Me and my partner both lost interest around the black metal stage. We forced ourselves to plough through it for a while but we went from spending pretty much all of our gaming time in Valheim to logging on for a few hours and thinking, "Meh, let's play something else".

I think the problem with Valheim boils down to one thing - The grind doesn't lessen with time.

I've played a ton of survival games with thousands of hours in some of them, and the ones that I keep coming back to are the ones that at least reward you with taking away the grind in some way. Whatever mechanic it is, whether it's easier transport, or easier collection, not having to deal with trash enemies, etc. But Valheim doesn't do that to any significant degree.

Sure, I can make better armour, and my collecting tools get better and my stamina increases, but in the scheme of things that makes almost no difference to the amount of time I spend grinding; I still have to spend ages replanting crops, I still have to spend lots of time collecting wood for charcoal and building, I still have spend tons of time collecting stone for walls and terraforming, etc. Even with the boss skills, it doesn't really change.

Contrast that to something like, say.. Ark, where I do have to spend lots of time collecting, and I would say in some ways Valheim beats Ark hands down, but I can get Dinos to do that for me. Running around collecting for hours becomes a matter of minutes. Travelling becomes trivial. It makes me want to push myself to build cool stuff, take on tougher enemies, explore different elements of the game.

I actually think Ark is a good example of how to do dungeons well. There's certain restrictions for them, so they remain challenging even when you're at the high end of the spectrum, until you get ridiculously overpowered. At which point you don't need to run them anyway and you're going for the bosses.

7 Days To Die is another example (although I haven't played that for a few alphas) - Making better quality weapons and increasing my skill makes collecting a ton faster. Dealing with trash becomes easy, I can concentrate on the big stuff like hordes finding blueprints.

Valheim seems to lack that though. The reward you get for putting the time in and grinding is to just grind in the same way in different places. A lot of it could be fixed though with some minor changes. A big problem is, quite frankly, the community. There's a pretty hardcore elitist bunch that jump into any thread and tell people to basically git gud because someone thinks the game would benefit from being a bit more streamlined. I just hope the devs listen to people who actually want the game to be better rather than some weird epeen flex.

Edit: I should add that this was talking about both our SP experience and our Co-op experience combined, that's why it's on this thread as I know the OP asked for SP. We had the same feelings with both game modes.

Edit 2: Thanks for the award whoever the kind stranger is :D Even if it was joke, thanks anyway :D (You never can tell on steam lol)