Highlights

  • Valheim's Nordic lore is rich and captivating, with each biome telling a unique tale through runestones and creatures.
  • While the game logically ends with defeating the final boss, players can still explore the world post-victory, finding stones that hinting at past warriors.
  • Adding NPCs based on runestone characters could further expand Valheim's lore and provide players with useful tips and insights for their own journeys.

Developers of sandbox games often choose to leave their overarching narratives to the imagination, but Valheim's Nordic inspiration opened up a wealth of lore that has catapulted the Iron Gate Studios release to the apex of the genre. Each biome in the harsh climate tells a different tale with its unique creatures, and players can easily get sidetracked from the plethora of base-building mechanics to explore the enthralling boss battles. Valheim's status as the Nordic purgatory - the unavoidable route for warriors to prove their worth to ascend to Valhalla - is only alluded to via the environment's runestones, and the sandbox title could expand on these pieces of lore by bringing them to life in the form of NPCs.

Unlike other loose-ended sandbox games that may feature final boss battles but have no definitive story ending, Valheim's premise of warriors gaining Odin's favor and leaving the harsh climate of Valheim behind shows that the game can logically end. Despite this logical conclusion, Iron Gate Studios allowed players to defeat the final boss in Yagluth and still wander around the world's biomes. Players might never glimpse the famed halls of immortality due to sandbox mechanics, but other warriors have walked the Valheim path before the player character and have presumably ascended, as some runestone carvings show. As such, Valheim could let gamers come face-to-face with these former glory seekers as an endgame dynamic.

Valheim Hildir Art
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Valheim's Haldor and Hildir May Be the Game's Greatest Mystery

Valheim's Hildir and Haldor NPCs are a mysterious pair, with their reason for wandering the tenth realm obscured from players.

Bringing Back Runestone Authors Would Expand Valheim's Lore

Finding pieces of lore is always a captivating experience, and Valheim implements its lore drops and tips through runestones. In line with the Viking era inspiration, these structures are literal carvings of red runes on stones, and they give insight into the Valheim world at large.

Adding NPCs to Valheim Would Tie Up Loose Ends

These lore stones range from warnings about the types of enemies players will encounter to odes that wax poetic about a day in the harsh life of a tenth realm inhabitant below the Yggdrasil world tree. Some of the runestones tell a story of disillusioned warriors, and it's possible that some never made the jump from Valheim to Valhalla.

In such cases, Iron Gate Studios could build Valheim's lore even further by creating new NPCs that embody the persona of the warriors described on the runestones. For instance, a runestone in the Black Forest reads "I have died again and again only to awaken in my own house...", highlighting the warrior's frustration with life, and they allude to giving up the battle to reach Valhalla at the end of the quote. Other runestones also display similar allusions, and it makes sense to assume that a sizable portion of warriors failed to impress Odin, in which case they would be stuck in the Tenth Realm.

Ex Valheim Inhabitants Could Be Useful for Tips

Iron Gate AB could let players meet these characters who failed in their journeys to add some personable flavor to Valheim's biomes. Meeting such NPCs and getting tips on paths to take and insight to avoid ending up in their shoes lines up with the Valheim spirit of toughness, and would give the developer a chance to include even more lore. In the same vein, warriors who ascended to Valhalla before the player character should be able to appear in the world. Although none of the runestones explicitly detail a warrior overcoming all Valheim's trials, one at the Plains details the story of Harald, who suspected that his final battle in the realm was at hand.

Adding NPCs would solve the mystery of what happened to each of these characters; from Astrid - who the Allfather spoke to in her seventh year on Valheim - to Ulf, who shared multiple helpful tips on the great drake in the Mountain. Since players can return to any biome to continue their sandbox experience after defeating Yagluth, previous residents of the Tenth Realm setting should be allowed to return in the form of NPCs to give gamers some much-needed guidance.