It's So Different Here: Modding Valheim

Mrs Bhagpuss tried Valheim yesterday and, as I feared would happen, didn't get on with it at all. It wasn't the gameplay or the graphics or the setting. It was the control system; specifically, the camera movement.

She finds any game that takes a screen-centered approach, which is most action-oriented games these days, induces motion sickness within minutes. Sometimes within seconds. It affects her so badly it usually takes her a couple of hours to recover.

Sometimes there are tweaks you can apply to reduce the effects but Valheim is still very bare-bones in that respect. Other than switching off camera shake (which I'd recommend in general) there's not much you can do.

Unless you go the mod route, maybe. I was wondering how long it would be before the moding community got to grips with Valheim. With three million copies sold already, not to mention the game coming with a wide range of console controls pre-installed, it didn't seem like it would be long.

This afternoon I spotted a news item on Massively:OP reporting the creation of a first person view mod for Valheim. That's not going to be much help with Mrs Bhagpuss's issue but it sounded promising. I clicked through to find a site called Nexus Mods, an aggregator of mods for lots of different games.

They already have five pages of mods for Valheim. Over eighty in total. I don't usually check for mods or add-ons for games I play so I don't know if that would be reckoned a lot or a little after just a couple of weeks but either way I would bet it's just the beginning.

 

I had a browse through them all. I wasn't really expecting to find a "Make Valheim Play Like World of Warcraft" mod although I certainly wouldn't rule one out eventually. After all, one of the few add-ons I have installed for WoW is one that makes that game play like Guild Wars 2. That's exactly what the game needs before Mrs Bhagpuss is likely to be able to enjoy it.

It was really interesting to see what modders had focused on in these early days. As you'd expect, a bunch of mods aim to remove specific "annoyances", anything from the famously unpopular restriction on taking ore through portals or the very old-school requirement to run back to your corpse to pick up all your stuff. 

There are portmanteau mods that bundle a bunch of quality of life improvements together, including one rather brilliantly named "I'm No Masochist", which "aims to reduce/remove the masochism required to enjoy some of the base game's mechanics". Oddly, other than the corpse recovery thing it seems to be some very minor tweaks to things I hadn't even have realized were problems, like how much fuel you can put in a kiln or how close you have to be to a piece of furniture before it gives you the comfort buff.

Naturally, one person's pain is another's pleasure, so there are also mods to make the game more challenging. Or more annoying. I'd go with more annoying. Remember the mod that lets you take ore through portals? How about one that disable portals completely?

Okay, I can see the point of that one. Portals do change the game. On the other hand, you could just not build them and not use any anyone else builds if you're on multiplayer, although that might get you some funny looks. Either way, it hardly needs a mod. Just a modicum of self-restraint.

A more straightforward difficulty slider comes with the mod called Expert Mode. That one spawns all mobs as 2* toughies but leaves their loot drops unaffected. The ironman pose is somewhat undermined when you learn the same mod can be reconfigured to provide EasyMode instead, weak mobs that drop extra loot.

I can't see myself using any of those. The default difficulty and convenience levels seem just about right to me. It's one of the reasons the game's so compelling. If there was a mod that removed the need to kill the bosses to progress, I might think about that. It already seems like an artificial construct. I'm not sure the game benefits from those awkward interruptions any more than I felt Final Fantasy XIV benefitted from shoving dungeons and trials into the single-player storyline.

There are quite a few mods that I would consider using, for example the ones that improve the way the game looks, like Cinematic Valheim. Those all require you to install ReShade, though. I've looked at that before and decided against it although I know some bloggers around here swear by it. I'd also give a thought to True Creative Mode although I think it's pretty much what PotShot was describing, just rolled up in a neat wrapper.

One unusual thing about Valheim is the way your characters are independent of the worlds they inhabit. That means you don't necessarily have to choose between the variations mods provide. You could set up a whole bank of worlds all operating under different local rules and transfer your character between them depending on your mood at any given time. Or you could have different characters on each world.

So long as you stick to your own worlds I don't see a problem. Well, there might be a problem for you, if  a mod breaks your character or your game but it isn't going to affect anyone else. Moving your character from a modded world you own to an unmodded (or differently modded) one owned by someone else is another matter entirely. 

As I understand it, the console controls only work in locally hosted games but whether the system knows your character has levelled up somewhere with easy mobs that give double loot or with a mod that removes the need for endurance or corpse runs I have no idea. It seems unlikely. There will be plenty of people who have an issue with cross-play involving characters evolved under rulesets of varying perceived difficulty.

 

The major factor preventing me from installing any kind of mods, if I'm being totally upfront about it, is laziness. I'd quite like to know what time of day it is in Valheim. Believe it or not it really is something that's been bugging me since the start. I can guesstimate the time of day from the position of the sun and the lighting conditions but it seems a bit daft not to have a local time on display.

I've also wondered many times whether trees regrow and if so at what speed. I've chopped down a lot of trees and left a lot of bare earth. From all the seeds I've collected from them I'm assuming I can re-plant and re-forest but it would be nice if the land repaired itself, too.

There are mods for both of those. Tree Respawn makes a sapling grow back every time you destroy a tree stump. That's something I'd use. Clock adds... well, a clock, although, delightfully, you can configure it to use vague phrases like "Early Evening" rather than specific times. Chances are I'll never get around to installing them all the same.

Given Valheim's popularity I'd guess this is just the tip of the modding iceberg. It's weird to think that a game officially in Early Access is effectively competing in real time with its own community of players to see who can develop a better game first.

For Mrs. Bhagpuss's sake I hope someone can do something about the way the camera lurches. I suspect a full tab-target classic mmorpg remodeling is too much to ask, even way down the line, but I'm sure there must be improvements that could be made. 

Maybe they'll even come as part of the official game. That'd be nice.

Welcome To Difficult: Wow Classic

As the big day draws ever nearer, all thoughts turn to WoW Classic. Well, for some people. I've been thinking about it on and off but I can't say it's been on my mind 24/7.

One thing that did occur to me was to check the exact time the new-old game launches. Almost everything I read just says "27th August" but of course nothing's ever quite as simple as that.

Blizzard have a very handy timetable on the official website that gives the American launch date as the 26th, not the 27th. I can't say I've seen that spelled out anywhere before. As the footnote explains "To align with other regions, the Americas will launch slightly ahead of August 27 in local time".

Here in the UK we also get a Monday start - barely. Servers should open for us at 11pm, by which time I can guarantee I will have been in bed for at least a couple of hours because my drug regime means I run out of steam at about eight in the evening. EU players technically begin on the 27th, at the dead of midnight, while Asia and Oceania join in at breakfast time.

I understand that time zones mean all the servers actually come online simultaneously but that's self-evidently not going to be the human experience. Given that launch is happening during the working week and that the majority of Classic players are likely to be of working and child-rearing age, being able to come home at five or six PM is a major advantage to having to log in at bedtime or breakfast.

Only to be expected. It's been that way in most MMORPGs I've played for the last twenty years. I bet Runescape doesn't do launches at 11pm UK time, though.

It's an entirely moot point at any rate. We're in no hurry. It suits us very well to start our Classic journey on Tuesday morning, with the whole day ahead. I'm home sick for the summer and Mrs. Bhagpuss doesn't work Tuesdays. I'm not even convinced she's going to get around to playing straight away- she hasn't made a character yet.

What's more, the server we've picked, Hydraxian Waterlords, is still showing as "Medium" population. Given eight or ten hours for the rush to subside (always assuming enough people want to stay up all night for there to be a rush), there's every chance we won't have to face a queue on login. Or not a ridiculously long one, anyway.

Once we get in there's the nature of the experience to consider. I made a second character today, a Gnome Warlock. It was entirely predictable. When I played WoW for six months I tried a lot of classes but the two I liked best were Hunter and Warlock. And obviously the two races that appeal to me in Classic are Gnome and Dwarf. If it ain't broke, as they say.

There's been some discussion around the blogosphere on the subject of how "difficult" Classic is going to be and also on how things like Add-Ons might affect that perception, not to mention the actual experience. They are thorny topics indeed.

On difficulty, my feeling is that those who played during Vanilla will be surprised to find almost everything "easier", and certainly faster, than they remembered. That's because they have those memories. They know, even if the knowledge is dim and cobwebbed, how to play the game. In 2004 they had no pre-knowledge and learning slows things down.

Players who only know the post-Wrath of the Lich King game will almost certainly find Classic a lot slower and considerably more fiddly and annoying. That may be perceived as difficulty; more likely tedium. They won't stick around.

I'm fine with Classic not being "difficult". What I want is for it to be involving - even immersive, if we can still call on that ancient concept. For that to happen the original systems and mechanics that Blizzard have taken so much trouble to re-create need to have integrity.

To that end I was very heartened to read Marathal's short post this morning. Community Manager Bornakk replied to a thread on the forums about the much-publicised LFG Addon, confirming that Blizzard aren't at all happy with it. What's more, they aren't going to allow it:

"After careful examination, we believe the nature of ClassicLFG is incompatible with our social design for Classic. Thus, in an upcoming patch (in the weeks following launch), we will be adding restrictions to the Classic add-on API that will significantly limit this add-on and others like it."

I sometimes complain about paternalism in MMORPGs but this is not that. This is proper custodianship, although I'm not quite sure why the fix has to wait until a few weeks after launch.

I was actualy playing WoW when the original LFG Finder was introduced. It was right at the end of my run and I stayed on a week longer than I planned to try this new-fangled option.

It worked. I got groups and got ported to the dungeon. It was efficient, clinical and alienating, all factors that have only increased over time as the mechanic has spread like a virus to most triple-A MMORPGs.

When we talk about difficulty, I'm reminded of the process of forming groups to do dungeons in EverQuest in the years before and just after WoW. Everyone remembers the the calling out in /ooc or /shout, sending and receiving /tells, trying to find a place in a group or fill one. Everyone talks about how long it took and how tedious it was but what no-one ever seems to mention is how dangerous putting a group together could be.

Not the reecruiting, obviously, but physically getting the members of the group together in one place, at the entrance to the dungeon. Norrath was both big and lethal. Dungeons were distant from population centers, tucked away in obscure corners of zones filled with aggressive creatures, monsters that could be much higher level than the ones the group planned on fighting in the dungeon itself.

I remember one occasion when, having taken half an hour or so to put a group together to take a crack at Mistmoore, so many of the group got killed trying to get there, some of them multiple times, that we broke up before we ever entered the dungeon. When Gates of Discord arrived to drive half the population of EQ in the welcoming arms of Vanilla WoW, most of the guild I was in refused point-blank even to try to join groups in Natimbi, let alone Qinimi, because they were convinced they'd never get there alive.

And they were right. Even with Spirit of Wolf and Invisibility the chances of dying in transit to your waiting group were significant. I found it "fun" or at least involving. I lasted longer in GoD than almost anyone on my friends list. I got past the entry level zones and did a little in the next tier. It was probably the hardest gameplay of my MMORPG career and after a few months I'd had enough, too.

That was taking things too far but to my mind getting to the dungeon should be as much of an adventure as crawling through it. Seperating the two experiences is a big mistake. I realize that traveling across Azeroth is never going to be anything close to the terrifying experience crossing Norrath was back in the day but at least it's heading in the right direction.

I only hope I will be. I do have a tendency to get lost trying to find my group.

Community Service: WoW, We Happy Few

Keen is going through one of his periodic spells of self-reinvention at the moment, this time in the hope of getting more involved in the games he plays and the communities that surround them. It's a fine aspiration but I just thought I'd mention that he's still an "influencer" without even trying.

A few weeks back, when he was covering the E3 convention, Keen dropped a throwaway comment about a game he'd seen promoted there called We Happy Few. The sum total of his coverage was "WTF…Creepy. Skipping." It was enough to make me google the game, find a video of the promo that had so disturbed him, watch it and decide it was a game well worth following.

The game went into Early Access via steam in late July. I was thinking of picking it up but it's currently selling at the equivalent of a full-price release while being, in the words of the developers themselves, unlikely to be ready for launch sooner than "between six and twelve months" from now.  It has a decent Overall Rating of Mostly Positive based on almost a thousand reviews but reading through them tells the story of a game with great potential that's yet to be realized.

I decided to take the advice of many of even the most positive reviewers: wait until the game is finished - or at least getting there. This really is one of those cases where the main reason to buy in now is to help fund the game and do your bit to try and make sure it eventually gets made.

I'm interested but not that interested. If it was an MMO then I'd be all over it whatever the stage of development but survival games are a long way out of my comfort zone to begin with.

In the meantime, however, I'll keep watching the progress and there is one small thing I can do to help. I mentioned We Happy Few briefly in a post shortly after I heard about it from Keen and regular commenter Simon was kind enough to point me at the blog of one of the creative forces behind the game, Alex Epstein.

It's an excellent blog, insightful and amusing on the subject of making games, and it ought to be in my blogroll. It is now!

This morning I read a post there about the problems Alex is having with Wikipedia. Apparently the Wikipedia editorial stance is that primary sources are ineligible as authority for amendments. He's quite upbeat, even supportive, about it but you might equally argue that it's The Intentional Fallacy gone mad.

Alex says that We happy Few is based in an alternate timeline where Britain was invaded not by The Nazis, as Wikipedia asserts, but by The German Empire. For sound commercial reasons as well as, no doubt, aesthetic ones, Compulsion Games want to avoid any reference to Nazis in their 1984/Clockwork Orange-inspired survival offering.

While Wikipedia won't accept the person who wrote the story as an authority on what the story is about, apparently they might look more favorably on a third party referring to that author's testimony. "Hopefully, someone will quote this blog post in their blog, and then I can cite myself", he says. Well, here you go Alex. Cite away!

It's probably safe to say that Keen won't be playing We Happy Few ("WTF…Creepy. Skipping.") but he is playing WoW. Again. So am I, in Veteran Starter Edition kind of way. He's playing a Gnome Hunter, which he boosted to 100, and he's been providing practical guides on where to find and tame Mechanical pets, almost all of which would one-shot me from the next zone.

A lot more useful for me was his discovery of an Add-On that turns WoW into Guild Wars 2. I am not a big fan of Add-Ons or Mods. I try to avoid them in most games but I'm not religious about it. I've used them, sparingly, in EverQuest, EQ2, ESO and others. When I subscribed to WoW I used a couple that ran in the background - I think one auto-declined duels...

The screenshots of this one looked fascinating and although I hadn't been struggling with the default UI I thought I'd give it a try. After four years of GW2 I would imagine I have a lot of muscle memory accrued so maybe I could get some benefit from that.

Not, of course, that anyone's going to be struggling to eke out that extra one percent of DPS in WoW's first twenty levels. The compliments I gave WoW a couple of weeks ago over the pacing of the low-level game turned out to have a hollow ring even before my hunter hit double figures.


It seems the only reason she was having decent fights was that she had no armor and no stats. As soon as she acquired some green gear the mobs started dropping on the second hit - sometimes the first. Add to that the firehose of xp from quests that took about twenty seconds and all the bad things people say about WoW's modern leveling game begin to come true.

Not that I wasn't having fun. And even having capped out at twenty there's plenty to do on a free account. There are pets to tame and there's reputation to grind for a start. And last night I spent some of my capped gold to buy a mount.

WoW is a lot of fun and I am more than ever minded to buy Legion and sub for a month or two. The GW2 mod has only increased the likelihood. The whole layout is so much better than the default, which itself is not at all bad. It feels natural and comfortable and I am able to find the buttons I need a whole lot faster.

The real benefit, though, is something I don't think Keen even mentioned: a complete revamp of the entire quest interface. I believe this is available separately, so you can have a vastly improved, far more "immersive" questing experience without having to go the whole hog and clone your UI to GW2's. I wholeheartedly, enthusiastically recommend it. If you enjoy questing and, especially, like to read the quest text, you won't regret it.

WoW has good quests, usually well-written and often very amusing. The game also has possibly the worst color palette, font and general art design for presenting them that I have ever suffered in an MMO. It turns what could be a pleasure into a pain.

The GW2 UI mod does away with all that. Instead you get a center-screen panel that shows your character on one side and the quest NPC on the other. You click on the panel to progress the dialog and it plays out perfectly, like a conversation. The characters even use emotes to emphasize what's happening. It's brilliantly done and it transforms my questing experience almost out of recognition.

So, thanks Keen. Your community service credentials remain intact, even if you do think they need a bit of a polish!