Valheim, a new Viking-themed survival, construction and exploration video game, became the title of the moment without anyone having foreseen it. In recent weeks it has matched and surpassed a series of historical and noble videogame records very quickly, and in no time. Valheim, available only on PC, has already been bought by 3 million users and has come to be the second most played game on the Steam platform, peaking at over 500,000 concurrent users. On Steam, no other video game had gotten this big this fast. “Its growth trajectory,” wrote The Verge, “resembles nothing it has been up to now.”
The strange thing with Valheim is that in many ways it is a game normal, without significant innovations compared to other games of its kind and with graphics that according to Ars Technica recalls “those of the first Tomb Raider of the nineties”. Compared to most of the competition, however, Valheim stands out for its simplicity and the speed with which you can learn to play it, and for an aesthetic that is perhaps a little vintage, but still very popular.
Developed by a Swedish production company with only five employees and available since the beginning of February, Valheim costs € 16.79 and is an “early access game”, in the sense that users who buy it agree to play it although in many ways it is still under development and with several possible problems.
You can play alone or with up to ten players cooperating with each other, and it is a sandbox game, in which players can roam for an open world with ample scope to actively act to change that world to one's advantage, largely by building things. But to build things you need better and better food, materials and objects; and it is also necessary to stay healthy, to know the pitfalls surrounding oneself and to face a series of obstacles, adversaries and adversities. The players are Vikings to whom the divinity Odin has granted a sort of afterlife in a world that is anything but heavenly.
The video game site Polygon wrote that in Valheim “there is no it's nothing too flashy “and that although there are a number of mechanisms” already used in games like Ark or Conan Exiles, many of the critical issues of those games in Valheim are “smoothed out or even outdated.” According to Polygon “in a genre so crowded with games that all look alike, dull and often disappointing, Valheim stands out because it is essential, it works well and it makes sense”.
Also on Polygon there are already about twenty articles of analysis, explanation and advice on the game: one explains how to cook your own food, one talks about the “giant mosquito that chases you and can kill you”, yet another warns readers against great danger represented by falling trees while being cut down.
The Verge appreciated him for his being “slow and methodical”, and for how one can get to build fortresses and ships, ” hunting divinities for sport ”, or simply exploring“ an incredibly large map full of idyllic scenery ”, accompanied among other things by“ delightful music ”. Speaking of the images, The Verge wrote that “they stand out for their depth of field, for their geometry and for the way the light filters through the trees”. Polygon also agrees that although graphically rather simple, the game is “splendid for its play of light and shadow”.
There is not one and simple answer on how and why in less than a month Valheim managed to make itself known and bought by so many, despite Iron Gate Studio – the Swedish company that developed it – is so little known that it continues not to have, not even today, an English Wikipedia page. Part of the credit certainly goes to Coffee Stain Studios: the company, also Swedish, which then managed the publication, and which in the past had already made itself known with a series of successful games such as Sanctum, Satisfactory and Goat Simulator, a third-person game starring a goat.
But it certainly has to do with the fact that certain aspects of the game proved to be very successful in making it the protagonist of several gameplay videos on the Twitch platform, in addition to the low cost of the game. Other reasons, more practical, Francesco Serino listed them on Multiplayer.it, referring among other things to “a gameplay loop that allows you to make mistakes and learn freely, without major punishments typical of survival »And the fact that the game is open and exploratory, but also has« a sort of fundamental linearity to provide the player with clear goals to understand and remember ». Serino writes: “in Valheim you know what you have to do but above all why, plus you are free to decide how and when”.
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In some ways the success of Valheim has been compared to that of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) three years ago: another game rather simple in its dynamics, presented on Steam in “early access” and came to have over 3 million users who were playing it at the same time (still a record today). The big difference is that, as The Verge wrote, PUBG took months to hit numbers that Valheim came up with in days.
And just as PUBG's success paved the way for even more great success of a series of similar games, in particular Fortnite, according to The Verge also the name of Valheim could in the coming months “continue to pass by word of mouth” and pave the way for a series of other similar games that will try to exploit the wake.
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