4Game

This isn't meant as a hate thread on Valheim, and I wish we could talk about media without it being one extreme or the other. I love Valheim enough to make a thread formulating my thoughts on why I'm upset with it.

Valheim started development in late 2019/early 2020, released in early access in Feb 2021. The game started with 6 biomes, and the devs made everything in the game that we now enjoy within the span of about 2 years. The enemies and their ai, the weapons, clothes, movement, building system (probably the most complicated mechanic), etc etc, in those 2 years.

It's been 1.5 years later, almost as much development time as the original release of the game, and we don't even have a single new biome. Does no one else see the problem with this?

The dev updates are pathetically slow. A 19 year old kid studying Unity in college can output more in his free time, than a multi-person team of seasoned devs with millions of dollars at their disposal.

Obviously they're not really working on the game. Anyone who's being good faith will admit this. It doesn't take 6 months to make a crossbow, especially not for a low poly game with simplistic mechanics.

The devs are enjoying some well deserved rest.

It's been a year and a half. How much vacation time do they need? And why couldn't they hire developers? Svensson doesn't even need to do anything to finish Valheim outside of outsourcing the game. And if he doesn't want to do that, then he needs to either shit or get off the pot. They're (the devs) are set for life and have almost zero incentives to actually "finish" the original idea of Valheim.

I got my money's worth.

Great, me too. but it doesn't address the issue.

Why is this a problem?

Because they're lying to supporters. They know the game's never being released as it was originally promised. Worse than that, they're still telling people the game's not finished, when it 80% is done. We'll probably get a few things here or there, but the game's basically content finished. The slow drip while saying "the flood is coming guys, just hold on!" is disingenuous and that's the part that bugs me.

The scope of the game changed once they found success!

Have they devs ever said this? And if so, did they offer refunds to backers? I'm guessing no for both.