Originally posted by Gael:

Lots of RPG games had a feeling of progression and you get rewarded with said progression by getting good stuff at different stages of the game. Be it having the ability to do laborous tasks much, much more easier with upgraded tools and tedious walking giving you ability to circumvent it with movement abilties or wings. Minecraft, Terraria,Stardew valley, Factorio, Subnautica,etc the list goes on. But from my experience with Valheim when there was a huge hype train on this game is that Gameplay felt the same and always felt like. never ending tedious chore. You couldn't teleport ores if I recall so you either have to smelt it on a new base or manually travel by boat to bring it back which could take to half am hour depending on how bad your map was. Combat was unsatisfying The boss abilities had horrid cooldowns like 5 minute usage time with a 20 minute cool down like wtf was that? Playing Valheim felt like I was playing a poorly thought out MMORPG on singleplayer and I stopped playing just before the ice mountain boss. Now years later I just want to ask did this game improve at all on that front?.

MODS that's it.. I can no longer play the vanilla game my friends and I use mods. We can teleport metal through portals, increased stam re-gen by 50% and added 5 minutes to boss buff timers.

But the game-play loop is the game-play loop if you aren't a person who likes to grind and gather mats then well.. the game is still very much the same in that regard.