Valheim's Ashlands update walks a "fine line between fun and frustration", according to new dev video

24.01.2024 - 17:43 / rockpapershotgun.com

Rival survival sims Palworld and the just-launched Enshrouded are now openly battling for hearts and minds on Steam, and here comes genre supremo Valheim out of the blind corner like, errrr, one of the celebrity WWE wrestlers who hasn't turned out to be Problematic - I don't know, maybe Zack Sabre Jr? Educate me, wrestling fans.

Valheim isn't waving a folding chair or a small flight of stairs, mind you. It's holding a development diary for the forthcoming Ashlands update, due sometime in the first half of 2024. The update introduces the titular Ashlands biome, a blend of graveyard and volcano level notable for the presence of burning skellingtons, some of whom emerge from glowering stone totems.

These are the Twitchers, an undead faction described in the video as "insanely more difficult than Grey Dwarfs, and more irritating than Grey Dwarfs", which if you've tangled with Grey Dwarfs much, might sound rather mean-spirited. The spawners they emerge from are dotted all over and seem hard to detect, what with all the soot in the air.

Further up the food chain there's the Morrigan, a kind of skeleton shrubbery with spidery limbs. It's functionally a mini-boss, with some "fun" mechanics they refuse to specify. And then there's the Fallen Valkyrie, a godawful winged apparition which has undergone much iteration. At one point, Iron Gate considered junking the abberant winged beastie, but luckily for all of us, they feel it's found a place in the menagerie. I look forward to being savagely beaked and clawed.

Back when Iron Gate announced Ashlands, they said it would comprise "a large chunk of land at the far south of the map" rather than forming its own separate island like certain other biomes. As you've hopefully gleaned from the above enemy descriptions, it's not a great place to venture if you're a brand new player. "There's a fine line between fun and frustration in Ashlands," the developers note in the video. "Hopefully it's on the fun side."

The video is also enjoyable simply for the laidback premise of developers strolling through their own creation as they talk, which recalls Brendy's old Ridealong series of in-game interviews. He never did one for Valheim, but the Ashlands footage puts me in mind of his trek to meet the last king of Wurm Online.

Valheim remains one of our best survival games - right up there at fourth place. Ollie is of the opinion that fellow fantasy offering Enshrouded might steal its lunch. "Enshrouded has come the closest for me to recapturing that feeling of when the world collectively discovered Valheim for the first time," he writes in our early access review. "But that's both an accolade and a reservation. Because it's not quite there... yet." Mind you, if any survival sim