Iron Gate Studio's lead artist Robin Eyre and senior developer Jonathan Smars took Game ZXC through Valheim's new Mistlands biome in a recent in-game interview. The game was released in February 2021 and was quickly followed by an announcement of the content roadmap, a mix of updates and biome additions without hard release dates. To this point the updates have brought new items, enemies, and systems to Valheim's world, but players will now be able to explore an entire new biome: the Mistlands.
In a brief interview and preview of this biome, Eyre and Smars spoke about the process of developing the Mistlands, the inspiration behind Valheim, and what they hope players get out of the game. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: For players looking to jump into the Mistlands, is this biome going to follow the Plains in the game's progression arc?
Smars: Yes, defeating Yagluth basically lets you start unlocking the Mistlands. Technically you could go here earlier, but it probably isn't a good idea.
Eyre: You can go get a Black Metal pickaxe and the [Black Metal] axe, and you could do this biome first. Which would be interesting to see.
Q: Do you both find it exciting to watch players try and rework the game?
Both: Yes absolutely.
Q: What are your emotions getting this close to the release date of this update?
Eyre: Personally for me, I've been working on this and trying to bring this to life, and we gave this to the testers, and they said it was too difficult, but we want to release this to everyone, so they can play it because it's been a while. We needed the time to be able to explore and... the way that we work is very iterative and [involves] organically trying to come up with things, so the time spent is also time that we needed to experiment. The way that we're releasing it now... it's such a relief. As long as people hate it or love it that's the thing that I want. If it's indifference, and people don't care, then we have failed.
Smars: It feels like people have extremely high expectations. It has been taking a long time, and... it has taken quite a while for our first biome and I think we've learned from that and the other ones probably won't take as long but still expectations are quite high. So we're both kind of nervous about it and also just kind of very looking forward to having it release. It feels really nice to be so close.
Q: What was the development process like for the Mistlands?
Eyre: From the beginning, there were the Mountains, there were the Plains, and they were pretty empty. And [the team] was showing me around and said this is going to be Mistlands, and showed me all these huge skulls and the cobwebs everywhere and these huge trees. We were thinking we could put stuff up in the trees, and walkways and have some kind of spider creatures or something and that was that. We didn't talk that much about Mistlands but as we progressed and did Mountains before Early Access, and the Plains, when we went back and looked at Mistlands it felt like Swamps without the rain.
So we started talking about how we make Mistlands different. What can we do? We started looking at pictures of Iceland...at one point in time I had made concept art for this really pink, pink Mistlands, with just lots of rocks. The Mist was pink and everything was purple and pink, and it looked interesting, but no one's going to want to go there and so that got scrapped pretty early on. We just tried to figure out how to make it different because this is the last chance for us to actually do something different, really different biome-wise because you've got the Ashlands which is pretty thematically straightforward, and the Deep North.
So [we said] let's try and hide beauty inside the mist, but also danger, huge amounts of danger and try and turn it into like some old, prehistoric place with ancient times, disparate magic, and I think it turned out well. I think people are going to have some difficulties with stamina and climbing up the cliffs, visibility is going to be an issue, but we have some solutions for that which we'll be getting to. The whole Mistlands process was like everything we do at Iron Gate: very iterative. We always start from what is the feeling that we want to achieve here.
Q: How much is your development process inspired by Norse mythology and Viking culture?
Eyre: We try to think of Valheim as basically space travelers leaving Earth, coming into a new place and this place will give them new technology. So we're trying to go away from Norse mythology for the Viking himself, but it's still in the Norse spectra. We tried to keep fantasy and try to keep it within their [the Viking's] grasp, but also try to infuse a sense of how would they progress here and how can we make something new and in the identity of Valheim. But going into Mistlands we wanted to turn it into the saga. It's the legends now.
Q: Anything else you would like to add?
Eyre: I would like to add that I hope people will enjoy the content that we have created, and I'm hoping that it's good enough because one of our philosophies when creating Valheim was to not polish too much, make it good enough and make it playable. I hope people will enjoy it and I hope to hear many screams, I hope to see many people laughing [on live streams].
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Valheim is available now for PC, and releases in early 2023 for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.