some more enemies!” But the thing is you put in one enemy, you have to have drops from that enemy, those drops have to become something, so just putting in enemies is just so… It sounds small, but it’s big.
In most cases, we want every enemy to have a unique loot and a unique purpose in the game.
That makes it a lot harder to add new stuff.

We try to add stuff that serves a specific purpose, rather than adding stuff just to add stuff. I guess that’s like a core mantra for the design.

We try not to add more build pieces just to add more variety, we try to add stuff that actually adds some kind of mechanics or some kind of purpose outside just looking cool.

We have pretty much rebalanced the entire game. Hearth & Home is pretty much just the next iteration of that. So it doesn’t necessarily add a lot of new stuff in all categories, but it definitely polishes and makes it more true to the vision.

I’ve seen people saying stuff like, “They’re nerfing certain things”, ‘cause we really went in and rebalanced and every food is changed. And enemies are changed, all the enemies are.
Because I’ve seen that people say that “Oh, they’re nerfing food, it’s going to be tougher.” That’s not what we did. We balanced the enemies to the food and the biomes and the weapons and the armor, so it’s- It has to work. It’s not like “we’re changing food, let’s move on to the next thing, do we like this stick?” That’s not how it works.
Yeah, everything affects everything, you can’t just change the one thing without also not changing everything else.

The game needs more polish, better balance. And what happens is if we start here, at this edge, it’ll be more easy for us to continue with the other things, because the food has such a big impact on your gameplay, so you can’t really start with throwing in really difficult and hard boss fights or mini-boss fights or super difficult dungeons, without having the food being good from the start.

I mean, we are constantly rebalancing stuff, and we will most likely rebalance food immediately after the release of Hearth & Home. We will realize this food is wrong, this weapon is wrong, and we will have to tweak it, so… And that’s just how things go.
We constantly rebalance stuff, so if your weapon feels super wrong, your favorite weapon, don’t worry, just try to report it and we will look into it.
Yeah. And that’s what early access really means, isn’t it?

Hearth & Home, we’ve talked about new foods and new build pieces, like what can we expect from this update?
Yeah, I mean, we have pretty much touched on every part of the game. We have changed a lot of user interfaces, added new functionality, we added new map functionality, we added more settings, we added some graphics optimization, some new settings there. Pretty much changed a little bit
of everything. So, essentially, Hearth & Home is like a pile of mini patches.

You can continue to play in your old world and continue to, you know, enjoy the game. When you start a new patch, the existing world- Your explored areas of the game will not be changed. To get the new content you have to explore new areas. For example, we added some new locations to the Plains biome, and if you have already explored parts of the Plains biome, those areas will not be changed, but you will have to go to unexplored areas to find the new things.

I know a lot of people might use exploremap and so on, but you have to actually have been there with the character. So it means like, been there is like, maybe 500 meters around you also, so you have to move pretty far away from where you have been to find new things.

We had a lot of different types of food before, but everything was pretty much just “add more stamina, add more health”, and there was never any kind of choice what, what food in this biome should I eat to play better? There were never any choice- any interesting choices.

So that led to adding more food types, especially in the Mountains biome, but we also added more food types in the earlier biomes, just to give the player a choice between health and stamina or balanced or whatever playstyle you want.

So we rebalanced the damage of most weapons in the same biome, or tier, as we call it. Now it’s balanced to be pretty much the same DPS, but how they behave is more different. For example, the- In the earlier version there was very seldom good to use knives. But now we’ve changed knives so knives are very much the fastest weapon in the game. They do less damage per hit, but you can attack very fast and this makes knives actually a much more viable option.

And we also changed the speed of axes versus swords; before axes and swords were pretty much the same kind of weapon, but now axes are a bit slower, but they do a bit more damage. And the same for two-handed axes, we actually added more two-handed axes- another two-handed axe to be precise. And we tweaked that to be more of a viable option, not something people used because it looked cool, but actually a weapon people use because it’s their kind of playstyle, and it’s balanced
against all other weapons.

But we didn’t really start full production until like May, or maybe somewhere in April, but it was like May when we were like, full production, Hearth & Home. Richard: Yeah. So yeah, it didn’t actually take much longer than expected, but it was delayed due to us prioritizing bug fixes, and you know, overall performance tweaks and I spent the first two or three months just hammering away, fixing stuff.
that comes back to the fact that you need to have a- a stable ground to like work on, before you can make more content, just like how we’re rebalancing the food system before adding more bosses.

It will end sometime, there will be a definitive ending where you beat the game.

Is ever gonna be released on console or on Mac, is that something that we’re planning or is that something that’s too far in the future to even think about, like, what’s the status on that?
Yeah, that’s definitely something we are considering, and it depends on how we want to approach it. We have of course talked a lot about these things. Currently we try to prioritize making, you know, the best possible game for Steam.

We have the Mistlands as the next big update after Hearth & Home, and then we also have more biomes than that even.
So we will have at least three more content updates before the final release of the game.

Mistlands, it will be probably new types of ships, new types of building pieces that actually affect other parts of the game, and probably other types of overhauls as well.

[About updates like Mistlands] So for us it’s actually much easier to just release smaller stuff more often."

Originally posted by Tevirik:

Here is a summary extract of what they told. IT HAS BEEN shortened and EDITED (by me) to be not too long. To get the full text, you have to listen to the video or get the YT subtitles.

I was just about to start doing a quick transcription and you beat me to it lol I gave you a couple of awards to say thank you

Its looking really good, so far.

i wished the op in another thread had seen this before things clearly went out of hand
good stuff