Valheim pinpoints the important aspects like eating food to keep up health and stamina, maybe grant resistances to certain damage types, but you are NEVER required to eat or you’ll die, you’ll just simply be a lot weaker. And Valheim took what made all these survival games fun, but cooked it in a NEW way, and served it beautifully on a gold platter. Taking Vitamins to maintain your characters health, using 50 different types of meds to specifically treat a CERTAIN wound, or having to constantly use your valuable resources to repair your very low durability tools is just too much sometimes. What I’ve noticed a LOT of in recent years is survival game creators wanting to make these games that are just an absolute chore to play, they go WAYYYY too far with it, and although they are indeed realistic, the desire to play a game that is the equivalent to a weekend house cleaning session on repeat is not always that fun. Survival games have always had key elements, eating, sleeping, sometimes drinking or requiring shelter or heat. And at first, that sounds really boring… until you realize how much there is out there. Valheim pushes you to explore because it’s what you want to do. Conan pushes you to explore to fight and capture slaves. ARK pushes you to explore for powerful dinosaurs to train. In Minecraft, the game pushes you to explore because of riches. One of the key things that is so attractive about Valheim is it’s ability to rethink how survival games are played through the means of creating objectives and pushing the player to explore. Such a key concept for survival games that most of them miss drastically these days. They’ve pretty much made a survival game into your own custom Zelda adventure, where you need to chart and map out everything, find all the key locations, and the more you discover, the more you’re rewarded. It’s so massive, it’s so lush and covered in things to do and places to discover. This isn’t a game you want to put down because the world all just feels the same, no, you want to keep going because you want to see what’s more out there to benefit you, your camp, your mission. Yet I want to keep going, and that’s the crazy part. I started running around for a couple hours, which turned into 10, then 20, and now 60, yet when I look at my map I’ve HARDLY made a dent into all there is to discover. You’ll come across random dungeons and crypts, caves for trolls, abandoned villages and castle towers, and each time you can chart it on your map which starts completely empty when you create a new world. The Ocean is vibrant blue and completely traversable. The swamps are dense and dangerous, the Plains are so open and covered in beautiful gold colors. You head through dark and deep Black forest, with absolutely massive trees and tons of foliage to keep you hacking and slashing to clear your path as you head further in. You find yourself exploring these beautiful green pastures, trees flowing where it feels like a genuine prairie field. And EVERYONE can have their very own world, completely different from everyone else. The lush rolling hills, the complexity of the forests, the way you are constantly coming across new and gorgeous areas that makes you feel like a genuine explorer, Valheim not only manages to impress with the way it looks graphically, but at the way it mends it together with these stunning locations. When I explore my Gandalf named seed world (think that’s how you’d say it properly, haha), I feel like I’m actually running around in a beautiful world that some devs designed themselves. And that is making a game that uses the whole “Put your world seed name here” to procedurally generate your own custom world… yet it feels hand made. The more I play the game, the more I’m amazed at the risks taken by going the extra mile to do something truly incredibly, jaw-dropping even, and Valheim has done the seemingly impossible with this game. Valheim went full force with the idea of procedurally generated worlds, yet without the blockiness of Minecraft. Ever since the potential of procedurally generated worlds was smashed open by Minecraft, a LOT of games have attempted to use that technique for their worlds, but typically end up just use it on smaller aspects, such as weapons or abilities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |