I'm not against mods for this game but the game isn't finished and I think if players resort to mods prior to the game being finished it will serve to ruin the experience for themselves.
Kinda like the if you open the console you will wreck the game for yourself.
That being said there are some very creative people making some awesome mods but I'm going to wait until the game is finished and I've thoroughly enjoyed it until I start modding it.
In principle I agree with you. @blueturtle13 and I talked quite a bit about this before we enabled the V+ mod and changed some settings. We wanted to play through the vanilla experience before changing things.
Then we hit some walls and had to make some decisions. Like you mention, the game isn't finished and there are some real rough spots along the way.
The fact that resource nodes don't respawn and ores have long travel times absolutely removes incentive to build up a home base or two. Once iron, other relevant resources, are depleted from an area there really is no reason to revisit that area. That lead us to abandoning bases and old areas which in turn brought us to a crossroads where we either stopped building bigger more interesting bases in favor of localized resource shacks, or we mod the game to change that behavior.
The game has a few other rough spots.
- All the dungeons are the same. They're very simple and they become tedious.
- Long ship travel times aren't fun. They're just time sinks that go against the rest of the design intended to respect player time involvement.
- Once a mob stops being useful it's better to avoid them, not because they're hard but simply useless. e.g. Trolls
- The stamina system needs a lot more fine tuning
- Iron is disproportionately required for everything
- Resource nodes don't respawn so areas become useless
And there are some more which I'm sure will eventually be sorted out by the time they finish the game.
However, Iron Gate seems to have dug in about ore transport and a couple other design decisions that run counter to how I like to play. I want to build and explore, not play resource transport. If others do that's cool. It's an option, but I prefer to do something different which is where mods come in. They smooth out rough spots I don't enjoy.
If your dead set against something its a pretty easy answer. I kinda enjoy the sailing and the serpent attacks. I never found it to be much of a chore to ship all the metals to my main base. I agree about the dungeons but i never found them to be tedious.
Might I be controversial and suggest that if you think you need mods to help out with the unpolished/unfinished bits that's proof that it is better to wait for the game to launch? While I understand the reasoning for the mods, it does all seem rather convoluted and bothersome for a game which seems will launch this year?
This type of games has always lived just fine with mods. Minecraft during its year long beta always had mods. Skyrim is full of mods.
It's just one part of the whole "sandbox" thing. While for some type of games, mods/addons can indeed hurt the game (for MMORPGs for instance), for those sandbox games it's an additional benefit.
I take the point about Minecraft's beta, if it worked well there and players think it is needed here yet is not a bother then its understandable. I do use mods in games, in fact I champion them, just never having played an EA/beta etc I have no experience of them in that setting.
Ugh, my epicness overload viking allergy is kicking in again. Must look at some ordinary non-epic stuff to prevent waking up at the ER...
But seriously, one thing Northend had over Valheim was actual quests and content. Unless Valheim eventually evolves into featuring some procedurally generated kill/fetch/escort/puzzle quests or whatever, I just can't see the appeal in that game. It's like every other sandbox game before it - a game about nothing.
To tell you the truth i find "quests" to be boring and lame now. Valheim has something better than quests. You self generate your own quests to get resources to build your base.
All games are about nothing. They are designed to keep you busy so you cant see your being robbed. They are great timewasters though
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But seriously, one thing Northend had over Valheim was actual quests and content. Unless Valheim eventually evolves into featuring some procedurally generated kill/fetch/escort/puzzle quests or whatever, I just can't see the appeal in that game. It's like every other sandbox game before it - a game about nothing.
All games are about nothing. They are designed to keep you busy so you cant see your being robbed. They are great timewasters though