Video Gamers Podcast - Rewind: Victorious Valheim - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

Gaming hosts Josh and Paul are bringing you one of our best episodes from the gaming vault and making sure if you missed the first episode, that you get a second chance to learn about Valheim. Valheim took the gaming world by surprise and came out of nowhere to be an instant favorite for many. As we pause for the holidays, we hope you enjoy the classic episode! Don’t worry, we’ll be back with brand new content just after Christmas! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad    Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy holidays from Paul and myself. Since it is the holidays, we are spending a little bit of extra time with our families or maybe gaming, you decide. But we are going to dive into the vault and bring you one of our favorite episodes, and that is our episode on Valheim. This game came out of nowhere. It took everybody by surprise. I learned that I am an excellent builder when it comes to these type of games. Paul is somewhat of a cook, I guess. I don't know. But this game was an absolute ton of fun. It's in our top 10, maybe top five. I don't know. I believe it's number six. Six. Well, see, I was right in there somewhere. Somewhere right around there. But we wanted to release this one because it's such an amazing game. They're still developing it. It just gets better and better.

And we wanted to have something fun for you all to listen to that was a great episode and a great game that maybe you guys didn't get a chance to listen to or try out. Yes, we hope you guys will enjoy the episode while we take a little bit of a break here for the holiday season. We are going to be rolling out a couple of older episodes, so we hope you guys enjoy Valheim. I know Josh and I loved the game, so we loved raving about it in the podcast. Hope you guys all enjoy it. Let's get into it. Whether we live or die today is already in the hands of the gods. Fear not, fight well. And if you fall, surely Odin will take you to Valhalla.

Boys, it's time to get our Viking on, because today we are deep diving into the biggest surprise hit of 2021 so far, Valheim. Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. Come join us at the bonfire where we have some delicious lox meat roasting over the open fire, which I dare say pairs delightfully with the barley wine. I am your host, Paul, the spiritual descendant of Eric the Red, and with me I have two of my Viking brethren, our sea captain and explorer, the Leif Erikson of our clan, Todd. Hey guys, I never knew how much I enjoyed stew until this game, but I have a new appreciation for it.

There's so many good stews in this game. We're going to break them all down one by one in a few minutes. This is the stew cast. Yes. The stew cast. The stew cast. Alright, and then finally, guys, I ran out of Vikings that I know by name, so I had to Google search famous Vikings for this one.

So he's the Chris Carter or the Dante Culpepper of the podcast, Josh. What? Dante Culpepper? That's a football player. Wrong type of Viking., Josh. What? Dante Culpepper? That's a football player. Wrong type of Viking. Wrong Vikings. I can't believe you didn't call me Loki, man.

The god of mischief. Come on. That's way better. We've already called you that before in past podcasts. We've talked about that. Maybe I like it when you guys say you're the god of mischief. You just want to be a part of the Avengers.

That's true. I really do. Although Loki was not an Avenger either. He was, like, in the Avenger family. He was the- Like a cousin. No, he was the brother to Thor. Adopted brother.

Adopted brother of Thor. Right, yes. As Thor likes to point out he's adopted all right so i'm i'm really excited to talk about valheim guys i feel like this is one that really snuck up on us out of nowhere i was so glad josh that you wanted us to cover this i didn't even hear about it and you just said hey i keep hearing great things about this brand new game in early access called valheim and then i saw it was one to ten players and just bought it i did not see a single video ahead of time we just jumped right into this game i feel like it has been such a joy to discover this kind of out of nowhere and the game's had enormous success crazy

and i'm so excited four million copies sold i think as of this recording dang yeah yeah by the time it comes out it could be five or six every two to three days i see another milestone where they say hey everyone thanks so much we've sold another million it's wild and it's a small development team i think think they said five guys. Which is insane. Yeah, five guys. Let's see. So it's 20 bucks, and they've sold 4 million copies. That's $80 million divided by five.

Steam takes half of that. All right, that's true. 30%. Yeah, the five of them, I'm sure, are doing just fine. So in case anyone is unfamiliar with Valheim, here is Steam's description of the game. A brutal exploration and survival game for one to ten players, set in a procedurally generated purgatory inspired by Viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin's patronage. So I think that that description does hit on the key terms.

The key verbs there are explore, survive, battle, build, and conquer. I think that that is a good description, but there's so much more to the game than that when you actually start to break it down. So I thought it would probably help if we kind of start like on the broad, kind of explaining what this game is, and then we'll start to narrow in on some of the other subjects and then also share some of our stories that we've experienced along the way. So who wants to maybe jump in here first and give a brief explanation for how the world works and kind of what you get dropped into. So the world is kind of an open world sandbox. You start off with just your fists and you're around this like monument with a whole bunch of stones that you don't really know what they do. You have a crow that's your guide throughout the game.

And then you run around and you have to like punch bushes and trees and stuff to gather mats and then you can build better things and then it starts to create this cycle of you gather mats you build stuff you can you know craft uh pickaxes and a whole bunch of different items and then you can gather mats faster and you can start to gather other mats and then you can gather mats faster, and you can start to gather other mats, and then you build more stuff. Then you gather new materials, build more stuff, and then it's like that for kind of the rest of the game, but it never gets boring. There's always something to learn. There's always a new mat, and there's always something to build. And how is that, man? Because this game starts like Rust starts, basically.

Except they give you underwear in this game. Like, you get dumped onto this random place. You're in your underwear. And the first thing you do is you start finding wood. You hit a tree. And you're like, oh, okay. And then you find a rock. And then you make an axe.

And then now you can chop a tree. There's nothing groundbreaking to the survival mechanics on this game, in the beginning at least. I mean, we'll get into some stuff later on that's different. But it's like, it doesn't get boring. I'm with you, Todd. We've done this 100 times in 100 different games, and yet there's something about the survival part in Valheim that is just super satisfying. Well, I think a major reason for why it doesn't get boring and why you don't give up on this game early is the fact that you do have direction for what to do in the game. Like Todd mentioned,

I don't know if it's a crow or a raven, but there's a black bird that shows up every once in a while, and he gives you tips and hints about the world. And that actually drives the game a little bit. Even though you don't necessarily get and finish quests along the way, they do give you more direction than your typical sandbox game. So Todd had kind of alluded to the fact that you start out in like a meadow, and there are some rock formations, and they have runes that have writings on them. And basically you learn that Odin has given you a task of hunting down and killing five of his enemies. And so that's kind of the overarching quest of the game. But then along the

way, you do find tablets that have some hints and direction written on them. You have the bird showing up and guiding you. And I think that that really helps. You don't just get dropped in a world without any direction, which is kind of what you get with other games like Minecraft or Terraria. This one, I think, is a little bit more structured. And that's what separates it out from games like The Forest, because when we first heard of this game. And started looking into it. I'm like. The Forest was good. Like.

Is this going to be better than that? It's probably going to be the same. And then you start to play it. And. What it does well. Is like. When you're in an area. You're not supposed to be in.

It punishes you. And it punishes you hard. And then like. You're like. Alright. Let me not go over there for a while until I feel like I'm leveled up. In the forest, it's just kind of like blind adventure, and then you're just going in every direction, trying to progress the story.

Yeah, I think you're definitely onto something there. Josh, do you want to talk a little bit about how there's different biomes and kind of how that works with the procedurally generated world? Yeah, so that's one of the cool things, and that's one of the things that keeps this game super interesting in the survival aspect and the exploration aspect. I mean, I don't think it's a spoiler to talk about some of the different biomes, is it? Yeah, I don't think so. talk about some of the different biomes is it yeah so you start off you start off in the meadows which is beautiful and there's music dude do yourself a favor when it asks you if you want to leave the background music on in this game leave it on i'm telling you because all the meadows are so soothing and peaceful and there's birds flying around and then there's freaking wild boar that start trying to gore you and then there's deer that are honking and running away every time you're trying to hunt one of them.

But then you slowly, all of a sudden, you get to the black forest. And the black forest is dark. And then it's super clustered. And all of a sudden, things are attacking you. And then you hear the ground start shaking. And then you're like, what the heck is that? And then a gigantic troll like starts walking towards you when the first troll appears it blows you away because it it towers

over everything around you and sometimes they hold the tree trunk which they can use as a baseball bat correction they hold an entire tree They'll pick the whole thing up. Yeah, that was one of the really cool things, because when you jump in, you're in the meadow, which Josh already explained the type of animals you see. And since we didn't know anything about this game, I remember when we first started exploring the Black Forest, I started yelling and telling you guys, there's a massive troll. And I took a print screen and I sent it to you in Discord and told you guys, hey, you need to come join me

because there's no way I'm going to attack this thing on my own. And so it was really neat. I think one of the reasons why this game has been so successful and why we loved it so much is that the game does have an awful lot of crafting and base building. And when you pick up a new building material for the first time, whether it's a piece of wood or a piece of flint or a stone, it will pop up and give you a list of all the new recipes that you have just learned. And I feel like that kind of

progression over the course of the game really drives you to keep exploring and finding new things and figuring out what these new materials do. Yeah. And then, I mean, the biomes thing is super cool too, because you're going to spend a lot of time in these, right? The Black Forest always butts up against the meadows. So then the Black Forest, you start discovering things like skeleton crypts and dungeons and stuff like that that are in the game. So then you're like, oh, wow, this is super cool. And then as you're running around, all of a sudden you start seeing snow. And you're like, oh, dude, this is super cool. And then as you're running around, all of a sudden you start seeing snow. And you're like, oh, dude, there's a snowy mountain. So you start trying to run up the snowy mountain.

And guess what? You start freezing to death. And then you're like, wait, I can't even go here yet? And then it's like Todd was saying, the game does a very good job of punishing you when you're not supposed to be somewhere yet. And I love that, man. I love that, like, ooh, I want to come back here. Like, I can't wait to come explore this new area and figure out, number one, how do we survive here? Number two, what's going to be here? Because you know there's going to be good stuff there if, like, you can't even, like, if you're freezing to death just from trying to run up this mountain.

So my first encounter with a biome that I knew I wasn't supposed to be in was the swamps. I hate the swamps um i got to an area and then i was like oh like i'm pulling up and then all of a sudden snakes or like little leeches start attacking my boat and i freak out and i jump out of my boat then i start seeing skeletons and then just monsters i haven't even seen before and then just get wrecked and then it it's like, what was that? Like, what did I just find myself in? And then like you scavenge and get your stuff back on another run. But then later, like you have that, like, what was that? How do I get there? What weapons and stuff do I need to build? And then you finally get to the point where you're like, all right, I know there's something crazy here. Let me slowly start to go into the swamps. Let me like go on the outside of the swamps and

slowly poke in until you start getting more and more and more confident. So like it, it feels like riding a bike where like the first time you ride a bike, you're, you fall and it hurts. And then you don't like it. And then you kind of figure it out, and you can go a little bit faster, a little bit faster, a little bit faster. And now you're having fun because, like, you did something. Like, you made an achievement. And then you go to pop a wheelie because you think you're just bad. And then you pop a wheelie, and you flip backwards, and you crack your head on the ground. But then you're like, ooh, that was cool, too.

Yeah, this game has so many moments like that. So while the game does encourage exploration, you can't explore too much in the beginning because you first have to explore the biome that you're in. Because the different biomes have different difficulty levels. And so you want to stick to a little bit more of the safety of the meadow. And I thought this would be a good time for us to just talk about some of the moments that stand out, some of the funnier stories in the early game.

And the very first thing that I think of was the first time that Josh and I started chopping down trees. Oh my goodness, dude. There was a little bit of a revelation that we were not ready for. This happened in the first 10 minutes? Oh yeah. bit of a revelation that we were not ready for this happened in the first 10 minutes like i mean we gathered some stone and some twigs off the ground built a stone axe and then started chopping trees because we're like hey we know how to do survival games and then we're chopping this tree

and the next thing you know timber goes the tree well the tree falls on me and kills me. Instant dead. Instant dead. And I just remember cracking up. And Paul just went like, what happened? And I went, dude, that tree just killed me. You want to know what's funny? I knew exactly what happened because you and I were chopping different trees and you got killed by the one that I chopped down. So I watched it fall and kill you. And it was a little bit of like the Tommy boy. What'd you do? Cause I was like, Josh, you died.

What happened? So yeah, the, the Valheim is a dangerous world. Even the trees you chop down, they will destroy your base. If it falls on your base, it'll kill you.

It'll kill your friends. So you can't even trifle with the trees. So I think all of us have died from chopping down trees because sometimes it'll start a chain reaction where you chop one tree. It'll knock down the one next to it. Next thing you know, they're all falling like dominoes and you can easily get caught up in there.

Dude. The best thing is how many times new people taught. Didn't you die to a tree? The first time you chopped a tree down. Absolutely. Like within the first five minutes, right? Jared,

who popped in, like we're like, he's like, oh, you guys are playing this game. Jared's like, oh, I'll go chop this tree down. What happens to Jared? Tree falls and Jared kills Jared. It's a rite of passage. Really? Everybody dies to a tree falling on them.

And then it's one of those things you don't want to tell new players because it's so funny. Do not. If you're listening and you are going to get this game and play with your friends, do not tell your friends that the trees are going to fall on them and kill them. Because it is the most glorious thing to watch happen when you know it's going to happen. Oh yeah, there's really nothing funnier. So another thing that really stood out to me in the early game is that Josh built our first group base. You guys rag on me for this base so bad. It was pretty awful.

Todd, how would you describe the base that Josh built for us? It was like if a child built a barn. Okay, number one, I am a child, okay? And it was a barn. A blind child. The building in this game is not... It had no floor. It was a barn. A blind child. The building in this game is not... It had no floor. It was all roof.

It was an A-frame. So all roof, both sides. It's more like a U-frame. And then the walls... You didn't even use a door to get in. You would just hop over the walls to get in. I did have doors that led in and out of the barn. You guys just found that it was easier to jump over the walls instead of go through the doors so it was so funny because in the game you

have to build a bed and the bed has to be covered by a roof and josh had so many holes in our roof that our buddy jared could not even lay down a bed because all of it was exposed. And we just kept joking, saying that he was gonna have to lay in the bed where all the rain was just pouring straight off the roof right onto his bed because he couldn't even get it to work right. And so Todd is usually our base builder in games like Rust. And I feel like Jared stepped on your territory just a little bit here because Jared Gets On does not go with us on any expeditions for the first 45 hours that we played this game. And all he did was build massive, beautiful bases that really made Josh's pale in comparison. Like, we're talking taverns like a dining hall tavern with a second story and like i don't i

i i don't have words for the beauty that that hall had i it's funny because todd actually mentioned like i can't believe there's somebody else that likes to build bases and as is is good at it and then todd didn't know what to do he was like like if it's not my likes to build bases and is, is, is good at it. And then Todd didn't know what to do. He was like, like, if I, if it's not my responsibility to build like bases, like,

like, what do I do? And we're like, now you get to go exploring with us. But when we're talking about the exploring thing, the thing that comes to my mind is we were building our bases, my beautiful, luxurious barn,

and we were gathering materials and we were slowly progressing. And then Todd is like, whoa, we just unlocked a recipe to build a raft. Like, let's build a raft. And I'm like, okay. So we build this raft and Todd's like, let's go sailing. Well, I'm like, okay. So we start going sailing out on the ocean. Like when you talk about a biome, one of the biomes people don't think about is the open ocean in this game. And we had just gotten like leather armor or think or bronze armor. Oh, it was bronze, right? We just started getting bronze weapons. And it took a lot of work to get these. So then I start freaking out, right? Because I'm like, Todd, we're so far out in the ocean on this teeny little raft that is like four logs strapped together.

And all I'm doing the whole time is just going, Todd, turn around. Todd, we're going to die. A kraken is going to kill us, Todd. A sea serpent is going to come along. We're going to die out here. We're going to lose all of our stuff. Turn around, Todd. And you're like, no, Josh, it'll be fine, man.

It'll be fine. And then we just kept sailing forever. It took so long. That little dinky raft is not meant for the ocean. It's meant for short jumps, not full-on expeditions. But we had fun and we learned some things. One, don't sail into the wind. It's not productive.

Two, don't ever go sailing with Todd. But yeah, that was the funniest trip. And then after that trip, so after we returned, I think we got off after we got back because we were on the ocean for like 20, 30 minutes. And then the very next morning, I was like, we saw an island and it was like, so weird. I'm going to go to that island. And that was my first encounter with the swamps. So I took my bronze weapon. I went out there. I started getting attacked by like little leeches. I started getting attacked by skeletons and draugrs and all of the things. And then just got wrecked so fast. And then all of my stuff was on that island that I had to figure out how to get.

So that's one thing we haven't mentioned. If you die in Valheim, all of your gear stays there. And you have to retrieve your corpse. So a big part of the game is being careful in where you die and how much gear you have remaining at your base, because if you have everything on your guy and you die in the middle of a really tough biome like the planes, you might have a really hard time retrieving your corpse

and getting that gear back. Well, that was another exploration thing that we had a lot of fun with, was Paul and I were sailing around. Todd, I don't know. Were you with us when we found the planes for the first time? I don't think you were. No. It was just you and me, Josh.

Paul and I were sailing around. We're like, oh, there's an island. And it looks nice. It looks nice and accommodating. It's not the swamp or the black forest. Sandy beach. Yeah. So we're like, like oh what's this so we the sun is shining and we get

out and there's these giant like like buffalo looking things that we'd never seen before we're like whoa what are those and then we hear this laughter we hear this haha yeah and we're like what is that and then all of a sudden i see a little goblin well any nerd knows that goblins are super weak right like they're goblins right likelin well any nerd knows that goblins are super weak right like they're goblins right like you don't have to fear goblins so we're like oh and i'm like dude look at that goblin over there well paul shoots an arrow at it and it laughs and it comes wandering on over and then it just chucks a javelin straight through my chest and one shots me and my little little two because you have this like little tombstone thing that pops out when you die, and my little

tombstone just goes... And all I hear is Paul cracking up, and then he starts running from this goblin that are, like, super strong, man. So that ended up being a tough trip to go back and retrieve our corpses, because that was all the way

across the ocean. We were far. That was not an easy corpse run. Yeah. So one other funny thing in the early game, before we kind of move on to talk about some other stuff, is that inevitably when you're playing with a large group of people, and we've been playing mostly with a group of four, but even as high as like seven or eight, and inevitably you end up collecting a whole lot of loot. And you're putting all of this stuff into chests. And you just have too much gear. And sometimes you just don't know what to do with it. Right, Josh? We didn't have enough treasure. We didn't have enough

storage chests in the base. So what I started doing is realizing what is trash. And I would take it straight out the front door. And I would just throw it over the railing because items in this game do not despawn. There's no way to actually delete items. And so I would just chuck it over the railing into like the little farm area. Well, after doing this for like three days straight, we had the largest trash pile you've ever seen just sitting in this

farm it was like a city dump in the oh yeah the worst thing is like it sparkles if there's like loot on the ground so it was sparkling but it kind of looked like it smelt because there was this big pile with like stuff coming off of it. And in the game, there's these giant troll heads that after you get a few, you don't need them anymore. So there was like four or five troll heads. So we have this just giant pile of heads and garbage sitting next to our farm, just sitting there and smelling. Oh, yep. to our farm just sitting there and smelling. Yep.

So one thing that I think is important to note is that we have been very careful to not Google and look up too much information about this game because we just wanted to experience it for the way it was designed to be played. The game gives you a little bit of direction, but a lot of the fun is just figuring this stuff out on the fly. And so we've been very careful to not look up strategies about bosses or how to find them or anything like that. And so there might still be things about this game that we don't know

or really understand because we're just playing it. And I think that's the best way to do it because we have also had experiences that have not always gone well while exploring. So, for example, we finally gathered enough mats and we got some iron nails and stuff like that. So we built this big, giant Viking ship and we set out with five of us, right? It was the three of us and our buddies, Jared and Andy. And so this is kind of like a multi-step question here. But first of all, Josh,

how do you feel about the wind in Valheim? I hate the wind in this game, dude. I like sailing. I'm a good captain. I've worked on fishing boats in real life. I know how to work a boat, right? But this game, I hate the wind, man. Because if the wind is in front of you, your boat don't move. It's not like other games where it doesn't move as fast, right? It's not like Sea of Thieves where you can sail into the wind, but you just kind of go a little bit slower. In this game, if you were sailing into the wind, you are stuck. And you're so stuck, you can't even freaking turn the boat, man.

It's terrible. Todd is so much of a better sport as captain of the boat because Josh just gets so mad at the wind. Every single time Josh is our sailor, the wind inevitably goes the other way. And Josh, I think Josh secretly really hates sailing, even though he tends to try to be the one controlling the boat. Todd is always just cool and calm and collected where he'll go at a weird angle and then try to use that momentum to go forward. But I never, I never sail any of the ships because I completely just let you guys do that. The worst was when I was like, Josh, come on, like, let me sail, like, you're getting frustrated and all that. I'll, I'll figure this out. Then like the whole area turns to fog.

So I can't see anything and a big sales in front of my face. So then I'm like, Hey guys, make sure you spot for me. And then you're like, all right, lands on like lands on our left. Like just make sure you stay to the right a little bit.

Oh, there's a little bit of land on the right. Like go back left land straight in front of us stop and then the boat does not stop quickly either and we like went into this inlet and we were trying to like u-turn in the middle of it and then goblins started running up to our boat because we're on the planes And that was by far the stickiest, like, worst situation because we were going to die with all of our stuff, all five of us, on this inlet. Because, like, the procedurally generated world created this terrible situation where it looks like it's going to be open. But then there's a little bit of land you can run into.

Yeah. it's going to be open, but then there's a little bit of land you can run into. Yeah, and so we're being somewhat careful in not to talk too much about what you can discover in this game. But the one thing I will say is that there are some more magical elements that you encounter in Valheim, and there are some things that do help out in regards to transportation but one of our experiences was when we took all of our good gear we are on the boat we sail i don't even know how long oh trying to set up 30 minutes in a new location yeah yeah and so we just sail for the longest time and our buddy jared totally not his fault bless Bless your heart, Jared. Bless your heart, Jared. Somehow was missing a gray dwarf eye,

which was a vital component to what we were trying to do that we did not realize we were missing until we were 40 minutes sailed away from our base. And I'll just let you guys share the rest of that story. What ended up happening? Well, Jared was very apologetic. So one thing we have to... So when you craft in this game and when you build in this game,

one of the things I absolutely love about it is you can dismantle something and get your materials back. I love that, right? It's not like once you build it like Rust, where, hey, you've spent it and you can't get it back, right? If you build it and you break it down, you get all that stuff back. Great. So, Jared was like, oh, I'll break this down.

I'll get the materials we need for this non-spoiler thing. We're being intentionally vague. And we're like, okay, great. But he forgot to pick up one item off the ground. Or there's a bug where, like, 90% it like comes back and you don't get some of the items um yeah maybe i think he just forgot so we get we get 40 minutes away and we're like okay go ahead like put that thing down and jared's like uh we're missing something guys and the thing you can't get the thing that we need anywhere

nearby it's only in like a different part of the world and we're like what do we do now so now we're stuck needing to get a gray dwarf eye which is only in the black forest and so now we are just taking our ship sailing at at night in the fog, just hoping to run into a black forest. Josh goes AFK, I think to get a drink or something. Josh is gone. We finally, all of a sudden, the biome changes and it says black forest. And Jared and Todd and I are celebrating. We're cheering we drive maybe or sail 15 seconds into the black forest and then park our boat

jump off and decide let's go find some gray dwarfs and kill them until we get our gray dwarf eyes and then all of a sudden todd jared and i start hearing some goblin laughter. And guess what happened? All of us died. Josh dies. The boat sinks. All of our gear, gone. All of those materials we needed for some transportation type of stuff is gone. And now none of us have any gear, and we don't really have any way of getting back. And all of us just said, all right, we're logging out for the night.

We'll just deal with this later. And the thing is, I went AFK. I'm thinking we're on the boat, we're sailing, we're fine. I come back and I'm dead in the base. Like, because you respawn in your bed. And I'm like, guys, what just happened? And here's Paul just going, man, you don't even want to know. Yeah. Poor Josh wasn't even there, and we lost all of it. But Jared, to his credit, because he lives in the East Coast and we're all out here in Phoenix, he got up early the next day, recovered all of our gear, and then let us know. And I was like, wow, Jared, I just figured we would all go do that together. But he went out and did all that in the morning. You know somebody feels bad when they build, gather the stuff to build a second boat, sail for 40 minutes to get back to where you all died, grab everybody's stuff, like get it up and running to where we can get back there faster than we need to.

I mean, Jared, kudos to you, man, because I would have been like, so guys, we getting all our stuff back tonight? But he took care of all of it, man. Yep, he did it solo. So one last thing that I think we should talk about is the fact that you do get to fight these enemies of Odin. And so I know that we don't want to talk about it too much. We have already defeated four out of the five bosses. and we're currently working on the fifth and the final. But I think the one fight that definitely stands out is the second fight. And you reach it pretty quick in Valheim, so I don't think this is too spoilery. But you end up finding a rune, and it tells you

that the next boss you fight is called the Elder, and it marks it on the map of where you're going to go and fight that boss. And I think we got a little cocky because we had just entered maybe the Iron Age, and we had crafted maybe just like one or two iron weapons. We didn't have any iron yet. It was bronze. No iron yet? We had bronze, yeah.

Just a little bit of bronze, probably. And so we got a little cocky and decided let's just go fight the elder oh man that did not go well so how it went sideways so quick yeah it's when you die in this game because you have to corpse run man and and so like number one you don't have any health you don't have any health, you don't have any gear, and stamina in this game. Another thing, we should probably break down combat a little bit in this to give people an idea. So one of the things that makes this game great is the combat. It's a great survival, it's great exploration, it's great crafting. And honestly, the combat's

a lot of fun. You are constantly getting assaulted by monsters and big monsters, little monsters, evil little goblins, giant trolls, that kind of stuff. And then there's these bosses you fight. But part of the combat and a lot of other stuff in this game is that you have a stamina bar. And so anytime you sprint, anytime you jump, anytime you swing an axe to chop down a tree, you use up stamina. And stamina is the bane of my existence in this game, man. Like it is, you just, you are constantly running out of stamina.

And yes, there are ways to build up your stamina. And yes, as you get better at chopping trees, you'll use less stamina as you do that. So there's progression there as well. But, you know, if you're blocking with a shield, it uses stamina. Everything in this game uses stamina. So part of it is that as you're fighting, you have to manage your stamina bar so that you can either run away or block or dodge roll or any of those things. And man, when we fought this Elder, we did not know what to expect. The first boss in this game, you can fight within the first 20 minutes if you want to, and he's cake. There's nothing.

It's like a tutorial boss, basically. The elder comes out and just wrecks us, man. And now we don't know what to do because all of our corpses are littered around this gigantic boss that doesn't despawn. Didn't he end up wrecking our mini base that we set up near him? Yeah, and that's the problem. Because he doesn't despawn, somebody kind of aggroed him over towards our mini base that we had set up so that we had an easy way to get to him to fight him, and he got ticked off at our base and just leveled our entire base. Oh, it was such a funny fight because the Elder basically shoots out tendrils and stuff towards you, but all of that thing, all of that is destroying the trees around you, and it's

destroying us, and there's wood flying everywhere, and he's destroying the ground and we're trying to cut line of sight and get back to our gear and it felt just so chaotic i think we actually legit probably fought him and did corpse runs for 20 to 25 minutes i think oh i think it was longer than that it was at least yeah yeah and i feel like for me that's kind of when i realized oh these bosses are not something you're going to crank out quickly like the first one you actually have to progress in the game build up your armor build up your weapons upgrade them and then maybe you'll be ready to take on the boss well and every boss has like a different weakness or like a different strategy uh like i don't want to get into it too much but like we in the bosses we fought like we didn't always attack the the boss the same way like there's

different weapons in the game which i think we should get into like there's you know a bow like in different types of bows and different types of arrows but then there's different types of bows and different types of arrows, but then there's different types of damage. Like there's pierced damage, blunt damage, slash, slash, pierce. Yeah.

I think that might be all of them. But yeah, they are different. So some weapons will hit more than one enemy. So if you swing a sword, you can hit multiple enemies at once. But then if you're using like a spear, it's more of a jab where you're jabbing one enemy at a time. And some weapons are two hand, other ones are one hand, which you can pair with a torch or a shield.

And so you get to test out the different weapons and they feel and act very differently. Josh, you and I are a bunch of idiots. We were maybe 30 hours into playing this game before we realized that some of the weapons have a secondary attack mode. Well, part of that was is that I had built an axe, right? Which I mean, hey, an axe is a nice weapon, right? Like, you know, you can crack somebody with an axe. But it also doubled down because I can chop trees with this thing. And I was like, hey, this is great. But then I guess the game doesn't count the axe as an actual like weapon weapon so right then you came in and you were like guys did you know that there's

special attacks with each weapon and i was like no there's not and i tried doing it i'm like my axe doesn't do nothing and then you're like i think it's because that's a tool technically so you get a sword and then the guy like lunges with sword, and I'm just like, what? Are you kidding me? And we were so far into the game. We were using iron weapons when you and I discovered it. And it even shows in the bottom right of the screen. It says, mouse one, regular click.

Mouse three, secondary attack. And you and I just get tunnel vision where oh we got a weapon there's an enemy let me go swing and we never even noticed that it had a secondary mode yeah so do you guys have like a certain type of weapon you like to use most because you've got maces you've got two-handed battle axes you've got the bows and arrows like what kind of combat do you guys like the most? I like melee, personally. The bows are super... You have to have a bow in this game.

You're not getting very far without one. But once you get to a certain point, I just love getting in there and then blocking with the shield and meleeing and dancing around the monster. I like being in the thick of it. So for me, I like the sword a lot. The spear is fun because it's really fast like this game does a great job of mixing in some like dnd type

elements like people have equated the combat to dark souls again i don't think it's dark souls but it definitely has like stats and blunt damage like if you're fighting a skeleton like what's what's better against a skeleton i always go with or a sword. I always go with axe. Well, everybody knows a mace is better because it's blunt damage. Shatter the bones. Right. Yeah, exactly. And it does. A mace racks a skelly versus shooting it with a bow, which does nothing to it. So I love those little tidbits about it. But I like the sword, man. For me, that slash ability to be able to hit three three guys at once and then it does like this big overhead swing because if you slash like three times in a row it's like you know a left slash a right slash and then an overhead slash and that overhead slash will stun most creatures it'll kind of

stagger them and i i love it man i think it's great it's not like a true weapon, but like I find myself always needing like a little bit of wood, a little bit of core wood, fine wood, whatever you have it. And like when you have an upgraded ax, it's really nice to be able to go out fighting and then just like, you know, get that,

that last bit of materials you need without having to really mess around and do anything else. And like, I find myself running out with a shield and an ax nine times out of 10. Uh, yeah, yeah. I,

I am running with a sword and a shield right now and I'm liking that a lot more than I did the mace or the spear. Although to me, there's nothing more fun than firing the bow and arrow because the arrows have quite a bit of arrow drop when you fire them and nothing feels better than aiming at a flying death skito and just nailing it and seeing it explode and then you get to run over and loot it i find that to be so incredibly rewarding can i just say Deathskittles are the worst enemy in this entire game, man? People, I hate Deathskittles.

I hate Deathskittles more than I hate sailing into the wind. Let's just put it that way. Well, Josh hates the Deathskittles so much because normally you hear them fly. Well, when you're in the swamp, every once in a while, you hear some like buzzing fly sounds. Oh, I will whip around. Josh would start freaking out and be like, is there a Deathskittle hear it i hear it i know there's the deskito around and it's just the ambience of the spot i hate those things man yeah you guys will see you play some valheim you'll you'll realize man so i don't think we have the time to get into the details

but there are just so many things to do in this game. It can feel rather overwhelming. There are beasts in this game that you can tame where they will end up loving you. And then if you have multiple animals, they will procreate. And so you can actually run a little bit of a ranch if you want to. There is farming. There are elements of beekeeping and making potions what else am i

missing like what else can you do in this game i mean there's a lot of crafting making stews and like food over campfires um like building shelters you can build with wood or stone i mean uh there's fishing to give you an idea just in our group of, like you said, we have like four guys that are the core. We've had up to six or seven people that have popped in here and there. But like, I love exploring and I do like a lot of the metal gathering. Like for a while when we were getting bronze, which is super labor intensive,

like we were just doing copper and tin runs nonstop, right? Like we kind of gravitated towards the, let's go out, let's gather some stuff and bring it back. Todd has always been pretty much a base builder. Jared just went hog wild with the building of the base stuff. We like fighting bosses. For me, I love the progression. So I love finding a new, you know, mineral or material, I guess, and then having it unlock these recipes and being like, ooh, guys, like, we just found this. Like, now it says we can make this, this, this, and this. And that's like, to me, that's a lot of fun. See, I thought a lot about this.

Josh, you're like definitely the adventurer where you're running headfirst running head first, like not looking behind you. And like, you're just going to explore the new biome. Paul's definitely like, all right, what do we need? Let's get the materials we need. Let's like do progression.

Very like methodical on like how we're going to do the next thing. Jared's like, you guys, you guys go out. I'm going to stay home and build the base and then like we come home to like six six carrot stews and then i'm the character that's just like fives across the boards like it's true i i'm not i'm not anyone but then like if josh needs someone to run in a new biome i'm right there with him if we're going

to adventure to see the kraken i'm not gonna stay home but then at the same time when jace when jared needs someone to hold a beam for him so he can build the base i got him yeah i think that's definitely true todd's almost like the support, even though there's no healing other players. Todd is just down for whatever the group's doing and whatever he needs done. Yeah, and dragging me across the ocean and getting us almost killed. I'll say this too,

because I know we have to kind of start wrapping up, but this game, there are so many oh my gosh moments in this game as well that just happen. And that's one of the things that we released a little snippet on social media, but Todd and I were out in the ocean exploring and came across a little island. And we're like, oh, there's something on that island we've never seen before. Todd, go look at it. And Todd goes out and he's like, oh, they're barnacles. Cool.

Well, anytime you get a new material, it usually unlocks crafting stuff. So Todd starts pickaxing these barnacles and he's like, oh, dude, we got chitin. Oh, I just unlocked like a new dagger and a harpoon and all this stuff. So he's pickaxing another one. I'm waiting in the boat. The island starts moving. And then we just like, we lose our minds and we're like, Todd, get on the boat. Get on the boat, Todd.

It's moving. I just see Todd running and're like, Todd, get on the boat. Get on the boat, Todd. It's moving. And Todd, I just see Todd running and like trying to jump and swim to the boat. But that's like, there's like, that's one moment out of like a hundred that happens in this game. Like, that's what makes this game amazing. Yeah. And I'm doing a whole YouTube video pretty much based off that one moment because it was so insane. And then kind

of the buildup we had to that moment. But yeah, I mean, this game, this game has a ton of them, like any, like we, we started early on with the trees falling and then like with the ocean and it's you, you find yourself in these chaotic moments where you're making these small decisions, but then they're always hilarious. It always leads to a tree falling on you, or pitting up a wax against a Death Skeeto, and then them fighting each other. And then you're just running away, just super thankful. Yeah, it's very funny how some of the stuff in the game will interact with one another.

That was one of the pleasant surprises where all of a sudden you're worried because there's another monster joining the fight, but sometimes the monsters will fight each other. So, you know, Valheim is just such a massive game. I feel like we could easily go two hours just talking about it. The last thing I'll say is that it is still technically in early access, but man, is this game well polished. It's already a very complete game. Occasionally, you will craft or you'll pick up certain materials that can't be used yet. So it does seem like they'll still add things in the future. There is also like a biome called the Mistlands. We ran into one. The biome's completely empty. There's

nothing there. So obviously they're going to fill it in. So there's probably still a lot that we'll see added to Valheim, especially because it's been such a success. But I'm very curious to see what they add in the future. So now that you guys have heard a little bit about what we think about Valheim, Josh, I believe you have a couple of reviews here that the community has left. I do. Yeah. The reviews, it's very similar. This is one of those games that lends itself to very long stories, right? That's how you know a good survival exploration game. And like you said, we could easily go for another hour just sharing funny stories and moments that happened. So it's difficult to filter out the reviews that are like 18 paragraphs long where somebody wants to tell a story about why they love the game or why they

hate the game. But I've got a few here. And what I love is that we've touched on some of this stuff already. So some of this is going to actually sound a little familiar. So I'm going to start off with a negative one. Stop adding bleeping stamina gauges to your stupid bleeping games i'm tired of never being able to do anything because you made a bleeping character with no real stamina to fight anything but trees i mean it's such a frustrating part of the game but i get why it's there yeah it's a survival game you have to have certain survival elements. So you do, you will not die from hunger, but you do have to eat food in order to have any kind of HP.

And you do have to monitor your food, your stamina. It makes sense. The game should not just let you run around and swing your overpowered sword on everything. It has to be a check and balance system. I actually love the stamina meter in this game. You masochist, man. I don't mind having stuff go.

As of this moment, Paul and I have lost everything that we own about 30 minutes away from our closest base because we were exploring and we got killed. Well, I died. Let's put it that way. I died and then I tried to make five or six corpse runs and could not get back because of the stupid deskitos. I hate those things.

So finally, I'm like, Paul, I'm going to need you to escort me. So Paul escorts me all the way back to my body. Right at the very end, I may or may not have aggroed two deskitos and made a beeline for my corpse. And then I got stung and died after that. Well, now Paul is aggroed from like 18 different monsters and Paul dies and there lie our bodies right now. So Todd, we might need you to help us after recording.

I'm busy. I got a thing. Need to wash my hair. It's those negatives. It's the difficulty in the game that makes this game though, at the same time. Like, if it was too easy, it wouldn't be fun. Like, honestly, you got to have that stuff.

All right. Totally agree. Okay, so next one, positive. This one is short and sweet, and this guy gets it. Beware of falling trees. That's the whole review. Yeah. I think I may have died from trees more times than I died in certain biomes altogether.

The trees are no joke. Dude, the first time that happens, it is hilarious. All right. Okay, here's another one. I never thought I'd see the day. This is a positive review, by the way. I never thought I'd see the day where six Viking warriors resurrected to fight for Odin's honor would all die from a single mosquito.

We had to sit around the campfire and come up with a strategy for literal bugs. 10-10 would lose dignity again. Oh, and it's so true. How many times did we try to go into the planes too early and doing

corpse runs and we would yell, the deskito's on me, run, go get your stuff. Save yourself. So funny. Really? Yes. So, all right, this one's negative and we didn't really talk about this aspect. Negative review, game looks like a mobile game on max settings. Yeah.

People, a lot of the negative reviews on this game harp against the graphics on it. Which is crazy. I think that's dumb. The graphics are not amazing, but they're not supposed to be. This game has focused 100% on the gameplay and the weapons and the crafting and the building, and those things are all 10 out of 10. The graphics themselves are not fantastic, but they're serviceable. This game looks remarkably good being that it's only one gigabyte. This game is incredibly huge with so much content

and it's in such a small package. It's hard to believe. The only time that I sat down and said, man, this looks awful is when I was first creating my character. Your character looks like garbage. Oh, absolutely. But once you go in the world and you see trees and the sky's beautiful and everything like

that, then you're like, all right, this isn't too bad. But it's not great. I mean, no one goes into Minecraft and then they're like, oh, the graphics in Minecraft are terrible. No, and Valheim looks so much better than Minecraft. Anything in Valheim from a distance looks gorgeous. If you look at something too close, yeah, you can see the pixels. But honestly, I would say 90% of the time, I think the game looks just fine.

And how atmospheric is it? That's like, honestly, your character graphics and some of the stuff may be low, but the atmosphere in this game is phenomenal, dude. There's weather effects, there's fog, there's rain, there's big storms, there's the sailing on the ocean, there's the background music, there's the ambient sounds of the birds chirping and deer. Everything makes sounds, right? You know there's a deer nearby because you hear it. I think the graphics are fine, man. I get the people are like, oh, it's simple graphics, but I'll take atmosphere over graphics any day. Amen to that.

Yeah. All right. So this is another negative review. If this is overwhelmingly positive, which he's referencing the reviews on the game, what is Red Dead Redemption 2 then? Galactic supernova positive? This has been done X number of times before, and there's nothing special about it. Chop down trees, build stuff. Pretty boring in the long run. The graphics and animations are pretty bad and boring. Only positive is that it doesn't cost a lot.

There are plenty of other good games to spend your time on. What do you guys think about that? Okay, look, this is kind of like comparing a popcorn movie to a prestige Oscar winner movie, right? There's different types. Red Dead Redemption 2 is, in my opinion, probably the best video game of the last 10 years. Okay, it's a masterpiece. It accomplishes a lot more than Valheim does, of course. But that doesn't good or not good? And then there's overwhelmingly positive, but it's basically good or not good. And they're like, well, if Red Dead's 100 out of 100, this game isn't that. And then it's like, yeah, you're right. It's not supposed to be. But that doesn't, Paul, like you were saying, that doesn't make it any worse. It's just a different game.

That's what a few of the reviews thought. And I kind of gave you guys a hint built in there as to what the community as a whole thinks. But as we are wont to do, we are going to play a game. Would you like to play a game? And we are going to guess what we think the percent reviews are. So who won last time? Paul? I don't even remember.

I think it might be Paul. So Paul, you're, you're up first. Might be me. Yep. All right. Well,

yeah, you dropped a huge clue saying it's overwhelmingly positive given the success and how much people seem to love it. It's obviously super high. I'm going to say 96% are positive. That's what I was gonna go with now it's over under oh yeah i i'm gonna go slightly under so 95 95 for todd okay um i forgot to write down my score before i looked at the review. So in all honesty, I am not going to play this round. I'll just say that, Paul, you hit the nail on the head.

96%. 96%. And here's the thing. Most of the negative reviews commented on two things. Either that people didn't like the graphics, or what's funny is I literally looked at their playtime and it's 1.1 hours played. And it's just like every other survival game, negative review. And it's like, dude, you are bonkers if you think you can play an hour of this game and be able to kind of have an idea of what's going on there. So, all right, Paul, well, as the, as the champion lead us into the next segment, buddy.

All right. Hit that music. Hey baby, welcome to make love, marry or murder. And that's all I'm going to do for that. I'm, I'm not good at this segment.

So we are going to be rating this game on our scale. Are you going to make love to this game, marry this game, or murder it? I have no problem going first. It's a marry. There is so much to do in this game. It's only $20. You can play solo. You can play with friends. You get so much bang for your buck. I feel like I say that a lot on this show, but you really do with this game. I have some very minor quibbles. I think this game is an absolute slam dunk, home run, out of the ballpark. You know, it's fantastic.

Yeah, it's going to be a quick segment. Yeah, merry. Absolutely. Yeah, merry for me as well. I have found that we did a little bit of grinding in this game that started to get old. We got in this groove where we were really just trying to focus on straight up progression and moving from bronze to iron and then iron to the next thing and then from that thing to the next thing. And from that thing to the next

thing. And it started to wear on me a little bit. But I think that was our fault. I don't think it was the game's fault. And then as soon as we stopped doing that and we got back to the exploration part again, I found that I was having a lot more fun with it again. So I mean, this is an easy, easy Mary. I think that we are starting to approach the end of the content that's in early access. So I'm a little hesitant to say I'm going to keep just grinding this game for the next two months without more content coming out. But it is hands down one of the easiest Marys I can think of in recent games we've talked about. We've easily already gotten our money's worth out of this game. Oh, yes.

A hundred percent. Yeah. It's only 20 bucks, man. So worth the price, guys? Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. All right. All right.

So it's a triple marry. 96% approval on Steam. Wow. All right. And then let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. All right, guys, taking a look at our leaderboard, in case we have any new listeners that aren't familiar with this segment, we have a list of 36 games that we have covered on the show, and we try to rate them against each other, even if they are from vastly different genres. We have a master list going from number one, which is Overwatch, all the way down to number 36,

which is Overcooked 2. And basically, we just have to come up with a consensus rating of where we want to put in the current game. So for all three of us giving it a Mary, I know that all three of us have been loving it. I know it's going to be somewhere near the top. So taking a look at the list here, we've got like number three, Rocket League, four, Rust, five, Call of Duty Warzone, six, Hearthstone. It's right in that area for me. Do we think it's in this range or down?

For me, it's in that area or down for me it's in that area for me it's five right below rust like i i have a hard time with like rust or this game rust is rust i definitely have higher highs lower lows this game is more like a simmer on how much fun I have, where it's always a good time. It's always going to be fun to play. I'm going to enjoy it. But the times in Rust I've had are so great, so funny. There's more randomness with like random people like they'll there will never be a scenario in this game where josh runs around with a guitar and and gets tips from other players right right

i think you're spot on todd i would put it below rust but i would put it above war zone and heart stone i i'm kind of with you what do you think guys we've been doing this together too long because i agree 100 like it's it's very close to rust but it does not rust is much more like online multiplayer so like todd touched on you get those kind of really wacky moments that tend to stand out and while there's phenomenal moments in valheim valheim is like self-contained servers yeah you know maybe one day if they ever open it up when it gets out of early access and they go, hey, here's a server with like 100 people on it and let's see what happens. Like at that point, I could see it maybe like supplanting Rust. But for now, I mean, it's right there, man.

Lock it in. Number five, Valheim. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for joining us here for the show today. Hope you guys enjoyed listening and hearing a little bit about Valheim. Please check us out on social media. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at MultiplayerPod. You can also find us on YouTube at MultiplayerPodcast. Todd mentioned earlier that he is editing some videos of our time in Valheim,

so definitely subscribe to that channel, and then you'll be notified when that gets released. And then also, if you would like to support the show, which we hope that you would do, please leave us a rating of five stars. If you're on Apple Podcasts, please write a review. And then also check us out on Patreon at MultiplayerSquad.com. You can help support the show.

That way we can keep releasing two episodes every week and you'll also get access to our discord server where you can come game with me todd and josh and you can also see recommendations of other games we post memes and trailers to other games we hear about it's a really great community so if you wanted to check that out that is at again at multiplayer squad.com and then i think that's it here for today and then we'll be back with another episode on thursday for this week in gaming todd can you help us get our corpses back now? I really had a lot of stuff. Todd, you got an hour?

Yes. And are you willing to kill 18 Deathskittos along the way? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.