(Very Hot Take Disclaimer) Valheim has Failed and this Update Proves It.

Since this is labeled as such, please beware that this is a tinyy bit of a hot take and only my personal opinion, you are welcome to your own, this is just my view on the state of the game. Everything I've written abides by this subreddits rules so please don't remove my critique I just want to hear the feedback of others in the community. I'd love to hear other opinions on this, no matter what they may be, the more perspectives the better 🙂

Im going to be very blunt with everything I say because I have no desire to waste more time with this game. I would like to begin this with a simple statement, I have played Valheim for roughly 400 hours personally, and have made a couple mods for it just to play around with and see what it's like to do so in this game, I have at the very least an idea what I'm talking about here.

So, its been roughly 6 months since the launch of the game, how is this all they've done? I'm going to give benefit of the doubt that there's more to the update that they haven't teased yet that we'll see when we actually get to play the update. Because if what they've shown is all that drops with the update…. yikes….

I'm exclusively talking about what they've added/changed with what they've showed thus far.

This is literally just incredibly basic stat variable changes. Food now is more "specialized"… and by that you mean you changed the only two variables you have for food ever so slightly? Cool. Cant wait to still literally never care about health foods and literally only build stamina since every enemy is a complete joke now. And you've only shown like 4 or 5 new foods. Not to mention, a FOOD item, should not take you ANY longer than maybe 3 days to add and implement into the game. I am confident I could add every food change they've made to the game, in a mod, in a week. Copy pasting code then changing variables is NOT hard. The hardest part would be texturing and modeling, which for a game like Valheim, ALSO, isn't very hard.

I also REFUSE to call the combat change a "combat change", congratulations, you made shields act like shields actually would, adding more knockback to a tower shield is not an impressive update 6 months after release. And again, CHANGING BASIC VARIABLES IS NOT DIFFICULT. Weapon balancing is content that can go out in a WEELKY update.

Let's look at what they've actually "added" to be completely fair to the devs and not just shit on them. Stacks of gold, a new chest, a few new wall pieces, a single roof (by the way how is there only ONE roofing option in the base game, that's pretty sad), windows which were somehow ALSO missing from base game, some admittedly pretty nice carved wood pieces, a new axe or something similar to one, a shield, and… anything else I'm missing? I dont think so. Oh wait the ability to puke! Congrats you figured out how to clear the variables now too!… I'm ignoring food since I already mentioned that joke.

No new enemies, no new animals, no biome updates at all, no terrain generation fix, no significant amount of building improvements, (you know, what you'd want in an update focused around food and building), none of the changes we've BEEN asking for.

Can any of you honestly tell me who asked for the food system to be revamped? It was literally completely fine, it was one of the better ones you can find in current survival games (personal opinion). I'll give credit where it's due, the food improvements do look good, and so do the like 3 new build pieces we've seen, but it's laughably too little, dramatically too late. The only thing that ACTUALLY interests me about this update is whatever the hell that crystal axe thing is and if I can put it on an item stand.

Valheim advertised itself as a "Hardcore survival game" and is currently turning itself into an incredibly cursed version of Farmville in a desperate grasp at straws to make it seem like it has more content than it does, to appeal to more people (however braindead they may be, regardless of whether they can actually play and enjoy your game. Not trying to hurt feelings, just a truthful observation.), and to make it seem like they're actually adding anything. This update completely caters to the people who sit in the meadows the entire game and never actually progress due to the "difficulty" or "grind" that the devs purposely put into the game as its sense of progression and growth. Deathsquitos were one of the ONLY scary enemies at first, then they got nerfed into oblivion because some idiots cant stand losing their stuff when they die and lack the foresight to be cautious when going to a new unexplored area without being explicitly handheld. Iron Gate, please figure out who you're making a game for. Are you making it for the Valheim community, or the farming simulator/animal crossing community. If it's the latter, you dont belong working on the game YOU created, and you should let somebody else work on it while you make AnimalFarmingCookingPeacefulHappySafeHeim. Just a casual reminder that every single one of your games bosses (it's core progression) have game-breaking exploits to make them practically impossible to lose, ever gunna fix those? How hard was it to add a BOTTOM TO TREES?

I'm more than open to an opinion change about this if someone can bring up anything that would actually do so. I'm open to having a conversation about it too 🙂 I know i'm going to sound like an angry ass just shitting on Valhiem, but I genuinely love this game and hate what's currently happening to it. Imagine the massive success this game would STILL currently be if the devs actually worked on the game more than 5 hours a week. Imagine if they released a few small features every week or two like Fortnite did(/does? I don't personally play the game and haven't in a LONG time so I don't know.), you know, one of the things that KEPT it popular? Remember, this a VERY graphically simple game, written in a VERY basic programming language, even WITH a small team. The "update progress" they've shown, is honestly pitiful. This is without a SHRED of cockiness, narcissism, or any exaggeration. I could have added more to the game by MYSELF as a LONE modder in half the time its been out, than Iron Gate will have added to it in total by the 16th. MOST modders in the community likely could too. In fact, if the game was being literally developed by even only the top THREE modders currently, im confident it would be a MULTITUDE of times better than it currently is with Iron Gate allegedly working on it. I get they're a small team, I get you guys think this is a some big complex game. It's not. Not even slightly. And if you would like to talk about size of studios vs the amount and quality of work they put out, that's an entirely different topic that would likely get Activision sued… again. Being a small team doesn't excuse literally not working on the game.

This was the first game in a long time that's made me properly enjoy gaming again like the "golden days" everybody likes to talk about, it's a shame to see it's so poorly managed and developed that the best content they have after 6 months working on it is puke berries and a glowy axe. Sorry for my opinionated rant.