4Game

I'm concerned about the game's future. It feels to me that Valheim is currently in a state a lot of other Early Access titles fall into, where they launch to massive success and the lack of additional content updates to keep player interest, or just general transparency regarding development.

From what I understand, the 2021 roadmap was scrapped to focus on the bugfixes given the massive number of fresh players. I understand the need to update the backend of the game to fix all the issues that are present, and I'm not saying to bloat the game with new features while neglecting old broken ones. Bugfixes are and will always be an ongoing effort. I just want to know what the current priorities are. The bug tracker is nice to see what is being fixed, but it doesn't show what's currently being added or changed.

There are a few communication avenues that could be used to improve development transparency. Barotrauma is an excellent example of complete development transparency. Ignoring the fact that it was open-source, they also have an amazing Trello that includes the current roadmap and known issues. Additionally, the official Barotrauma Discord has dedicated GitHub channel that leverages Discord's Webhooks to display new commits and their descriptions. The commits only display the commit message and does not publicly reveal any specific code alterations.

Not sure if the developers monitor reddit or not but hopefully this finds their way to them and is of some use. Might help prevent people from constantly pestering them about when the next update is.