As I wrote on Tuesday, the Ashlands biome arrived in Valheim this week, the long awaited updated to the game to expand its content beyond the Mistlands and another step to the final biome and being able to finish Odin’s tasks in order to gain entrance to Valhalla.

How about a little fire scarecrow?

It has been a while coming as it seems to take Iron Gate about a year to accomplish any task.  They are a small studio, so I want to cut them some slack, but it took them a year to react to their success at launch and get the game settled and get it launched on XBox, another year to get the Mistlands biome launched, and then more than a year to get the Ashlands to go live.

So yeah, I expect we won’t see the Deep North, the alleged final biome, until mid-2025 at the earliest.

But the real question is, “Will I care?”

By my own admission this week, I am not even ready for the Ashlands yet.  Again, just yesterday I posted about finally getting geared up in the Mistlands… a post I wrote before the Ashlands launched and postponed a couple of days… so I have not set foot in the new biome.  But those that have are not bringing back happy reports.

Bhagpuss has his own tale of the Ashlands, where he died, even while having the game difficulty dialed back.  And I have heard back from a few people that their enthusiasm for the game has died on the burning altar of the new biome.

And, as it turns out, even I am not immune to this turn of events as, on logging in after the Ashlands update, Hugin came to speak to me.

Hugin, less comedic than usual

That didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already.  I had read that the waters around the Ashlands would require a new type of boat.  I couldn’t make the new boat, the Drakkar, yet because you need to slay The Queen, the boss of the Mistlands in order to unlock that ability.

So what did that have to do with me?  Well, I was working in our base when I heard the distinct sound of a boat being destroyed… and then another.  I went out to the dock at our base and found the remains of both boats in the slips where they had been left.

Just some floating wood and some other bits in the water

I wasn’t sure what had happened, but sometimes neks or greylings swim around there and attack the boats.  It could have been them… and the other boat in the slip, a full longship, was still there.

As it turns out, it simply had more hit points.

I figured this out after going through a portal to set sail to try and make my way to where The Queen spawns.  I noticed, on setting sail, that my boat seemed to be taking one damage every tick.

The boat is taking damage

You cannot really see it in that image, but there is a stream of 1s floating from the mast, indicating the continuous damage being applied to the boat.

I did not go too far before I felt I had better sail near shore and build a workbench for repairs.

This has put a big damper on exploration progress and made sailing, once a leisurely, enjoyable activity, more akin to sailing on a time bomb.

Which brings me back to Iron Gate, the developers, and their insistence that Valheim needs to be “a difficult game,” which seems like a bizarro world claim after it was a huge success back in 2021 in early access mostly because it WAS NOT a particularly difficult game.

Yes, there are difficulty settings in the config that you can ratchet up and down, but apparently that isn’t enough to keep the Ashlands from reaching out and smiting you according to Bhagpuss.

The Mistlands were the first new biome since early access and they were a pretty big step up in difficulty, the mist in the Mistlands being a big part of that.  Fortunately, you can cure that with a mod.

The Ashlands though… that has reached out and hit our world and we aren’t even there yet.

So why are the devs so hot to trot to make Valheim so much more difficult?  It isn’t a live service game, so they don’t get more money for people playing longer.  I paid them my $20 and that will likely be the end of it.  Do they get a small cut from services like GPortal?  I am sure they get some money for it being played on XBox Game Pass, so maybe that incentivizes them to make people play longer?

I think this is the Elden Ring brain worms at it again.  Ji Ham, acting CEO of Enad Global 7 is planning to use the Elden Ring difficulty factor as the basis for the next EverQuest game because he is into it.  But is the difficulty the reason that Elden Ring is popular?  Or is it just a really well made game such that people get past the difficulty because it has other appeal?  If you make a mediocre but very difficult game, is it likely to sell better because of the difficulty, or worse?

I don’t know.  I never bothered to look into Elden Ring because the talk about it is always focused on the difficulty.  That does not appeal to me.  And Valheim going that route does not appeal to me either.