Since we’re in the year Iron Gate studios first suggested they would be able to fully release Valheim 1.0 from early access, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the one area in which Valheim and many other Early access-based survival games tend to fall short: the late game. With the advent of early access, video games now have the opportunity to become more player driven and adaptive. With new updates comes new content, with new content comes new player experiences, and those experiences help drive new updates.
Moving the Goal Posts
While I think many games, Valheim included, benefit from an early access model, what tends to suffer in the long run is the late game. Usually, it’s due to new updates changing what the late-game content actually is. The late game of Valheim today is very different than what it was a year ago. Getting magic was a really cool and significant change. Now you can build a catapult and do magic!! With updates changing what late-game means come some side effects, and one of the most significant side effects that Valheim, in particular, is not great with is “tether materials”.
Discussing Tether Materials: The Term I Just Made Up
Tether materials are materials within a crafting system that are usually omnipresent throughout that system. Wood is a pretty easy example. You can find it in just about any game. From Palworld to Abiotic Factor, wood will be used in the low-tier recipes to the high-tier recipes. Valheim is no exception, though to be fair, wood isn’t Valheim’s problem. Valheim’s problem is metal.
The main gameplay loop of Valheim is traveling to different islands, setting up forward-operating bases with portals, and using those portals to transport materials back to your main base. One of the few materials in the game that you cannot transport through portals is the various metals throughout the game. This has been a point of conflict with the community for a while, with many debates over the topic. There is even a popular mod that removes this restriction.
The Comfortable Middle Seat
My views sit squarely in the center of this debate. I think restricting the easy transport of materials makes sense when you consider the meta context of what the game is trying to do. It’s a Viking game; You are a Viking; what do Vikings do? They traveled to distant lands in search of materials and then brought those materials back home to share with the commune. The restriction forces this behavior from players, which is why I don’t think it should be fully removed.
On the other hand, needing to travel back and forth between swamps/mistlands 20 times so you can deck out the squad in iron Armour or get the cool new weapons is incredibly annoying. From a gameplay perspective, traveling back and forth from island to base to island gets dull. The most fun part of boat travel is when you’re discovering something new, going to the next biome, finding Haldor or Hildir, or beating up a leviathan. It’s the difference between wanting to do something and needing to do something.
My Modest Proposal
To solve this problem, you could opt for the mod to transport metals willy-nilly. You could over-optimize your experience so as to waste a single second on frivolous crafts (you never really need to make iron armor), or maybe we could come together and create a reasonable middle ground. After you reach certain milestones, say defeating a boss, you could get a recipe for a totem that allows portals within its range to transport relevant metals.
This wouldn’t remove the fun travel time of looking for the next biome, you’ll still need to transport materials manually while in that biome, but after you have sufficiently conquered that biome you wouldn’t need make long tedious trips back and fourth, you would be able to focus on traveling to the new area, where you want to be.
