Valheim dev knows its updates are slow and it's sorry, but there's a good reason

Releasing new content for a long-running game is a delicate balancing act. Too much too quickly burns players out, and is often seen as an attempt to slap a band aid on a gaping wound. Performance issues? Here's a new battle pass. Server crashes? Here's a compensation prize. On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, games need fresh additions to survive. The inevitable drought at the end of an MMO expansion, for example, kills me every time, and the last few weeks of a League of Legends season often feel more like a chore than anything else. Valheim is just one such example where updates arrive a little too slowly for its community's liking. I quiz producer Andreas Tomasson and creative lead Robin Eyre about the game's content schedule at Gamescom, and yes, they know they're slow.

As you've probably guessed, a lot of the delays come from the fact that, despite Valheim's overwhelming success, Iron Gate is still a small studio. "We really do not want to grow too big," Eyre tells me, meaning that features that bigger, triple-A survival games can implement overnight simply take longer to develop.

"It has a lot to do with several of the mechanics within the game itself," he continues. "If we want to make a new armor, we have to consider the fact that there has to be a monster that drops something, then that resource has to become an armor. It's like a big, long chain of things that you [have to change] just by adding one creature. Upholding the entire vision of the game is easier in a smaller team.

"The big goal here is to try and get Valheim to 1.0. Yes, it's taken time, and we're listening to community feedback. We want to have a really nice canvas for 1.0, then be able to extend upon that after to just continue and continue… forever."

"When it comes to communicating with the community, after four years now, they know we're slow," Tomasson says. "It's always a balance internally of 'how much do we show them,' because we don't want to spoil everything because then there's not really a surprise. Then, when the update drops, they'll be like 'oh but we've seen this already, give us something new!' and we're like 'but we just did!' It's always 'what should we show, what shouldn't we show?'

"By now people know we're slow, and we're sorry about it, but there are a lot of reasons why."

With Valheim's 1.0 release slated to drop in 2026, I ask the duo whether or not fans should start a new playthrough to celebrate the official launch and re-experience the game's biomes as though it was their first time.

"When we hit 1.0 I hope that people do a fresh playthrough," Eyre says. "I hope that everyone who played in early access for the first two weeks will play it from the beginning. But there's also so many hours that you need to put into it, and so many things to do in every single biome. We have worked really, really hard for people to keep their saves and just continue from [where they left off]. We really do not want to destroy peoples' worlds; we want to be respectful of their time."

Valheim's Call to Arms update, which improves combat, adds a very large, very angry bear, as well as some rather cheeky outfits (by Valheim's standards, this isn't The First Descendant) is currently available on the game's public test branch. Check out the team's handy breakdown here if you want to try it out.

In the meantime, did you know that Valheim started life as a battle royale game? Neither did I. While there's no BR mode (yet), we have a list of all the best Valheim mods to freshen things up, as well as a rundown of all the best Valheim servers, too.

Are you looking forward to Valheim 1.0? Let us know what you're hoping for over in our Discord. I, for one, want a fur coat - the Deep North sounds pretty damn cold, after all.