Having done a full playthrough on a fresh start server with a friend and experiening the mistlands from start to finish - I'm disappointed.

The Mistlands itself is beautiful. Aesthetically, awesome work. The Gjall is terrifyingly awesome design both in sound and appearance. The dungeons are cool (albeit a bit lacking in reward), the seekers and other monsters in this area are satisfying and well designed. New weapons and magic is also great but this feedback is not going to be focused on any of that. There is a lot of good that happened in the Mistlands, but I want to focus on the bad with this feedback, so here it is.

Navigating the Mistlands isn't fun. Both from a gameplay perspective and a lore perspective, the overly jagged and mountainous region is excessive. Why would an area inhabited by giants be so jagged? The entire zone shines a spotlight on Valheim's mountain-goat style jumping mechanics in complete excess because the mountains are excessive.

The mist, while visually aesthetic, is also obnoxious. If it storms in the Mistlands? Forget about seeing anything at all, even with a wisp. If it's night and it storms? Might as well dig a whole in the ground and go afk until the sun comes back up. But more importantly, even during the day in 'clear' conditions with nothing but fog to navigate through, it still feels rather awful. The wisp is unresponsive to movement and sometimes i'll turn toward a misty area but it doesn't get illuminated to the point where I can't even see a foot in front of me. At first the mist feels novel, but it quickly becomes frustrating.

The solution would be to have the wisp become more reactive to illuminating what's in front of you, and the area which it illuminates could be increased by 2x. The terrain generation could be tweaked to not create quite as many mountains in favor of more grassy areas. I think this would solve almost all of the gripes I have with the mistlands.

But there's one more thing, related to the mistlands, but also to progression in general. Once again, we get another item that requires inventory space that feels like I'm gaining something to lose something else.

Valheim's progression has a lot of this. You get better armor, which is exciting, but this armor is -5% move speed per piece, and that's not fun. The weight of the armor fluctuates too, with certain sets weighing a lot more than others, limiting further an already limited inventory space. I would like to move the same speed or faster as I level up and progress in power, not slower.

I would like to carry more, not less, which brings me to having to swap out our belts that let us get +150 carrying capacity for our wisps to use in the mistlands. The wisps which, as already noted, take up yet another precious inventory slot.

As you progress through the game, you may hit harder and become more durable, but at the cost of being able to carry less, of having less inventory space, and moving slower. That shouldn't be the case. That feels like sideways progress, not forward progress. It's trading one thing for another. Sometimes that's good design, but when it comes to shrinking inventory space, reducing carrying capacity and reducing move speed? Definitely not my idea of good design.