4Game

Now that the mist has settled on Mistlands and everyone got to enjoy and suffer the new content, we're starting to see a lot of threads questioning game design decisions.
Rather than nitpick over details, I'd like to draw a bigger picture of how the game has been shifting in gameplay and, more importantly, target audience.

What is this game?

Valheim, like many indie games these days, is a soup of many genres. It's a survival game, yet the survival aspect is minimal; you don't need food to survive, repairing equipment is free and destroyed structures drop all their materials.
It's got that soulslike combat, but it's possible to beat this game without engaging with any of those "difficult" mechanics. Not only that, but by RPG-style grinding your skills, equipment and food to max level, you can trivialize most of the content.
On top of that, it has co-op to go on adventures together with your friends. Are your friends more of the casual type that can't be bothered to raid dozens of crypts? They might be more into playing farmville or building a cool looking base, joining you only for cool boss fights.
Somehow, Valheim on launch ended up being a perfect combination that drew out a large range of players. It is exactly that which I would attribute the 498k all-time player peak to. It felt like Minecraft 2.0 for many people, and brought different groups together.

The (H&H) Nerfening

Hearth and Home arrived and reworked various mechanics. The design changes were good, but the nerfs that came with it raised controversy.
Food was reworked to be split into "health" and "stamina" food, which is a good way to let players further customize their play-style. However, it also came with significant reduction to both stats, leaving players with easily 35% less stats total than before.
These nerfs raised controversy, and foods were subsequently slightly buffed as a result. But the food numbers are still nowhere near where they were; leaving players significantly more squishy.
Another victim of nerfs was the Bow. The bow was and is an overpowered weapon simply because it incurs no risk. Every melee weapon in the game locks you into animation, making you vulnerable to attacks, whilst a bow can be canceled at any time to dodge.
Instead of bringing the bow in line in terms of risk, the draw speed was slowed by an insane amount. The weapon wasn't just slow, it was simply not fun to use. This too raised controversy, leaving Iron Gate to partially revert the nerf.
Armor wasn't left out of nerfs either, now using a different formula that reduced less at higher values. This didn't draw much attention, but it's still important to note.

Overall, players had their survivability significantly reduced. Whilst this certainly made the game more "hardcore", it also alienated the more casual players of the game.
One of the things I really loved about Valheim on launch was that, despite the fact that I was one of those tryhards that refused to "waste" any metal on armor in favor of dodging, the option to grind your way to easy mode was available. It made it possible for me to play this game together with friends that are bad at videogames.
Hearth and Home, despite sounding like an updating that was going to focus on base building and cater to more casual players, did the exact opposite. It made the game harder in the worst of ways; by making enemies kill you faster.

What's up with raids anyway?

Raids is a feature that is present in various survival games, requiring you to construct your base with defenses. It adds another layer of depth to base building.
The problem begins with how players interact with this mechanic. If players could just slap down some walls and spikes, that'd be fine.
But once questions like "how can I prevent enemies from spawning inside my base" and "how do I get a troll to not instantly decimate my buildings" are raised, we start to question what the purpose of this mechanic is in the first place.
To casual players who enjoy building a cool base, this mechanic quickly ruins their experience. Your cool build is decimated within seconds, with little to no recourse.
Rather than tweaking raids to deal with this, the developers have doubled down and introduced new raids like the bats, which have a tendency to decimate all of your (potentially 2-star) pets. This raid isn't engaging, it just shows up and shoots your dog.

One thing that I find particularly tone-deaf is the fact that developers go around posting "community builds" on social media, whilst conveniently ignoring that in regular gameplay, many of these builds would collapse from a single troll swing.
It feels dishonest to me to advertise the base-building aspect of the game, whilst conveniently ignoring that everyone engaging with it is modding these mechanics out of the game.

Wait, this game has PvP?

Another feature Valheim has is PvP. Both Wards and the ability to enable friendly fire raised the idea that, one day, Valheim would be playable as a PvP game in a style somewhat similar to Rust.
However, Valheim has not made a single step in that direction yet. Not even the most basic step, which is giving servers the ability to force the PvP flag on, was introduced.
Sure, the game is still in Early Access development. But it seems more like an abandoned feature than something still planned.

Mistlands!

I like Mistlands aesthetic a lot. The zone has a much higher level of quality and polish compared to all the other zones, which Iron Gate definitely deserves credit for.
Mistlands, however, is incredibly hostile. Seekers are very fast, possessing levels of combat initiative similar to wolves. But unlike wolves, they're tanky and fly.
The mist and terrain not only make it difficult to traverse, but also to lose enemies. Managing encounters of multiple enemies solo is often flat-out impossible beyond kiting with a bow.
And you know what? I like the difficulty. But after a few hours, it got stale. There are little options to mitigate the difficulty.
The biggest offender is how useless the wisp torches are. Not only is farming wisps tedious, but enemies deliberately target and destroy these torches.

New gear… ?

Every time you set off to a new biome you quickly find new materials to create new equipment; but this is the opposite for Mistlands. You need significant investment to get anything made.
On top of that, the gear feels like an inconsequential upgrade. Whilst this is in part of people having maxed out Plains gear, the reality is that even without that, the upgrade is fairly minimal. Doubly so when weighed off against effort spent.
The only exception to that is magic, which is the exact opposite. The fireball staff is a risk-free weapon that puts the pre-nerf bow to shame, yet it somehow made its way into the game.
Even if the next biome is exclusively filled with fire-immune enemies, the risk-free 120 crush damage makes it the best by a large margin.

Who is this game for anyway?

Whilst originally the game seemed to cater to a wide variety of interests and a wide variety of skill levels, Valheim seems to now only steer itself to difficult adventure & combat.
I enjoy that gameplay, but I also want to continue enjoying the other aspects of Valheim. There's a lot of rough edges on Valheim. Some are loved, but others get in the way to the point of ruining the game for some players.
With the way H&H changed the game and Mistlands is building on that, I don't believe the developers want to maintain the accessibility of the game. It's becoming more niche, and what are we getting in return? A viking themed soulslike that doesn't let you attack on slopes?

That ultimately raises my question to you; what do you think about the direction the game is heading into? Is making it a manly viking adventure the way? Or should it try to go back to what it was on launch and cover its bases? Do you think it has any chance of growing beyond its initial all-time peak if it did?