Valheim Part 3

Part 1
Part 2

The Plains

I really enjoyed the new enemy types and how differently they all felt, even the types of fulings. It kept the combat and exploration feeling varied. I especially liked the challenge of approaching fuling villages. Again, the atmosphere of the biome and the renewed use for old materials were both appreciated.

While the plains have more enemies and resources, I noticed some similar problems to the mountains. It’s possible, even for very large plains biomes, that there isn’t really anything to do but collect resources. The fuling villages might not appear, and because the new ore only comes off of fulings, there may be nothing to collect but berries, then wander around looking for enemy spawns. The lack of dungeons is noticeable, and I was surprised that there were no buried items or resources. It definitely seems unfinished.

As with the mountains, I had a lot of trouble finding the stone that gives the boss location. In fact, I never found it. I instead found the boss spawn after traveling between plains after plains. I was so burdened with resources I no longer needed that I stopped picking loot up and even ran through fuling villages, ignoring enemies, just to see if there was a boss marker somewhere. The player shouldn’t reach a point of resource saturation that nothing has remaining value, yet they can’t fight the boss to move on. It brings the gameplay loop to a grinding halt. Both the mountains and plains have this problem, and I think it stems from the boss marker being too rare. There really isn’t a problem giving the marker early because the player will still want to collect resources, make and upgrade items, and likely expand or renovate their base to accommodate new crafting stations.

More Things I Appreciate

• Events only spawn on you. You never have to rush home because an event started without you, they will only spawn on the player. Considering how vulnerable player houses can be, this is a very welcome touch.
• Combat music is reserved for bosses and events. For one, there’s far too much combat when out adventuring, the very nice exploration music would never get to play! But it also gets the blood pumping when an event triggers. The choice to exclusively use pleasant exploration music when out in zones also makes exploring and resource-gathering a very relaxing affair.
• Draugr-infested villages. Unique discoveries like these make exploration fun. It adds a lot of flavor, adds danger to low-level areas, but the lack of treasure variety (and currently limited use for money) definitely takes away from it to some degree.

Further Improvements

• Cultivation doesn’t cover as wide an area as it looks. This causes cultivated land to have many invisible holes in it where it looks like you can plant but can’t.
• Stacking Items. A lot of times when picking up items off your corpse, items that should stack, don’t, and it can even prevent you from looting your corpse all at once because you don’t have inventory space. I’ve even seen this happen when looting chests, not everything automatically stacks like it should.
• Ammo count. On your tool bar, where the bow is equipped, it should list how much ammo you have.

That’s about all for now. I can’t wait for the first update.