4Game

I returned to Valheim and beat the Mistlands content. It was excruciating. The game does everything it can to hinder your progress and sap the fun out of exploring the new content. It's not just challenging, it's actively hostile to enjoyment.

TLDR: skip to Final Thoughts at the end.

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The difficulty spike of the enemies was extreme: even fully leveled gear from the previous zone was not enough to prevent being two shot by the new enemies: Horse sized Cockroaches with Scythes for front feet. They travel in packs, frequently with an elite version of themselves in tow. They also fly, so you aren't safe behind your outpost's walls. The rare spawn for the zone is a floating bloat monster that shots undodgable AOE fireballs and drops dog sized ticks that latch onto you and apply a DOT. Again, there's no defense to be had. It floats around ~100 ft up. It's shots are incredibly damaging, apply a fire DOT, and destroy buildings/crops. Combined, the bloaty-floaties and scythe roaches make establishing a permanant base EXTREMELY difficult.

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The terrain is an issue too. It 100% crags: giant spires of rock shooting out of the ground. You can't walk more than 20m in a direction before hitting a spire of rock that blocks your progress. There are no paths anywhere, just random 0m-20m areas that don't have a spire. Forward progress in any given direction takes -ages- as you climb and descend these crags. Every descent is a huge death-by-fall risk. There are super cool dwarven outposts dotten through the landscape staffed with neutral NPCs. You can take shelter in their mini forts, but you can't build inside of it without making all of them hostile. And they're fending off the bloaty-floaties and scythe roaches too.

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Then there's the Mist. The entire region is blanketed in a never ending permanent fog. Visibility is 0 ft. In near first person view, you can't see the ground. The previous area's boss drops components to build a Bound Wisp that floats around you and clears out the mist, but it takes up your all important accessory slot. Unlike every zone before, you don't equip it to acomplish a specific task, then unequip. You have to have it on 100% of the time or you literally cannot see anything. The enemies do not suffer this lack of vision though. They still sight in on you from a distance and close for melee. What's worse is the Wisps range: it's incredibly short, maybe 20 meters. Enemies see through the mist much farther than that. Even with the only tech available in the game to combat the mist, enemeies will always get the drop on you. Rememeber, they charge with flight and come in packs.

I love the idea of the mist, but the Wisps range needs to be upgradable, or you need to be able to equip more of them. And it shouldn't take your dedicated Item slot, you NEEED the extra cary weight of the belt so you can haul the required new special Stone back form the mine sites. The terrain makes a cart absolutely impossible, and the bloaty-floaties and Scythe Roach packs make portals short lived.

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Raids. Good lord, the raids. If you've played Valheim, you can imagine how devastating a Mistlands raids can be. I'm not going to address that here. See the HOPE section bleow for more on that.

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All of this could be solved with steady tiered progession, but everything combines to make that feel impossible to even start. You have to navigate up and down 85% vertical terrain with fatal falls everywhere hoping to stumble within 20m of a dungeon, all the while fighting off packs of cockroaches that charge and swarm you from your 360° blind spot. If you get hit twice, you die, drop your gear, and loose skill progression. You now have to make it back to that same spot from your distant base with your B-Tier gear. This Snowballs quickly into your character regressing into a level 0 amount of skills and equipment. Even -if- you find a dungeon/mine, your problems are only half over. You have to delve infested mines in search of Black Cores. Each mine has 0-4 Black Cores. You need 10 to build two different crafting stations before you can make your first mistlands piece of gear. When I walked into a mine, it agroed every scythe roach in the entire dungeon. In the starting room, I fought 95% of the cockroaches in the entire dungeon, 3 at a time, as they just poured into that one room. The only ones that didn't come for me were the ones trapped in lower levels that couldn't navigate a staricase. This happened on 3 out of the 6 mines in my playthrough. Two of those mines had 0 Black Cores. I died alot. I lost equipment alot. I de-leveled alot.

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I want to stress this point. The progressions is so out of wack, the only unexperienced content left in Mistlands after I was able to craft my FIRST piece of mistlands gear was camping in my base to craft the remaining mislands gear, and killing the boss. By the time I could craft my first piece of gear, I already had all of the materials needed to craft all remaining gear and upgrade it. I did every single thing in Mislands, except kill the final boss, in gear from the previous zone (Plains.)

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—HOPE—

One word: Mods. The only reason I continued to play the Mistlands content was due to the fantastic modding community. I -cannot imagine- engaging with Mistlands without mods. Most were tiny quality of life things that had little to no impact on gameplay difficulty: Paths provide a 15% speed boost, seperate inventory slots for Food and Gear, a clock that shows the time of day. But two made mistlands playable. It was still !@#$ hard, unfair, and poorly designed, but raised mistlands to the incredibly low bar of "Playable." They were Better Wisp to double the wisps's mist clearing radius and Forsaken Powers to enable a 100% uptime on one forsaken ability, mainly Bonemass's resistance vs physiacal attacks. With these two mods combined, I was able to see just a little farther, enough to not get sneak attacked at every opportunity by the terrible scythe roaches. I still died plenty, fighting three scythe roaches at once is hard. But, I died with my shield held high and sword red with blood, like a Viking should.

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Oh, and a mod to increase the timer on raids. I set raids to require 2 hours of in-base activity, instead of 45 minutes. Earlier in the game, I lost 100% of my progress and buildings because I got a Draguar raid, Troll raid, and another Troll raid all within an hour. I was still in copper tier at the time. Each troll was an epic boss fight and a significant drain of resources. Fighting 4 with no break was devastating. I lost basically everything I wasn't holding. When it came to the mistlands, I had just finished crafitng the my rod of fire and was working on the rod of Ice when a Scythe Roach raid started. I didn't care anymore, I left my base and portaled to the micro base I setup near the Queen. I eventually beat her and never came back. Since they don't care about Moats or Walls, I assume everything's gone. It doesn't matter. I have the Queen' head. I mounted it, took this screenshot, and uninstalled the game.

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—FINAL THOUGHTS—

There's a lot of negativity in my experience. The only reason I kept playing was because of my love for what this game is trying to do. I like the theme and execution of this game. Aside from Raids, which I seem to have Terrible luck with, the previous 5 zones were great. The Meadows, The Black Forest, The Swamp, The Plains, and even the Ocean, all have their difficult parts, but all were fun to engage with. The mistlands was not fun.

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Everything about mistlands, taken individually, is SUPER COOL. The lands are beautiful with new trees and glowing roots from Yggdrasil. The Dwarves are interesting as the first widespread Neutral NPCs. Magic makes it's first appearance, with a new stat on food and two unique mana spending weapons. Mining Jotun bones for Black Marble and their grey matter, with the decayed remnants of their helms and swords littered about p[roviding much needed Iron was inspired. One of my Youtuns spawned with the sword through his head, it was awesome to come across. The new plants are beautiful. Both glow and look unique. The rabbits darting in and out of eveyrthing was cool. The bloaty-floaty enemy is interesting to fight, so long as you can see it coming. The same goes for the Scyth Roaches. I'd love the opportunity to soften one up with a bow, and then engage in Melee when it charges me through the air. The Mist: What fantastic idea! Wandering through the mists is -so- evocative. It's so moody and thematic for Vikings. And a Bound Wisp was the companion I didn't know I needed. How cool is it to have a flaoty friend that sheds light!?

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There are so many cool ideas in Mistlands. It's a shame the mist covers all of this up though and robs the player of the chance to take it all in. Instead it's an innavigable, blind, non-stop gank fest, with horrific pacing. For those old school WOW players, it's like walking though Stranglethorn Veil at lvl 20-30 in a PVP server with blinders on: Every 3 minutes, some lvl 60 stealthed rogue backstabs you. You're dead immediately and spend more time running back to your corpse than you do engaging in the zone. Likewise, the mistlands mechanics are great conceptually, but combine together to make an an unbreachable difficulty wall. You can't target a single problem and overcome it, you have to address all of the mistland's challenges simultaneously.

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Despite how much I love this game and the theme of what Misltands was tyring to do, there's so much that needs reworked here that I can't recomend playing it as is. Mods help, ALOT, but that's a bandaid for poor design choices. It's unrewarding, painful, and fails to delvier fun.