Hey ya'll.
Just finished my first run!
Overall, a pretty good experience.
Here's the main takeaways I had.
Good things:
- Great sense of progression. After getting the gear from a biome, it really does feel like you "conquered" it. Dying there afterwards mostly has to be a critical mistake by the player.
- Intuitive gameplay. The ravens give you crucial hints, but otherwise, if you find the right things, you know what you need to do next.
- Exploration feels good, especially the first time you encounter a biome. My wonder and fear the first time I saw the Mistlands was genuine and huge.
- Amazing atmosphere. Each biome is unique and the devs really nailed the vibe and increasing sense of danger you're supposed to get in each one.
- The mist especially is very cool on first experience. The bells ringing in your head as it lights up red with the boom of a Gjall in the distance, the Seekers you can hear, but can't see, even the Hares with their strange sounds that make you jump at a bunny rabbit. Excellent!
Straight up bad things:
- There MUST be a way for the Trader to be found without chance or third party tools. I beat the Queen without even knowing about it and it's only after looking at the wiki did I even find it exists. I had 3 chests full of gems and coins that I was wondering what the hell to do with. Finding out I could have halved the number of Silver/Black Metal/Dragon Egg trips I needed is a huge bummer. Plus I missed out on FISHING!? 🙁
- Hitboxes and elevation. Not sure much needs to be said here. It feels genuinely not good.
- Mist is very cool at the start! It gets old fast. By the time you do 2-3 Infested Mines, you wish you had a better tools for vision that the super short torches and Mistlight. I had full Carapace gear by my 2nd mine. I needed to do 6 to get the pieces needed to craft the boss key. Finding mines is genuinely a bit tedious because of the mist. I can place 7 torches and it still won't look cleared.
- Losing 5% skills on death. Yes, I understand death is supposed to be punishing. However, it does not make sense from a design point of view to make the game harder immediately because a player failed.
Subjective/quality of improvement critique:
- If you don't find something early, you can feel clueless. My first Swamp didn't have a Crypt, for example, and I was exploring it for like 2 hours wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do.
- Screen shaking is a nuisance. I turned it off in settings, but I still get a lot of it, especially climbing.
- Comfort should not be a linear increase in Rested. It's not a huge deal, because Portals exist. The first levels (1-7/8?) are really easy to get. However, spending metal for just 1 more minute of Rested is a bit silly. Going from Comfort 10 to 11 should be something like 2 minutes more.
- You get stamina increases, but the stamina costs also increase. It doesn't feel like much of an improvement.
- Knockback is really annoying. The concept is fine, but needs tuning. Doing a perfect parry and getting pushed back 5 meters is a bit much. You can't even use the extra damage. I get that it incentivizes dodge rolling, but still.
- Getting to a new biome and finding out you need the previous biome's metals is a nuisance. Plains needs metals from *2 biomes ago*. Mistlands addresses this, but it feels like it should be addressed earlier.
- Sailing sucks. The Ocean is not interesting. Even if it had more content, because you need to sail so early, it gets a bit tiresome.
- By the time you get to Mistlands, you're super tight on inventory space. You're carrying arrows, weapons, tools, potions, trinkets, food, building materials (usually a portable portal)…
- Carapace armor looks like padded lol.
- Arbalest loading bar does not match animation. There's still a second delay after the bar ends.
My suggestions:
- Add a Vegvisir for Haldor. Alternatively, if you beat Moder, you should get a guaranteed Haldor spawn the next Black Forest you find.
- Haldor should unlock a craftable Crossbow. Mistlands being the first time you're able to level it up is a bit annoying and you only mainly use it for the rare Gjall anyways. It also makes sense since he's a Dvergr.
- Death should reduce experience, but not levels. This means you would basically go into an XP "debt". Same rules for skill drain apply.
- Add a rudder to both sides of the boat, so you don't have to do a full rotation.
- Either an upgrade for more inventory slots or things should take less slots. Wishbone, Swamp Key, Mistlight especially.
- There should be a default or standard map. Grounded and Subnautica, for example, both use a standard map. It really helps with the sense of progression and fixes a lot of the issues of content potentially being missed and the player left standing around. Random generation should still be an option.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/11by40s/new_player_experience_completing_mistlands_update/