Introduction
When Minecraft was just starting to get big, I was already too old to take a game about building with blocks seriously. And as a result of that, perhaps misguided, aversion, I consciously skipped it, as well as a whole bunch of other games following a similar formula.
Then over time, due to the genre’s overwhelming popularity, these survival games started branching out to differentiate themselves from the rest of their kind. For some, that meant becoming survival-RPGs and adopting an RPG-like progression. Others evolved into these small-scale sandbox MMORPGs (MORPGs?) somewhat reminiscent of games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
Because of all this cross-pollination, we’ve already covered some of these titles here at GameBanshee. And so, when Iron Gate’s exploration and survival adventure Valheim entered early access and then quickly proceeded to take the gaming world by storm, I decided to finally bite the bullet and see what it had to offer and whether survival games could be of interest to your average RPG enthusiast.
Journey to Valhalla
In Valheim you play as a newly-deceased Viking on his way to Valhalla. Only before you get there, you first have to prove yourself to Odin by slaying a bunch of his enemies. A Valkyrie drops you off in a meadow and then Odin’s trusty raven Huginn sends you on your way.
From that point onward, you’re on your own (or aided by up to 9 of your friends) in this new hostile world plagued by all sorts of beasts and mythological creatures. You will need to find shelter and craft all your gear before setting your sights on the game’s big bads. Right now, there are five of them, but seeing how this is just the beginning of the game’s early access journey, the developers plan to add more.
Immediately, Valheim avoids some of the pitfalls that make the entire genre poisonous to a lot of people by taking a page out of World of Warcraft’s book. Instead of penalties for not eating or sleeping, the game grants you buffs for consuming food and resting. The strength of these buffs depends on how good your food is and how cozy a home you’ve built for yourself, respectively, which incentivizes you to actually care about your base and the logistics of procuring some decent ingredients for your meals.
However, if you choose to ignore those things and just spend a few in-game days exploring or building stuff, your character won’t die of hunger or exhaustion. Your stats will merely return to their base values.
Speaking of exploration, the game’s procedurally-generated world is absolutely massive. It’s separated into a number of distinct biomes, each with its survival challenges, enemies, and valuable resources. Currently, there are six of those in the game, but there are already plans to add more.
If you want to beat the game, you’ll need to advance through the biomes by first mastering their challenges, then crafting all the gear you can, using the resources available to you at the moment, and finally beating the biome’s boss. Doing so will unlock a special power for your character, one for each boss, and grant you access to some new resources and gathering techniques. Some of the biomes also allow you to explore instanced dungeons that tend to be filled with enemies, but also useful loot and materials.
This creates a satisfying loop of discovering new stuff, unlocking new abilities, and making your character strong enough to tackle ever-increasing challenges. However, while there’s certainly a lot you can do in the game already, its early access nature leads to its vast open spaces feeling somewhat barren. For the game to truly shine, the developers should really add a bunch of additional points of interest and useful but not crucial items you’ll be happy to see in a hidden chest, and liven the place up with some NPCs, as at the moment, the entire game only has one merchant.
Valheim also has a skill system inspired by The Elder Scrolls series. As you chop down trees, swing your sword, or just run across the plains as the local fauna tries to kill you, your skills gradually improve, making you a better lumberjack, swordfighter, or sprinter. You get the idea.
And should your character fall, you will drop all your items (you’ll be able to recover them), but more importantly, you will lose a certain number of skill points, which can sting quite a bit in the later stages of the game, incentivizing you to better prepare for your expeditions.
Valheim’s combat system is quite similar to Dark Souls with light and heavy attacks, dodge rolls, blocks and parries, and a stamina bar that presides over all of that. Now, this being an indie game by a tiny team, don’t expect the animations to be very smooth and precise, but they get the job done. And underneath a layer of clunkiness, there’s quite a bit of complexity there.
For example, the damage you do is determined by both the weapon and your proficiency with said weapon, but also, certain monsters can be weak or resistant to certain damage types. You’ll also be able to find a variety of elemental weapons and arrows. And if you want to parry anything but the weakest attacks, you’ll need to keep upgrading your shields, as for a parry to work, a shield’s block power has to exceed the incoming damage.
In a similar vein, there’s a surprising amount of depth to many of the game’s systems. Like how monsters from different biomes will frequently fight each other, allowing you to use their battles to your advantage.
Bees are another good example. At a certain point, my base turned into a small village. And either I didn’t understand how something worked, or it was some early access hiccup, but I had a problem where monsters would spawn within my palisade and mess with my stuff. So, I put a bunch of beehives around the monster hot spots. The critters would spawn and attack the hives, forcing their residents to retaliate and keep my village free from enemies, on top of their primary function of providing me with honey.
So, the game has some progression systems and a fair bit of depth. However, there’s a decent chunk of RPG players who want their games to first and foremost have a lot of story and lore. Does Valheim have any of that? Well, not really, unless you count the entirety of Norse mythology as lore. At this point, Valheim is a purely sandbox experience. However, there are some bits and pieces there that can easily be expanded into a loose but intriguing narrative.
You see, there are these stones scattered throughout the world that are presented as messages from those who came before you. These messages act as the game’s codex entries, but they also follow the journeys of at least two distinct characters. With a bit of work, these can be expanded into neat little tales you get to follow. Also, when you go to sleep, you get these flashes of your mortal life. Right now, they’re just flavor text, but it wouldn’t take too much work to make them guide you towards some secret. And every once in a while, you’ll spot a mysterious cloaked figure that disappears as you try to approach it. All these little touches are just a few turns of the narrative wrench away from becoming something bigger than they currently are.
And since we’re now talking about divisive features, the game’s pacing should also be mentioned. The developers want you to go out into the world and mount these time and effort-consuming expeditions to get new and stronger resources. So, even though the game has some nice quality-of-life features like free item repair and easy-to-use portals, those portals won’t work if you have any ore on you.
As a result, if what you’re trying to gather is relatively close, you can use a cart to haul a whole lot of it, but if it’s far away, you’ll need to use a boat. And sailing especially takes quite a bit of time. You add in the time it takes to produce coal and smelt the ores, the time it takes for the crops to grow or your mead to ferment, and you get a good deal of downtime and a rather slow overall pace.
I personally didn’t mind it, especially playing in multiplayer. That way, you can split the menial tasks, have a chat while stuck in the middle of the ocean, or have someone come pick you up if you fall overboard. Still, I can definitely see someone who likes to constantly be doing something not appreciate such downtime, so do keep that in mind.
Overall, though, Valheim currently has enough content to last you a few dozen hours, but its later areas can feel lacking in variety, and overall, the game still has a ways to go before becoming truly satisfying. Especially considering that at this point, it just ends, without even acknowledging the fact you’ve exhausted the available content.
At the same time, the developers seem to have plans to expand a lot of the systems and introduce things like set bonuses, less linear gear progression, new biomes and bosses, and perhaps even the ability to tame wolves. And even though we can only guess how all of that is going to turn out, at the moment the future is looking pretty rosy for Valheim.
Longships and Longer Houses
Next up is another staple of survival games – free-form base building. Now, for a lot of people, a rich story is an integral part of the RPG experience. For me, it’s planning a character build and then seeing it gradually come together.
While playing Valheim, I was surprised to discover that building a base over a rather extended period of time was a similar kind of fun. Having started with nothing, I first took shelter in a pre-built dilapidated shack, and then expanded from there. By the time I was done with the game, I had an entire Viking hamlet at my disposal with a house fit for a jarl, a spacious mead hall, a warehouse doubling as an embarkation room for my portals, an industrial quarter, a garden, and not one, but two docks, not to mention a bunch of small outposts all over the world.
And while none of it is necessary to beat the game, it still felt like a form of progression and a satisfying one at that.
It also helps that even for someone with pretty much zero familiarity with the genre, the building system was very much intuitive and allowed for plenty of creativity. It did take me a while to figure out how to flatten the ground properly, but once I did, it became second nature.
The whole system works really well already and just feels nice thanks to the building pieces easily snapping together. And if you do place something in the wrong spot or decide to edit some structure, you can easily dismantle your faulty builds and get all the materials back.
The system is also quite deep, as you can’t just slap architectural monstrosities together. If you want your buildings to stay up, you’ll need to provide them with enough structural support. If you want your wooden structures not to rot, you’ll have to place a roof above them. And if you want to rest by a fire, you’ll need to build a chimney to protect it from the elements and yourself from smoke buildup.
Technical Information
Valheim greets you with a faceful of dated, low-resolution textures. And while such a visual style is understandable for a game with a huge world you can terraform at will, once you get your bearings and look at the forest instead of the individual trees, chances are, the game’s visuals will not only grow on you but fill you with awe.
In motion, despite its shoddy textures, the game looks absolutely gorgeous and its environmental effects like fog, rain, and thunderstorms are straight-up great. Pair that with the fact that it takes up merely 1GB of hard drive space, and you start wondering why the hell do we have to suffer through games in hundreds of gigabytes when you can do so much with so little.
The game’s audio is less impressive and is mostly just there, but it gets the job done. The music is pretty neat, but there’s not a whole lot of it, so after a while, it becomes really repetitive.
Now, with this being another Unity project, you’ll be dealing with the usual problems, including saving taking longer and longer, and the occasional hard to explain FPS drop. Still, even considering its expansive world, the game doesn’t run too bad for the most part and judging by its resource consumption, there’s still plenty of optimization left to do.
And, of course, as with any early access project, there are bugs, but most of them are fairly minor, like you being able to load 21/20 coal into your smelter, or an occasional item duplicating when one of the people on the server disconnects. There was one pretty nasty bug that made it so you couldn’t get your resources back after dismantling a building, but either it was fixed, or it’s pretty rare, as I stopped encountering it after a while.
Conclusion
While I can’t really consider Valheim an RPG, it certainly has enough RPG elements to scratch a similar itch, especially if you’re someone who enjoys the more sandbox examples of the genre like, say, Mount & Blade or Outward.
And with Valheim consciously moving away from some of the more annoying features of the survival genre, it can also act as a pretty decent introduction to it, especially if the developers keep adding more stuff to the early access build.
