Non-RPG General News - Valheim: Big Launch

IGN reports that the survival game Valheim is very successful right now on Steam:

Valheim Appears To Have Steam's Biggest Ever Launch for a Survival Game

Already in Valhalla.

Valheim is already nearly the biggest survival game ever on Steam, and it's not even a fortnight old.

On February 14, Valheim hit an all-time peak of 367,443 players on Steam, barely two weeks following its February 2 release. Compared to the most popular survival games on Steam, this makes it the fastest growing game in the genre ever. Its key genre rivals, Rust and ARK: Survival Evolve, cannot boast such a high number of concurrents in their entire lifetimes, and only hit comparable peaks years after launch.

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More information.

I'm always surprised for these sorts of games, which for some reason explode in popularity, and I just don't get it as to why. Maybe I'm just not into survival games.

Fall Guys I could get. But this, I don't. Maybe I'm missing something.

danutz_plusplus said:

I'm always surprised for these sorts of games, which for some reason explode in popularity, and I just don't get it as to why. Maybe I'm just not into survival games.

Fall Guys I could get. But this, I don't. Maybe I'm missing something.

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Ditto for me but given it's popularity it seems house building is the focus of most players not survival. Seems Fallout 4 was the start of games like this gaining popularity.

Then again you could probably blame Mine-craft instead.

Couchpotato said:

Then again you could probably blame Mine-craft instead.

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It is pretty much an updated mine-craft.

So, who liked and played co-op mine-craft, will definitely like this one. And vise-versa.

Henriquejr found this article:
Valheim is better because it rejects boring survival systems

Me and a friend have been looking at this. Thanks for the added article @HiddenX; and @henriquejr;

Kind of a crappy article, though. The guy talked more about himself than the game.

My kids love minecraft. Maybe we could play this together? A forgiving survival and building game sounds more fun than a hard one, at least nowadays.

Anyone tried it and knows how difficult the controls are? And how hard it is to understand the basic rules of the game?

Despite the survival elements, this is very much an rpg. I'd call it more of an action rpg with survival elements as the survival aspect isn't as intrusive or annoying as many similar games. It's sort of like Skyrim with no npc's, at least that I've encountered yet.

The controls are nice and for early access the game runs very smoothly. The rules are fairly simple, pick up everything to learn to craft new things and craft everything to learn how to make other things. The combat is a decent challenge for an average gamer, but once you learn to time blocks it becomes fairly easy aside from the boss fights. Building is amazing as is sea travel. The combat might be a little difficult for very young kids, but once they get a hang of the combat it shouldn't be an issue. I would think it would be a fun time to play with the family.

I played a couple of hours of this the other day. I found combat was considerably less clunky than, well, 95% of other early access survival games, so that's good. That's one of my main criticisms of most EA survival games.
There are areas for improvement (e.g. ugly menus), but as far as EA survival games go, it's already pretty good.

I've tried it yesterday, but it wasn't for me. Maybe I shouldn't try any survival tagged games anymore, they just don't seem to match with my idea of fun.

So, I just grabbed this Friday when I saw nearly 500,000 people playing it. The game is mostly a crafting/building game as the survival elements are pretty bare bones. That's not a knock, there is enough there to meet the genre label.

Basically, you're a hero from one of Odin's other worlds. You've left Valhalla to enter Valheim and kill the spirit forms of some Forsaken Beasts. Doing so rewards you with special powers and it also allows you to craft better weapons, tools and armor for the next beastie.

The crafting stuff goes pretty quick, so it isn't too much of a grind moving up from Breezehome to Dragon's Reach. I'm not much of a builder, so I do as little as I can get away with and still move on. Combat is fairly easy, even for this old coot, so I wouldn't say the challenge is super high, but then the game has only been out 4 weeks or less.

This could become a much better game if they add dungeons to the world. BTW, the world is absolutely massive. Think along the lines of Daggerfall. It's proc-gen and suffers some of the common problems of the type. Building requires a lot of room and the terrain is bumpy and hilly as all get out. You get a hoe to deal with the problem, but it's pretty tedious to smooth out the land for each yurt you'll want to build. The world is too big to only have one domicile.

There are teleports later on, but I'm only 15 hours in and I spent most of that re-rolling worlds to get one that I liked. Killed the first big bad monster and harvested tons of boar/deer/lesser monsters to make my weapons/tools/armor.