Nine days to go until the first major update to the hit Viking survival game, Hearth and Home! We’re excited, and I’m sure some of you are too.
Background
Valheim was released on Steam in February by a small team, Iron Gate, as early-access and instantly started to break records. Within a month of release it had sold over 5 million copies, and this continued to rise over the next two quarters. Gamers loved the look and feel of the game, the superb build mechanics, the attention to detail, and, of course, the gameplay itself.
There are finished games that feel less fleshed-out and well balanced. If you hadn’t told me it was early access, I probably never would have suspected anything.
ign.com – Feb 2021
Valheim is a gorgeous game, too, imaginatively blending pixelated textures and fairly simple models and animations with beautiful lighting and environmental effects that make me stop what I’m doing to admire the sunset or bask in the daunting power of a thunderstorm.
PCGamer.com – Feb 2021
In that first flurry of activity the developers at Iron Gate enthusiastically produced their Roadmap for the future of Valheim within 2021. This was an ambitious plan, there was no doubt it would be achieved. However, this wasn’t to be. We suspect that the huge playerbase rapidly revealed the inevitable bugs in the game (remember, it is early-access, after all), and the speed at which the bug reports came in kept the programmer (singular) too busy to implement the new code required for the updates.
The latest roadmap came a little bit later on and scaled down the ambition somewhat. The order of the new content changed and most of it was pushed out to a later time. The first update has always been Hearth and Home, however.
Hearth and Home
Hearth and Home is intended to flesh out the already meaty content around the player base and food requirements. Gameplay will change where it improves the player experience, and new content will be added and rebalanced. For months we have had teasers of what might be included, and there have been mixed reactions to the plans.
A couple of weeks ago Iron Gate issued a statement (and a cool video) with the new release date for Hearth and Home. Thursday 16th September is that date, and we have every reason to believe it will be kept. Iron Gate hadn’t given any firm dates before, and the short space of time after the statement would seem to indicate that development is complete with just a few finishing touches to be made.
Hearth and Home Spotlights
Since then we have had regular video tasters of the new content that Hearth and Home will bring us. The first one talks about the new food system, which basically provides more scope and need for tuning your food intake to either stamina or health point builds. There are also a few tweaks with the UI to improve things.
Following on from the food changes, Iron Gate tell us how this might affect our gameplay. Blocking is now dependent on your health points, so defenders can go with a HP-heavy diet. There is a new ‘stagger’ bar as well. It has always been the case that your character staggers and you lose a little control if your opponent blocks, but now you get a visual cue that this is happening.
Shields will have different qualities in Hearth and Home. Currently all the different shields are pretty much the same, but now the larger tower shields will be much slower while providing much more protection. Bucklers will offer much less protection, but also won’t impede the player while fighting.
New ingredients will be added, with the animals you butcher giving a variety of meats, and new vegetables. This opens up a huge variety of new recipes. The cookpot will now need further upgrades to unlock different foods, and there is a new oven for baking in. You will even be able to vomit up any food that you no longer require, making it possible to switch from one type of build to another, albeit by wasting valuable food!
Finally, weapons have had a rebalance as well. Bows will take longer to aim, but stamina won’t be used up as quickly while aiming at an enemy. All the various weapons have had stats rebalanced to give the player more thought as to which is most effective in any particular scenario.
You are my breathing in, I possess few blogs and occasionally run out from to brand.