Winds Of Valen - First Impressions

I've only recently started paying attention to the recommendations that appear on my Steam home page or whatever the heck we're calling it. Landing page? Login screen? The first thing I see when I open Steam, anyway. You know what I mean.

It used to be filled with games I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever and I trained myself to ignore them but lately I've noticed a lot more turning up there that seem to have at least some relevance to the kind of thing I might usually play. I've gradually slipped into at least glancing at them, taking a closer look at any that stand out. I guess that's how they get you.

Yesterday, a title I hadn't heard of popped up - Winds of Valen. It looked pretty so I passed the mouse pointer across the image to see what sort of game it was. 

It's a F2P MMORPG. That is kind of in my wheelhouse. Not that I have a wheelhouse. Or would know what to do with one if I had.

Here's the store description:

Winds of Valen is a free fantasy sandbox MMORPG. Experience old-school progression where every level, skill, and drop is earned through effort. Train your combat, mining, and smithing skills, and hunt for rare and unique items in a seamless open world filled with danger and discovery.

Well, that sounds alright, doesn't it? I wonder how much of it is true? (Spoiler: most of it, if you squint hard enough and don't set your expectations too high.) The footprint was fairly small, just over a gigabyte (The specs say 2gb required.) so I stuffed it into my Steam Library and left it there for the morning. 

Today I played for half an hour after breakfast and an hour and a half this afternoon. 

And it was fun. For a given value of fun, that is. Whether you think it would be fun too depends on your feelings about The Grind.

As many of the Steam reviews (More than six hundred of them, currently aggregating to Mostly Positive.) point out, often as though it's an attraction not a drawback, there's not much to do in the game other than kill mobs, raise skills and pick up loot. Grinding is the gameplay. The developers seem to agree:

"Winds of Valen is built for players who enjoy the open-ended, sandbox design of old-school MMOs." 

Yeah. That's what we called grinding, back in the day.

The other thing many of the reviews agree on is how similar Winds of Valen is to one particular, very specific old-school MMO. It's the one that literally has "old-school" in its name: Old School Runescape. 

I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of that impression. I've never played OSRS. I have played Runescape, though, alneit years back and not for long, and it didn't remind me all that much of what little I remember about it, but I think that might have more to do with what WoV looks like than anything. I sure don't remember Runescape looking this charming.

So, where did thing thing pop up from, anyway? According to the description on Steam, WoV launched in November 2025. According to itch.io, where the game is also available, it came out slightly before that, at the end of October. Itch says the developer is HeadCoach. Steam says it's Fiery Dog Games. 

Not sure it really matters. What does is that, since then, it's been updated regularly. And that tells an interesting story in itself.

If Winds of Valen was a modern, forward-looking, cutting-edge MMORPG it wouldn't have launched at all. It'd have gone into Early Access and stayed there for a year or three. That would have given the devs a pass for any glitches, bugs or shortfalls in content. Or at least they'd have claimed it did.

WoV sure as heck plays like an Early Access game, not least because there's not a whole lot of content there yet, but if you can remember that far back, that's how many MMORPGs used to be at launch. They'd come out half-finished, if that, and then patch patch patch until they had something approximating a full game there. Players expected it and if the game was any good they hung around for it.

WoV is like that. The update history on Steam shows a stream of patches, small and large. Eighteen since last November. That's old school, alright. 

As for the payment model, F2P, might not seem to fit the old school bill (Although the free to play model is older than you might imagine.) but if this was a regular 2026 F2P title, it'd have plenty of Supporter Packs you'd be able to buy to "show support". As far as I can see you can't give Fiery Dog or HeadCoach, whichever it is, any money, even if you wanted to. How they're funding this thing beats me because there's no in-game cash shop I could see, either.

So, that's the background. How about the game?

Well, there's not a lot there yet but what there is looks very promising. As you can see from the screenshots, it's very pretty. If anything the visuals are better in game.

Performance-wise, I'd say it was bug-free because I certainly didn't run into any problems when I was playing, except that I hit a pretty big one when I logged out. After each session my PC crashed and had to be hard-rebooted. Makes me a bit nervous to try again, although I might give it a go on the laptop to see if it'll run there.

When you hit Play for the first time, it's straight into Character Creation. There's absolutely no story, no narrative, no introductory movie or cut scene to sit through. There isn't even any passages of sub-Tolkeinian prose to set the scene. There's nothing at all. It's so refreshing!

Character creation itself is fairly basic but the models are cute and I had no problems getting someone I felt comfortable playing. The surprise comes when you have to pick a server. There are half a dozen, each in a different region. How a game like this manages servers in the USA, Europe and Australia beats me. When I was making my choice, there were people on all of them, mostly single figures. The game has a thirty-day average concurrency of just under a hundred with an all-time peak three times that, according to the Steam Charts.

I spawned in on the outskirts of a village with a huge castle behind me, the implication being, I guess, that that's where I'd come from. Nothing in the game said so, of course. Nothing in the game says anything, including the NPCs, mostly because there are none.

There are no questgivers because there are no quests. There are shops but they're automated. No-one's waiting behind the counter to serve you. You have a sword and a pickaxe and that's your lot. It's the sandiest of sandboxes. Who needs NPCs? Just get on with it!

So I did. I went out of the village to see what was there and what was there was goblins. And skeletons. And chickens. And cows. You can kill all of those. I did, except for the cows. I didn't kill any cows. It seemed... unnecessary.

I sliced them all up with my sword. It's not like I had a choice. There's only one weapon type I could fiond and that was the sword. There's a  whole sword shop. All it sells are swords. There's crafting and the only weapon you can craft is a sword. If you don't like swords you're in the wrong game.

There are shields, too. They have their own shop and crafting recipes. Ditto armor. Ditto potions, theoretically, although I couldn't find the crafting station for those.  There's jewelry, too, and a jewelry store but I didn't see any crafting option for rings or amulets. Probably waiting for a patch.

If you don't want to craft your gear you can rely on the mobs you kill to provide. Everything always drops something, even if its only coin. You can wait for the item you need to drop, which is how I got a shield, a helmet and a ring, or you can save up your coins and buy what you want in town. 

It's surprisingly satisfying. And very old-school, except in the really old days, everything in the shops would have been inferior quality, where here it's pretty good. The motivating factor to get you crafting or looting rather than going to the store is the price. I'd still be saving for a shield if one hadn't dropped.

One distinctly new-school innovation I liked was the information panel that pops up when you target a mob. It doesn't just tell you all the stats, it tells you what the mob drops and the percentage chance of it happening. Until you actually get the drop, there's a question mark to maintain the suspense about what it might be but the likelihood of getting something is clear right from the start.

Even better, the chance of a special item dropping increases the longer you fail to get one. I was killing skeleton miners to see what the drop was going to be and my chances went from 7% to 12% before I got lucky. 

The rare drop off a Skeleton Miner turned out to be a pair of boots with a bonus to mining. The common drop is either tin or copper ore. Drops are rational and realistic, which I'd have to say is very definitely not in keeping with the old school vibe, but much appreciated by me all the same.It used to bug the heck out of me when a wolf would drop a rusty sword in EverQuest.

The combat itself is about as basic as you could possibly imagine. No player input is required at all beyond targeting the mob and starting the fight. From then on, the two just exchange blows until one of them falls over. If it's the mob, you loot it and move on to the next. If it's you, you respawn in town at full health . There's no death penalty as far as I could tell.

There's not much in the way of healing, either. You can use potions but I didn't bother. It seemed pointless when I was so close to the spawn spot. Mobs either use potions to heal up after a fight or employ some similar mechanism. They heal themselves up in stages, anyway,with a visual effect to show they've done it. If you can run back fast enough, you can catch them still at low health and carry on the fight you just lost at an advantage. I did that a few times.

Despite the sparse nature of the gameplay, there are some more sophisticated systems in place already. There's a bank. You can add gems to jewelry to give bonuses. There's fishing. It's not like there's nothing to do.

The main attraction, though, is grinding. Kill mobs to make skills go up. Kill mobs to make your level go up. Kill mobs to get better gear. If that's the kind of simplicity you've been missing you're going to have a fine old time.

I did. I was surprised how much fun I had. That old gameplay loop, with its skinner box structure and all the dopamine hits, it still works. Especially when there's a really satisfying ding every time something significant happens. 

I enjoyed my two hours with Winds of Valen a lot. If I could be sure it wasn't going to break my PC every time I log out, I'd be playing some more right after I post this. That does put me off a bit, though. 

In any case, at the moment, there's not really enough there to hold the attention for more than a few sessions. But all the building blocks are in place. If the developers keep adding systems and content the way they have been up to now, this could turn out to be a very enjoyable MMORPG indeed. 

As first impressions go, I'd have to say Winds of Valen makes a good one. And for free, why wouldn't you give it a go?