I’ve been around enough to see some very strange patch notes. Square-Enix has some for March 18th that are really a head scratcher.

Extending the Leveling Process

The single player campaign gets you to around level 15 of 50. From that point forward, you need to play repeatable missions (e.g. grind) to get to 50. That process is linear today, so 1-2 takes as long as 45-46. That entire process is pointless, as it’s not possible to have the best gear drop until you’re 50. If you’re actively grinding (I had a post on this), you can do 1-50 in about 2 hours.

The patch notes indicate that the time to level between 25-50 is going to increase. No idea what the value will be, but certainly more. Why? The levelling experience is nearly identical to the one at 50 (minus Hives), so what? The explanation is that new players get skills too quick, which is a business twist if I’ve ever seen one. If the process is mindless, it’s effectively impossible to have any player groups form, this seems more like it will reduce player retention. Very odd. Or not…

Replacing the Cosmetic Reward Structure

Currently, cosmetic rewards come from leveling, lockboxes, and random drops. Once you’ve hit 50, there’s no real way to target a cosmetic aside from gambling or outright buying it on the store, which itself appears random. Avengers is a weird game where there is no partial cosmetics, it’s an entire player skin with no customization. I get why, the IP needs to be protected, but it’s also a horrible model when you end up with 4 hulks who are identical. The good news here is that cosmetics have zero impact on power levels, so there’s no link to gear drops and your look.

There’s no real clarity at what the end goal is here. However, they are stating that all random drops and leveling rewards are being removed and added to the cosmetic vendor. So read into that I guess.

Next Steps

Combined, these types of changes remove interest in people who have bought the game already. From that, I would bet dollars to donuts that Avengers is going to convert to F2P before the summer. Hawkeye will be the last ‘free’ item provided to the player base, and from then on, everything will be in the F2P mode.

If you’ve been following Avengers, then this really is the only logical conclusion. The single player experience is still frankly amazing, and then after 5 hours or so, it’s done. A F2P swap won’t really change that, just make it more accessible I guess. Until there’s a serious effort to put in content with value at max level (Mega Hives are not that), then there really isn’t any long term view here. It’s similar to Anthem, just a different set of problems that are going to end with the same conclusion.

Dying in Valheim isn’t terribly painful. You may lose small amount of skill points on the first death, but all your gear is just sitting on your corpse. Valheim is kind enough to even put a map marker where you died. Dying is a normal thing, especially when you first enter a new biome. You are but a babe in the woods if you’re not prepared and cautious, and the lowliest of boars can take you down without much effort.

After taking down the 2nd boss, I received a Swamp Key. Inferring that I now need to find a swamp. Valheim is BIG, and my starting island is a full day’s trek from coast to coast in a straight line. My island is but a drop in the bucket compared to the larger map. Exploration is fundamental to Valheim, and the move from Meadows/Dark Forest to anything else feels like you’ve moved onto a different game.

You Need To Build a Boat!

Great game btw. I had put some minor effort into a raft, went out for like 5 minutes, moved like a snail, and then decided to do better. The exploration part of the game doesn’t tell you that there are other boats until you have the right materials in your bag. In this case, Bronze Nails. Why craft Bronze Nails at all when nothing seems to need it, and bronze is already hard to get? Well that was a bad call. I’m now crafting 1 of everything, in the odd chance that is adds a new recipe to my list.

Back to the boat though. I crafted a Karve, which is a sort of sloop with a 4 slot inventory. Sailing in Valheim is more simulation, so you really need to take wind direction into account to actually go anywhere. You know you’re doing it right when the music changes. I opted to head out to larger sea, enough to see the short but far enough away to avoid rocks. That was a bad idea for two reasons.

First, the fog on the map is super important to get the outline of land. You need to be a certain distance for that the unveil, and it makes further trips a lot easier. Second, if it’s night, you’re going to find a sea serpent and it will not stop attacking you. It doesn’t do enough damage to sink a Karve (at least not a level 1 serpent) in one night, but it sure as hell is a new level of stress! Staying to short avoids notice from sea serpents.

I haven’t mentioned sailing in a storm. That is at another level, and I strongly urge everyone to give that a shot.

Finding Land

Finding a swamp is not super obvious. Finding anything really isn’t, truthfully. I ended up sailing for 20 minutes to find something that looked like a swamp. And here’s where that started going downhill.

Swamps are a level of death that’s on part with taking out a troll naked and no bow. You’re always wet, which means slower stamina regen. There’s crazy monster density (Draugr, Skeletons, Leeches, Slimes) so that you’re nearly always in battle. There are leeches in every pool of water, and they deal decent damage and poison you. There’s next to no useable land, meaning it’s crazy hard to find a spot to put a workbench and install a portal. It’s an entire zone that say ‘DO NOT ENTER’.

Of course we need to explore!

So I end up finding a spot that has no enemies, is close to water, and with my hoe I can raise the soil to put down some stuff. I have enough time to put down the workbench, and as I’m building the lean-to for shelter which would allow portal construction, it feels like half the zone has aggroed me. I had over 100hp, full bronze armor, but wasn’t able to get back to the boat before poison took me down.

And where do I end up? Back in my main hut, naked, 3 islands away.

Rebuilding

I had kept all my leather/stone items, but I didn’t have enough copper or fine wood to build another boat. You need a bronze axe for the latter, so I ended up spending a day rebuilding my inventory in order to set sail again. I could see my corpse marker, it was just impossible to get there without a boat.

So lesson learned here is that I need a ‘recovery chest’, which has all the mats needed to build a boat, and the food needed to do the corpse run itself.

The other lesson is that I absolutely need to have a portal on any island that I land upon, and that it is never a good idea to put a portal in a swamp.

Next Up

I did get my corpse back and was just able to squeeze back onto the boat before dying AGAIN. I sailed the coastline a tad, found some Dark Forest land, and built my portal. And then proceeded to die 3 minutes later. But I do have some iron scraps, some ancient tree, and some mats to cook up better food.

So many lessons learned from a single corpse run.

I guess you could say I’m taking my time in Valheim. Maybe compared to others. It doesn’t feel like I’m going slowly, rather the fact that there’s always 2 things left to do at any given time. It helps a lot that these things never feel tedious, and that every act makes you better at that act.

I can recall the first few minutes I was playing. I punched a bush for some wood, tried in vain to find a rock on the ground, and was mauled to death by a boar. Welcome to Valheim! Now I’m chopping down giant trees in a couple strokes, taking down giant trolls with well placed shots, and harvesting carrots.

I’ve spent the last few sessions taking pains to harvest as much copper/tin as possible to craft some bronze items. A bronze shield (with an ok amount of skill) can negate pretty much everything but poison and a giant troll smash. I’m not rolling through the countryside immune to everything, but the feeling of perennial dread has abated. I can risk entering a crypt without large sweats that I’ll die in 2 hits. Maybe it’ll be 4 this time.

My first large camp was on the border between Meadows and Black Forest biomes. You know the spot, a large open area that just screams BUILD HERE! Slowly, every so slowly, I keep unlocking more things to do. A kiln/smelter to make bars. A forge to smash things to be better things. New trees with new wood to improve my bow and arrows. Rain is a great thing, it causes all the birds to stick to the ground – so there’s 100 feathers for more arrows. I’ll spend an entire day just harvesting food items – mushrooms, berries, queen bees for honey, thistle, dandelions… everything seems to be used for something, There’s no such thing as junk.

Which comes to the next point about stuff in general. There’s so much of it and so little room to store any of it. I don’t mind at all the smaller personal inventory – I think that adds choice to any particular run. The fact that I need 12 chests, stacked on a wall, that’s a problem for a future update. Having to move things from a chest next to a crafting station to my inventory – that’s a quality of life item I would like to eventually see. But this is a quibble, a minor annoyance.

This stands out when you look at Valheim in general – the map for each seed is HUGE. Walking in a straight line for an entire game-day would maybe cover 2% of the map. When I found a rune telling me where the 2nd boss was located, I honestly thought it was joking and there were multiple spawn points. It was 5x farther than my furthest exploration point.

I took enough tails/meat to survive 5 days, the material to build a portal, and enough wood for a workbench and set out to see how I could get to the boss. While the world is made up of various islands, most of them are close enough to swim rather than build a boat. I figured I’d just take the time to explore my local coast line and see what happened. I did luck out and find a spot where I could swim with only minor HP damage. When I took the other shore, sure enough there was a portal with Greydwarves waiting for me. Cue the running around to lose them, in the dark no less.

The other short didn’t have any meadows, so there weren’t any easy access huts to repair and spend the night. I ended up creating a super simple shack (no door!) to sleep through the night. Morning came around, I broke it all down, then continued on to the marker. Only took a further half-day to get there, dropped the portal, and got attacked by skeleton archers. The boss area was standing on a crypt. At least there were no Frost Giants! I opted to clear out some nearby trees to give more room near the boss pillars before heading back home. I then prepped all my gear (bronze gear, fine bow, fire arrows, 2 cooked meats, royal jam, healing potions) and went to bed for the night.

New day, I filled up on food, took 3 seeds to summon the boss and went through the portal.

tldr; the Elder boss is really quite simple. Stand behind a pillar to avoid the vines shooting towards you, shoot fire arrows, and move to another pillar if ground vines spawn. It’s a LONG fight, it was dark by the time the fight ended, but I was never in danger of dying. I am so happy other bloggers got to do him before me!

Next up is trying to find a swamp. I really don’t have a clue where that would be given my current discovered map. Think it’s time to build a big boat and go sailing. I’ll need to do that no matter what in order to transport any metals. Act 3 here, I come.

Bel’s post reminded me this was coming about. What with the news Anthem is effectively dead, I’m a tad curious as to any further entries into this genre.

The demo itself covers the first chapter, up to level 7, 4 powers and 2 talent points. There’s no crafting, no real customization, and I’d have to guess other systems just aren’t present. It’s not a beta in that sense, but really a demo of what the game will have as 90% of your playtime.

If I had to compare, it would be like playing The Division with cover based mechanics and skills with cooldowns. The world is a sort of mix between Avatar and Anthem, or at least appears to be. The first chapter is all trench battles, and feels quite drab. Just when you’re about to leave that place, the demo ends.

The good news is that the shooting mechanics feel tight, and enemies go to great efforts to flank you. The less good news is that the cover mechanics don’t feel right – it’s like the 100m hurdles all the time. It could just be the first chapter. There’s marginal weapon variety – assault, shotgun, sniper, rile, and so on. They feel different enough in handling to matter more than just pure DPS. Melee is weird, as you sort of force push something and hope it hits. It’s hard to figure out range when you don’t have an actual object to judge. Also, it’s 2021 – why can’t I jump?

The 4 classes have interesting bits I suppose. You can have 3 active skills, and they often interact with each other. The ability to interrupt casting is really cool, though enemies build resistance over time. I’ve tried all four to level 5 (and pyro to 7). It really isn’t remotely close enough to get any sort of passing grade, aside to say that the classes all play differently. Given the size of the talent trees it sure looks like you can further customize the classes – say more healing, or more debuffs – at your leisure.

I will add that the game looks good. Damn good. It uses motion blur in quick movement areas, which helps mask any framerate drops. Gear, even at low levels, has appeal. (side note – my big gripes on Anthem/Avengers is the lack of player customization.)

The story sounds interesting, and the end of demo gives some flash forward bits to more interesting locations. Anthem and Avengers both had solid leveling experiences, then petered out completely at the end game. If Outriders plays more like Borderlands 3, then I can sort of see this thing work well. But truthfully, I can’t make heads or tails of any of it. Thinking about it, I don’t really care much. I paid $20 for Avengers (worth it) and like $15 for Anthem (also worth it). In both I was frustrated at the end game, but now I guess I have better expectations. And better alternatives in all that’s around. Lowered expectations are good.

There are still some bugs to workout, so I’m guessing a pretty big day 1 patch is due when this launches in April. The game crashed to desktop 4 times in the 8 or so hours I’ve put in. I got stuck on terrain a few times, enemies teleported, skills just didn’t work at all. It’s QA stuff that I’m sure has been flagged before, and that this demo is more like a chance to heat-map player behaviors. There’s little pity for any game that launches broken these days, so smart on them to push this to the right.

All told, this isn’t a day 1 purchase for me. There’s potential, for sure, but there’s also a backlog of like 20 games to get through that I know are good games.

I should hope no one is surprised by the announcement. I’ve written a lot on Anthem, and there are few examples of perfect failure.

Anthem is a failure of BioWare management, full stop. The devs built some spectacular systems, and as a proof of concept, Anthem just knocks it out of the park. When taken as a whole, that’s where the game fails, and that is entirely at the feet of the directors. Jason Schreier’s report does a good job of explaining this.

Anthem NEXT had a team of 30 people to incubate a new idea, which wasn’t so much a ray of hope for Anthem specifically, but a way to salvage as much from the game as possible to transplant elsewhere. The prime market window for something like Anthem is in the past. Dozens of companies have tried to enter the team-based shooter realm and have failed. You’re fighting against years of momentum with Destiny and The Division. You need to be practically perfect.

BioWare has never, ever been close to perfect. Go back and play their games to check it out. They are great at capturing the essence of an idea, and have had success in being the only option in their field. We geeks are notoriously forgiving of other geeks attempts, and once BioWare started a more corporate view (e.g. DLC in Mass Effect), our patience waned.

The lack of patience has created a lack of success for BioWare for pretty much the last 10 years. Mass Effect Legendary is out in May, and should be an olive branch to their player base. It’s one of those “don’t F this up” deliverables, as failure here doesn’t bode well for Mass Effect 4 or Dragon Age 4.

That said, I’m glad this is not a jobs cut operation. The people working on Anthem NEXT are going to other projects, which is great. Here’s hoping both of those major projects can apply lessons learned from Anthem (and related, Cyperpunk 2077) so that a quality product is delivered and employees survive the process.

I generally avoid EA games. There are very few cases where something of quality comes out of it (Hades, Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon are notable). I was aware of this game, and the general hype here was that it was in a better space that some games at release. The blogs I follow all seem to have nothing but good to share on the game, and at $20, it’s less than I’d spend at the pub (if it was open).

First things first, the game is still in EA. While I’ve never had a single crash, or found any bugs (amazing!), it’s rather clear there are some rough systems and placeholders present. There’s a breadth of systems here, no question, but it’s relatively shallow in the current state. You’ll always be knocking down trees, needing ever increasing amounts of wood to get things moving. You’ll always need food, which is always cooked the same way, and provides the same boons. Inventory management is painful. It looks like you’re playing Asheron’s Call, which is a really weird vibe with things sort of ‘blending’ visually. So with these rough edges, what’s getting people to play? A few ideas.

• The freedom of building in 3D space is a big one. This isn’t Minecraft where you’re in an X/Y/Z block model. Valheim lets you design free-form, which results in some extremely impressive options.
• There’s zero PvP. Aside from No Man’s Sky, there are few free form options without PvP. I could do without the greifing in ARK/RUST.
• Repairs are free! This is likely just an EA feature, but wow does it feel great to not have to worry about harvesting back up material to repair something. It’s grind work that defeats the exploration parts of the game.
• It’s hard. You’re likely to die in the first 5 minutes. And then multiple times as you go forward. You vs. 5 enemies = you’re dead. Bosses are very hard to defeat.
• Death is an annoyance, not a punishment. Your gear hits the ground and if you get back to your corpse, you get all your stuff back. It’s a corpse run, with all the fun that comes from that.
• It’s long. You’re not going to beat this game in a sitting. Heck, you’re not likely to see the first boss in a sitting. It feels incremental rather than revolutionary in terms of progress gains.
• It’s balanced. This is a weird statement for an EA game, as there are clearly some tuning aspects required. What I mean here is that there’s no one single way to fix any given problem, multiple viable paths exist. Is a bronze mace better than a club? yes, but not like 20x better, forcing you get that to move forward.
• ‘One More Turn’. It is stupid easy to lose track of time here, cause there’s always something else to do. Civ and XCOM spring right to mind on this.

I’ll keep plugging away at it. The Elder is my next target, requiring a boat to reach and a whole pile of bonze to properly gear up. I can easily see myself here for a solid 40-50 hours, which is a great return for $20.