Quoting: Liam Dawe*me remembering being killed by the boars quite a few times when first starting*

The difficulty absolutely isn't for everyone, and even some bits that aren't "difficult" can certainly be a challenge for people. Valheim is quite a brutal game, and anyone saying differently probably has played it a long time now.

Their upcoming upgrade with difficulty sliders should solve the early rough starts for people to learn it more.

Yeah, I got chewed by boars a few times as well. Ran like a king right into the boar runestone with no food and no torch on me. Chose to fight them instead of running away, panicked a few times during the fight and paid the price. But that whole thing was completely my fault. Not a "bugged game state in a procedural game".

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Quoting: GroganTwo of you now have stated the obvious, that I didn't try hard enough. Yes I did, I got where I am in the game by trying again until I did. I wasn't born yesterday, I can recognize a bugged game state in a procedural game, so I start over instead of wasting any more time on that. Moreover, I am excusing those encounters as early access "features".

As stated, I stopped there, waiting for something that will make my game easier and less tedious. I want to enjoy it, not get that "yuck factor" and not play it again like those others. That was really my main point.

Nice Vulkan game, huge effort, I just hope there's going to be something for me in there.

We want you to enjoy the game as well, but I wonder really what are your expectations? Valheim is already a very casual survival game. I can tell you from my experience that a 7 year old girl can play it and enjoy herself with no frustration involved. It's in fact one of the major reasons why this game blew up as it did back in coronavirus days. It removed a lot of the grinding and tediousness that's usually associated with this genre. The early access was and still is in a very playable state with very minimal bugs, including no wacky procedural generation issues. All that in a nice, endearing and atmospheric package that runs on potato PCs yet looks incredible at times. It was the perfect game for a wide population that's stuck at home.

And here comes you, who obviously did not enjoy the game, and it's your full right to do so, but then your reasoning sounds really weird to the rest of us. You're complaining that one of the easiest survival games out there is too difficult and you need an easy mode. You're complaining that boars are too difficult to defeat, but consider this:

• Boars do not kill you in a single hit despite your claim. Your starting health is 25 and they do 10 damage, so you survive two of their attacks. They actually do a little bit less, because you start with very crappy pants that still provide some armor. Furthermore, the starting area will have basic food like raspberries and mushrooms that give you more health, making you survive even more hits.
• Boars are really easy to defeat because of their single attack pattern they have. They charge at you and attempt to hit you, then they turn around and run away from you, turn around and charge back at you again. The charge is therefore always heavily telegraphed and you see it coming. It's easy to dodge roll and even side step. Even if the boar hits you, it runs away from you afterwards, meaning it's very easy for you to also run away from it, if you don't want to deal with it.
• Boars have really pathetic health of 10. They die in one club hit (12 damage) or two fist punches (5 damage each).
• Even after all this, if you still struggle with them or you run into a group of them at a bad time (they always spawn in large groups around a specific runestone, for example), you have the option of using a torch. They won't attack you at all if you have it out.

Come on man, how bad do you have to be to struggle with this? You are one button press away from lighting up a torch (that you start with by the way) and completely invalidating this threat. What is your easy mode? To have a damaging aura around you and boars just dying spontanteously in your presence? Because at this point, the only real way of making this even easier is just playing in Creative mode with no enemies at all.

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Quoting: GroganBoars were relentlessly pursuing me, absolutely relentlessly. There was no safe place to avoid them, there were no branches around. In two world generations. When I died, I'd have maybe 20 seconds before I'd start getting attacked by boars again. In the third one, the boars were nowhere to be seen, there was wood all over the place. Those greyling enemies were no problem, I can just beat them up.

I also don't like that you lose all your stuff and start over when you die. That's something they said they were considering for the easier mode.

I don't know what seed it is, it was whatever seed it used, I didn't choose anything. I don't care to play that game again until they fix it.

I find that to be common behaviour for procedurally generated "survival" games. You may not get a viable world to get the game off the ground and you may have to regenerate it. "Sir You are Being Hunted" and "We Happy Few" both did that to me.

This is also an unfinished game.

Branches on the ground are mostly an emergency campfire fuel, really. Do you realize that you can punch the thin, young birches with your fists, Minecraft style? Those tend to be everywhere as birch forests are everywhere, in the first biome. A few of those trees are enough to get you an axe and then you're golden from there. It's usually more difficult to find the stone you need early on than wood. As for boars, they will eventually stop following you when you run away far enough and you do outrun them. You can also make yourself a torch, boars (and greylings) are afraid of fire. Once you kill a few boars, you can get a shield and from there you should be fine.

I get what you mean with the procedural generation, but Valheim really doesn't do anything crazy with its world generation in terms of variance. All maps are very similar to each other in my experience. It follows a basic logic where the more difficult biomes start to appear farther from the starting location. As such, you are always starting in Meadows with Black Forests being close by. As I said before, the "hardcore" difficult starts are those that start you on a tiny island, but all that does is just force you to make a raft and get to a bigger landmass. Sometimes, a starting landmass can be dominated by Black Forest and other biomes instead of Meadows, which can be more difficult too. Even in these situations however, you will be missing things like honey, never a basic resource like wood (and stone drops from Greydwarfs if you can't find it on the ground).

What I'm trying to say here I suppose is that it seems to me your perception of the game got distorted in some way for some reason. It isn't a hardcore git gud tryhard survival game with brutal starts with relentless boars that are going to eat you. You can't die from hunger, the starting biome is very chill even in the nights and the world doesn't get harder if you don't progress by defeating the boss, meaning there is no time pressure on you either. You're more than welcome to take your time if that's what you need.

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Quoting: GroganI can't play this game. It took me 3 restarts to even get a world where I could get a toe hold without being relentlessly chased by pigs I can't fight, with no wood around.

Valheim has some moments that will catch people unaware and unprepared by design. When you're new, you're going to be killed by the first troll, by the first trip into the swamp and such. Dying in that sense is a part of the game. But I find it difficult to imagine that the early game, where you're mostly dealing with deer that just run away, boars that attack once then run away and greylings that attack very slowly would pose a problem to anyone. What is the seed you've been playing, man?! Even the "hardcore" starts on tiny islands tend to have enough wood to build a raft and get out of there.

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I know Baldur's Gate usually takes the crown as peak Bioware-era RPG, but for me, it's always going to be Neverwinter Nights. BG has tons of modern spiritual successors after it, but there's nothing quite like NWN. It's not just a standard campaign, but a platform for digital role playing.

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Tried to run the Proton version and well, it doesn't really work for me sadly. The load into the Immortal Empires campaign takes ages (and I just killed my Windows install to make room on my SDD for this, hah) and then either crashes or loads in successfully but crashes after I do a few actions on the campaign map. I hear the native version is much better performance-wise but crucially AFAIK, there is no crossplay between it and Windows, which makes the native version useless to me.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPWhen the game comes out, I don't know if I'll be playing the Linux native version much.
With WH2, you basically had only disadvantages from it. The ports were always weeks behind the Windows version (which also made mods unusable since those move with the Windows versions obviously), the communication from Feral was... not good, to put it mildly, and performance-wise I just don't see that much of a difference. Maybe 10% better on the Linux native version (and definitely faster loading, for some reason).

Cross-play is not something I personally care about a lot, but obviously going to be a dealbreaker for others if it won't be supported.

I haven't really noticed any difference perfomance-wise between native or Proton. Mine is running mostly fine; there's one graphical setting, either anti aliasing or SSAO I believe, that when enabled eats up too much video memory for me and tanks the FPS dramatically. Otherwise it runs on 60 whether on the native version or in Proton.
Except for those damn loading times, though. Native or Proton, the campaign loading times are annoyingly long. A battle loads reasonably well within a minute or so, but the campaign takes about 5+ minutes straight. I was wondering whether you have your game installed on a SSD drive? It is too large for mine so I figure that's the main reason for mine being so long, but perhaps it's just normal that it takes ages to load into the campaign map. I hope the devs add a "restart battle" button in battle game menu. It's really annoying to take like half an hour to surrender, load into campaign, load campaign again by loading a save and then load battle again.

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Quoting: Arten

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: CatKiller

• developer promises Mac & Linux support


• developer breaks promise, demonstrating that they can't be trusted


• developer promises Steam Deck support


• ...

• Linux users happily buy developer's Windows-exclusive product


• …

Love it or hate it, such a world we are living in. Linux is irrelevant. This story will (I suppose) prove this developer's initial assertion of the market was spot-on. It is better to ignore Linux completely -- less hassle that way and no real monetary loss.

Speak for yourself. I only buy Windows-only games at absolutely rock bottom prices and rarely even then - most of my Windows library post-2013 is from Humble Monthly/Choice. I've bought several native titles at full price though.

Also, I tend to remember developer's antics. I'm not buying from these guys - they promised Linux support, then dropped it like a hot potato once they were funded. Absolute fraud move. I have no time for them. They're up there with THQ Nordic for their 8chan "shout out to Mark" antics and Epic Games for their exclusivity bull.

Before KC:D is released I was at prague fest where one of the speakers was one of the founders of Warhorse. At the time of the questions, I asked him to support Linux. The situation was such that at a small event in Czech he could comment on it openly, unlike the company as a whole, which was bound by agreements with crytek. Cryengin's support for Linux was in a much more desperate state than they were told. They didn't have the strength to do what Cloud Imperium Games is doing now, which is rewrite the engine. I wouldn't call it an Absolute fraud move, not from warhorse.

Unfortunately as can be seen in this comment section, a number of Linux gamers are, uh, let's call them principled people and in the eyes of this part of the community Warhorse Studios is the devil incarnate in spite of the truth and the details around the situation.
I don't want to point any fingers around here, partly because I think we are all to blame for this in varying degrees, but I have the impression that a large reason for Linux support being as hard to get for games as it is now is due to the fact that we are simply put a tough crowd to please in general.

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I'll wait until modders of a certain community on a certain site get their hands on this. This gonna be good.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt's a missed opportunity, like there's this whole aspect of the game that's basically useless, but it doesn't get in my way.

You've shared this sentiment several times in your reply and I believe I understand you. I'm the type of guy bothered by this, because the useless aspects of the game that are there but don't really serve anything important or work as you would expect frustrate me to oblivion.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe sectors--well, if you have big expectations of them doing something important and useful, they don't and that's bound to be disappointing. I never had such expectations, really I always thought they were kind of a mechanic looking for a purpose, so as long as they largely stay out of my way I'm OK with them. I resented them back when I had to assign most of my planets to sectors which would then be mismanaged by the AI and there was little I could do to salvage them, but now they're a shrug.

I remember vividly back in the original Stellaris with the old economy, sectors were a big topic on forums, reddits and whatnot. The governor AI was admittedly wonky and stupid and didn't do an optimal job of your planets at all. So a lot of people whined for them to be fixed. Well, they fixed them by basically removing them from the game except they're still in the game somewhat.
The irony in all this is that the old planetary economy system was pretty basic and easy on the player. Planets had tiles, tiles made resources. You could build a building on a tile to make more resources. You needed a population unit to work the tile which spawned automatically. Then there were adjacency bonuses for buildings to shake things up a bit. All in all, it was a pretty simple system for a grand strategy game. Because it was so easy, you could quite easily manage a large empire with many planets - all you really had to do was to just queue up buildings on a planet to build. Make sure to build them on the correct spots and you were done with the whole thing. Planet worked for the rest of the game, no problemo. The only annoying thing were tile blockers you had to clear up before you could build your stuff on them, which was the only time you really needed to re-visit a 'done' planet. Again the system was very easy, fire and forget style, and you didn't actually need any sector AI to manage it at all. So yeah, people complained about the sector system, and I would say they complained rightfully, because it was a trap, it didn't work and it was actually unnecessary.

So, in comes update 2.0. They change the whole economy of the game big time. Stuff is more involved now and there are many things you have to account for, like housing and overpopulation, crime, employment etc. Most importantly, planets are now stupid and can't function properly without your routine attention, because every time a new pop spawns in, it might pick the wrong job to do, it might cross the crime threshold, it might've unlocked a building slot you've been waiting for, or something else might have happened that you need to now go and check and click up. When you run out of buildings slots, you start running into overpopulation problems, so now you have to manually migrate your pops from your overpopulated done planet on some other one. For this and other possible reasons, you have to revisit every single planet or habitat or whatever like this, constantly, for the whole game, all the way from the beginning to the end, to click stuff.
Man, this game would really benefit from some kind of automation that would help alleviate all this clicking on my part! Well, that was what sectors were supposed to be doing, no? However, people complained so now we don't have sectors. Or we do have sectors? I'm not really sure. My point is, micromanagement is actual Hell in modern Stellaris. Your mileage may vary, I guess every player tolerates different levels of ant work, but I'm not a fan of it and game doesn't ACTUALLY have any tools to help with that even though it might appear that it does.
So yeah, game might be fun in the beginning, but late game it's just way easier to let the Unbidden eat everything away and start a new one - once the next DLC comes out of course.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe scope of Stellaris is unmatched--there's so much of it that a couple of underdeveloped areas that you can largely ignore don't really do much to the experience. It feels to me like you're someone looking at the windowpane and saying "Look, there's quite a bit of dirt" instead of looking through it at the amazing view.

Well said. You can't really see through dirty windows very well, can you? The scope of Stellaris is a bit of a lie. Yes, game simulates many things - internal and external politics all the way to the galactic scale*, detailed planet economy*, galactic markets*, species proliferation*, espionage and intrigue*, genetic modification*, awesome random late-game crisis that shakes up your game*, psychic powers*, large fleets of custom ships from little fighters all the way to giant titans*, giant floating space leviathans* etc. etc. etc. It all sounds great on the front cover of the box or in an elevator pitch. Then you play the actual game, get a good look at it and realize all the cool features come with that asterisk at the end. Asterisk saying *Yes, it's in the game buuuuut it doesn't really work all that well.

I can respect the opinion that a game system that is physically present in the game but doesn't amount to much isn't harmful in any way. I still see it as a glaring design flaw - it's a system literally asking to be removed - but you're likely correct that it doesn't harm the game per se. However, I think it clashes directly with the claim that Stellaris has unmatched scope and depth given that we've established there's numerous areas of the game that are, as you said, useless.

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