I’m getting the impression that maybe, just maybe, Valheim’s five-person development team might be onto something. Since the Viking survival game’s Steam release earlier this month, it’s sold 3 million copies. Over the weekend, more than 500,000 people played it at once. But what do players actually think? That you should avoid falling trees, mostly.
I’ve had a killer time with Valheim so far, toppling the world’s biggest deer in a showdown that can only be described as “extremely metal,” and now, meticulously crafting pointless additions to a base my friends and I have spent the past few nights building and rebuilding. It sounds like a lot of players are having similar experiences. Valheim is officially the “stay in touch with your quarantine-isolated buds” game du jour. Steam users love its refreshingly uncomplicated world and atmosphere, as well as its intuitive (though janky) building and crafting systems. The basic formula will almost certainly grow stale after a while, but with players already logging hundreds of hours, it seems likely it’s going to be a long while.
