Summary
- Valheim's grind can be slow, but world modifiers and mods can help speed up progress for solo players and multiplayer groups.
- The linear nature of Valheim ensures players are prepared for each biome and boss fight, but it limits exploration and choice.
- Valheim lacks meaningful optional content and could benefit from additional bosses, weapons, armor, and biomes to provide more freedom and variety.
The grind in Valheim is quite slow, due to the combined time it takes to build fortified bases, discover the map, stock up on food buffs, and collect enough resources to craft the next best set of gear. This can be especially tedious for solo players, although a recent update for Valheim has introduced world modifiers that can help to set a customizable pace for the overall progression, difficulty, and survival elements throughout the game. Playing in multiplayer, using mods, and/or setting custom world modifiers is a much more efficient way to gain progress in Valheim, although the grind still tends to be extremely linear despite all the help these features can provide.
Valheim’s linear nature isn’t all bad though, mainly because it ensures that players will always be adequately prepared for the dangers and enemies in each consecutive biome and culminating boss fights. For players who enjoy taking their time in each of Valheim’s different biomes and related progression stages, the game’s natural order of progression allows them to master and fully complete each biome and potentially never need to return to it. The downside though is that there are very few opportunities to stray from the intended path, at least on a player’s first playthrough.
Valheim Is an Extremely Linear Game
For players who just want to explore freely, the order of major bosses in Valheim can be quite unforgiving. Players looking to find the traveling merchants in Valheim might also run into this problem, that the difference in difficulty between certain biomes is so extreme that it discourages players from exploring biomes outside the intended order.
World modifiers and unofficial mods for Valheim can all help to give players a lot more freedom regarding how players can make progress. Although players potentially risk the chance of ruining their experience with Valheim when using these features, ultimately it’s a slippery slope to navigate the game with these tools.
While Valheim’s grind is extremely linear, the game’s pacing is actually a symptom of a different problem, that Valheim doesn’t offer much in terms of meaningful optional content to explore, at least as it currently stands. Compared to other benchmark games in the survival-crafting genre, games like Minecraft have built their reputation on the freedom of choice that the optional progression elements offer. For example, players can entirely skip the ability to brew potions in Minecraft from the Nether Biome. In Valheim though, no matter what state of the game players find themselves in, it's always mandatory to keep up with the core survival elements, like food, armor, and weapons in Valheim.
Valheim arguably needs more bosses and progression steps that are optional, between each of the mandatory progression stages. Ultimately though, there’s a wide variety of untapped potential that could help to steer things in the right direction, such as optional bosses, additional tiers of weapons and armor, and/or entirely new biomes. Valheim’s Leviathan monsters are actually a great example of how optional encounters can be extremely worthwhile to discover, yet few other experiences in the game end up having such an impact. Hopefully, though, this will change in future Valheim updates.
Another potential solution that Valheim should consider is to increase the impact of the player’s skills. One of the few noticeable skills in Valheim that can be upgraded is the jumping skill because this is a universal skill that players are likely to level up faster than other more specialized skills. Given how difficult some of the other skills can be to increase, and how minuscule their benefits are, most skills arguably aren’t worth the effort to prioritize improving them. Most of Valheim’s skills are in need of a buff, and this could also be a great way to provide players with the freedom of an alternate means of progressing, potentially making the boss order less linear.
Valheim is available now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.