Valheim Early Access Preview - Page 3
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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.
