“We want physical exploration to be a big part of the game,” says Törnqvist, but portals were replacing the need for most journeys. In playtests, Valheim became a portal-building game in which players would set sail, build a portal back to base, and never take to the seas again until they had to reach the next island. So it was obvious from early on that Valheim would have portals to instantly teleport players across the world.īut problems soon became evident. “We wanted people to experience building multiple times but with different ingredients, so to speak.”īut while it’s exciting to think about the idea of building a base up and then making the commitment to leave it behind for distant shores, in practice it can feel a little bad to give up on all that work and creativity. “We want players to build many bases as they progress, because many building pieces and such things are unlocked as you go, so you don’t have access to everything from the beginning,” says Törnqvist. Valheim is a game of journeys, and it wants you to feel like a stranger in unknown lands. All of this means that at a deep level, Valheim is a game of journeys, and it wants you to feel like a stranger in unknown lands and to need to make footholds in them. We would definitely like to add unique stuff like that.”Īnyway, Törnqvist and Svensson wanted Valheim to be very much about being a Viking, with players building boats and sailing the seas between the islands that make up its world. “They’re something that I personally think the game lacks a bit, like coming across something really spectacular, a giant castle complex or something, and perhaps there’s only one of this castle in the world. “I talked about having really unique locations during development,” he says. Valheim, after all, is still in Early Access. The result is a world that encourages you to explore it, one in which you can feel enveloped by wilderness and also trust that you’ll likely come across something remarkable that makes every journey worthwhile.Īs an aside, Törnqvist isn’t sure they’ve quite nailed those points of interest yet. So they squeezed Valheim down to better balance its sense of wilderness with its places of interest, at least in terms of how many interesting places its tiny five-person team could reasonably produce. “You’ve got to have something to fill it, or to put it another way, there’s got to be an end point to every journey,” says Törnqvist. They love the sense of exploring big, open spaces, so much so that early in Valheim’s development, the world was much bigger than it is today.īut they also know that there’s a point at which all that open space stops adding anything to the experience. Something important to know about Valheim is that Törnqvist and his co-lead, Richard Svensson, are really into the Elder Scrolls series, especially the stupefyingly vast Daggerfall, which contains over 15,000 settlements and dungeons.
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