Originally posted by CGA:

yep i personally dont get why some complain about the graphics. i think it looks awesome. nice pictures thx for sharing

"But the texture resolution isn't 4K like I bought overpriced hardware for".... or something.

I mean, I exagerate but honestly I love how this game bucks the trend of graphics direction that see prettier graphics sometimes purely in terms of "higher resolution/polycount/etc support than X" to the point of sometimes forgeting.... like, art direction. Again of an exageration but gosh it feels such sometimes.

Honestly, I like how this game manage to not only have this low texture resolution/low polycount models approach for lower requirements but also *rolls with it*. Because in truth, it's a very modern game; you see it in the lighting engine, the water, the use of normal mapping.

It's just that it understood that "having access to modern tech" doesn't mean you're always absolutely have to constantly go "push hardware to the max because that's the only standard of pretty for some" and instead decided to scale back to a MUCH more approachable hardware requirement that, thanks to wonderful art direction and other aspects it's more forgiving graphics allows... make for an utterly gorgeous experience.

Amusingly the only other game I can think of pulling a similar "lo-fi but GORGEOUS" might be the Octopath Traveller folks with how they simply made a world of simple 3D with literally 16bits pixel textures and 2D character sprites but then overlaid the whole with beautiful lighting and other effects like gorgeous water and it just... work?? Like "I sometimes feel like I'm staring at wonderful papercraft diorama" work.

Back to Valheim, I sometimes I have to even pinch myself when wandering it's forests and grassy fields because they are so much more immersive than other more "advanced" games despite all the pixelated textures. But then when I pause I end up realizing it's likely *because* more advanced games can't even "afford" forest that lush and packed with so much tree and detail without performance taking a massive hits so much they've pushed things which forces people to either have massive overpriced hardware to run things at full detail or cut down in detail until everything is but an incomplete picture of what it should be like an incomplete canvas.

But because Valheim has such forgiving requirement thanks to it's approach, it's able to not only give but *procedurally generate* complete canvas from the get-go, amazing us with the fullness of it's environment.
No Man's Sky, and that's with years of improvement(and improved it has! I still play it once in a while and stops only because of unergonomic controls to my sensitive carpal tunnel or else I'd play it more) and optimization to both it's graphics and procedural engine still feels lightyear away from generating anything that actually come close to feeling like as "complete" a forest to walk into and wander through the way Valheim already does in it's first year.

And Valheim does that by procedurally generating it's environment itself as well rather than being handcrafted environments like ARK or Conan Exiles who HAD to be handcrafted to optimize their absurd requirements.

And the fact that Valheim, unlike these handcrafted later titles, weights only 1gb instead of 100gb also again make it all the more accessible.

I've only just started playing a few days ago and I keep being amazed by just how much this title does RIGHT straight off the bat without even having left early access yet(I'm not even getting into the gameplay nuances that it pulls off that were so critically needed by the genre since so long)


TL:DR : just like Octopath Traveller's own art direction, Valheim is a game that keep me thinking about that one Nintendo quote relating to their console design philosophy being based on "Lateral Thinking with Withered (“Weathered”) Technology".

By this I mean that their decision to purposefully make the graphics "lower"(but then thinking on WHAT to do with these graphics) they made a game that almost everybody can afford, almost everybody can afford to install on their computer and which nobody will have to wonder if they even have enough hard disk space to install it.

Case in point:

An actual port of ARK was attempted for Switch. It runs as well as you can expect it: barely and only after butchering it all to hell with "optimization".

... meanwhile I'm fairly certain Valheim, should a port happen for that console, would run on it with extremely very little sacrifices and remains as gorgeous on it than it is now for the average player.

Like, perhaps without meaning to, the devs likely very much made the "massive sandbox survival game that could run on a Switch where every others couldn't".