The co-op survival game Valheim has only been out for a few days, but it’s already starting to become very popular, currently sitting at over 5000 reviews on Steam that are “Overwhelmingly Positive.” There are a multitude of reasons for this, much due to the simple fact that it’s a very good survival game, but another aspect of it that’s likely helping to skyrocket its popularity is the Viking setting.
The Viking setting has been getting more and more popular in the gaming circles. More than a few big games have adopted various aspects of the setting as of late, including the newest God of War and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. There are quite a few reasons that the Viking setting works so well in gaming in particular, and why it’s seeing such a surge in popularity.
Part of the popularity of the Viking setting is that it’s vaguely familiar, without being overly so. Any setting set in the past with swords and castles is a familiar one to just about every gamer. However, it’s generally a setting that’s explored either in a straight fantasy mindset or in a more English/Arthurian setting. So while the time period has been explored deeply, this particular section of it has stayed comparatively unseen.
What makes this setting really fun to get into is the fact that it makes it very easy to go both historical and fantasy. Many Vikings generally pagan beliefs, with gods like Odin, Freyja, and Thor, instead of the more monotheistic beliefs of many other places around the same area at that time. The Vikings believed that these gods often interacted with people and places, changing the course of events and setting challenges for the greatest of them. This blend of a historical and fantasy setting makes for a melting pot that developers can really make into whatever it wants, instead of having to stick to a more strict roadmap.
In Valheim, the player is a warrior that Odin has taken to the tenth realm in order to slay Odin’s ancient adversaries. It works beautifully in the Viking setting, taking heavy advantage of the more fantasy elements of it all.
The Viking mindset coincides pretty well with the mindset that a lot of players in games have already: the freedom to do what they want. Vikings, at least how they’re depicted in most media like video games, take what they want in order to take care of themselves, the ones that they care about, or just because they want to. It creates a very black-and-white mindset, where the Vikings care about taking care of themselves, and anybody else could be in the way of them doing that.
That’s exactly the mindset that a lot of players already have in a game. It fuses together beautifully, and ensures that the player doesn’t have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to enjoy roleplaying in the game, if that’s something that they’re interested in. Valheim gives the player more or less total freedom in how they accomplish their murderous task. There are certain things a player has to do to survive, but because it’s an open-world survival game, it doesn’t hold the player’s hand. It allows players to do things at their own pace, and the room to figure things out as they go along.
It’s possible that Valheim would be popular without the Viking setting, simply because it’s a solidly-constructed game at its core. However, there’s little doubt that the setting is helping the game’s popularity along and has helped create the rich world that the game is built around.
Valheim is currently available on PC.
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