According to Valheim developer Iron Gate, the game's update roadmap has been slowed due to its unexpected popularity; presently, the team is focusing its efforts on addressing bugs. The Norse survival experience hit Steam Early Access in the first week of February and quickly took the world by storm. Within four weeks of launch, Valheim managed to cross the much-coveted sales milestone of five million units sold.
Iron Gate planned to support its Early Access player-base throughout the year with four big updates. Though none of the updates had firm release details attached, the studio at least managed to outline what early adopters could expect over the course of the next several months. According to a content roadmap, Update 1 will introduce "Hearth and Home" additions; Update 2 centers around "Cult of the Wolf;" in Update 3, players can expect "Ships and the Sea;" and the fourth should result in the launch of a brand-new biome - the Mistlands. Now it seems the previously teased updates for Valheim must take a backseat for a time.
Speaking with Fanbyte about the survival game's popularity, studio co-founder Henrik Törnqvist admitted no one expected the game's success to spike so rapidly. As a result of that meteoric growth, Valheim's content roadmap demanded some change. "We actually had to slow down the roadmap for the game," Törnqvist told the publication, explaining that the influx of players means the five-person team shifted its priorities to tackling bug fixes.
Sebastian Badylak, Valheim's executive producer at publisher Coffee Stained Studios, offered a bit more insight about when players can anticipate the first big update. Apparently, Update 1 will go live once all of the title's "major bugs" are stamped out. Badylak divulged, "I’m just looking forward to kind of seeing it through in the short term, which is definitely sort of getting to a point where we have squashed all the major bugs and can start talking about the first update and stuff like that."
As evidenced by the comments from Törnqvist and Badylak, it doesn't seem as though there are set dates in mind for when the updates may start rolling out. The focus on bug fixes is certainly understandable, though, since Valheim is no stranger to game-breaking glitches. The fewer of those, the better.
Plus, the title's millions upon millions of players have done well in making their own fun. From functional beer bong tables and Star Wars replicas to fancy settlements and item recovery community efforts, there's no shortage of Valheim excitement for fans to partake in.
Valheim is out now on PC via Steam Early Access.
Source: Fanbyte