4Game

No spoilers pls I'm just about to leave the third boss zone.

I've spent wayyy too much time on this game the past week. I have never felt such a strong sense of adventure from a game, or possibly from anything in life at all. The game is a marathon, every tiny advancement has burden and strife behind it, even just building walls around your base, and it's so satisfying making incremental progress on your epic journey.

But the more I've started using portals, the more trivial everything has felt, and the world stopped feeling massive. It's weird because I loved how confidently the game was going for a certain vibe, then introduces these portals that just undermine that at no cost whatsoever. You can get back to your base for free at any time by just constructing a portal and then deconstructing it when you come back.

So I've decided to just abstain from the entire portal system and will be sailing everywhere instead. I wish I had decided that earlier, it feels like my first playthrough has been tainted now. It boggles my mind that the devs didn't put any kind of cost or restrictions on this, but of course now that everyone's used to it there's no way they can turn back on it.

I know what people will say – "What's the problem, just have self-control," etc. And yeah, I will be using self-control to abstain, but then I'm no longer playing Valheim – I'm playing my own sub-game within Valheim. Since the game was designed with portals in mind, this will probably cause frustrations in my sub-game that doesn't allow portals.
That's always the problem when you start self-imposing rules in games: there's no guarantee of quality, and you'll be stuck wondering if you're actually missing out, or if the game would be more fun if you adjusted the rules a little more, etc. I don't want to have to think about these things when I'm just trying to enjoy a game to its fullest.

I saw in one of their latest news posts that they're working on adding some difficulty options to the game. I would love to see an official "no portals/restricted portals" game mode, I think it would be a great compromise that would make everyone happy.
An official game mode could have compensations for any frustrations that could come from not being able to use portals, like maybe allowing the player to make traveling gear which makes it a little faster (but not trivial) to get around.