Mistlands review

[oybl606]

After diving into Mistlands with an old character, getting my ass totally kicked at the beginning, I decided to start a new world and a new character, to see, if it is really such an impossible difficulty jump. So I have two worlds and two characters so I can compare the progression.

Meadows and the first boss was easy, fighting Greydwarves in black forest was tedious at first but also became easy. Until I encountered my first Troll and almost died from two hits. Upgrading armor and weapons, Trolls became manageable, until I died five times just entering the swamp.

Now I crafted my first iron armor and shield, and manage to melee kill my first Abomination. I still get annihilated by starred Draugr, so I just avoid the body piles in a big circle.

So what I can see is the difficulty jumps are the same. You get killed by trolls, get chased trough half the island by Elite Draugr, don't stand a chance against two star Draugr archer in the crypts. If you encounter an impossible enemy, you run away.
Crafting progression is also consistent: iron armor at the start is almost the same as upgraded bronze armor. The forge gets new upgrades after you enter the swamp, so two biomes.

I also play with the old world, and personally Mistlands biome is my favourite. I like the fog and the claustrophobic feeling it generates (especially when hearing the Gjall in
vicinity). I agree it is hard at the start, but comparable with older biomes.

Coastal areas are usually without fog, I've found enough mines to collect enough black cores to craft Black forge and Galdr table (you actually need just 5 cores to craft everything).

Multiple seekers can be defeated by kiting and blocking. For starred seekers you have Bonemass power.

Also you don't have to go to an area with a Gjall, you don't have to clear all chambers of an Infested mine. If there is a 2 star seeker, just leave it be.

When you are in a dense fog, just listen to the sounds. It's the same as entering the Mountains fresh from the Swamp, if you just run around like an idiot, you'll get totally wrecked by wolves (same as seekers). And then try to fight a Golem. It is the same as Soldier in the Mistlands.

Also the mist moves. You can see it on the map which areas that are clear and explore them first.

I think that one year waiting for the update is the cause for all the hate I see. We became so good at fighting in old biomes, that we are all now in shock, when we get our ass kicked again :)

There are bugs/flaws in the game, which I am sure the devs are going to fix (sloped combat being the most obvious), but after 500+ hours of gameplay I still think this is one of the greatest game ever produced.

And I personally very much like the Starship troopers/Alien theme :)

[Flux]

What doesnt scale or compare is the potential structure damage the new mobs can cause to settlements. A single Gjall raid could literally destroy your entire settlement with a few shots, same with a lone seeker soldier. Even a troll isn't as destructive as that.

Im enjoying the new patch but if a Gjall raid happens when I'm at a main base I'm devcommanding it away and it'll be the first time I ever did such a thing, I dont care. If they're not going to release all the tools so we can properly equip ourselves to swiftly take care of the challenges put forth by the new threats I'm not going to care using the command.

At over 700 hours myself I really wish they'd change how the food works. The stat degrade is way too steep. You basically lose 10 minutes off a food with how bad the decline is. HP/ STAM/ MANA should be the full amount, for the full amount of time, or at the very least degrade to the same degree it does now starting at 3 minutes or something.

[Konstantin]

Ursprungligen skrivet av oybl606:

After
So what I can see is the difficulty jumps are the same. You get killed by trolls, get chased trough half the island by Elite Draugr, don't stand a chance against two star Draugr archer in the crypts. If you encounter an impossible enemy, you run away.
Crafting progression is also consistent: iron armor at the start is almost the same as upgraded bronze armor. The forge gets new upgrades after you enter the swamp, so two biomes.

Ursprungligen skrivet av oybl606:

After
I think that one year waiting for the update is the cause for all the hate I see. We became so good at fighting in old biomes, that we are all now in shock, when we get our ass kicked again :)

Nope and nope.
If you only comparing monster power it may be so. What makes Mistlands a good-looking pile of bad game design is overall composition,

Hard hitting fat monsters -ok
Difficult to navigate landscape -ok
lowered visibility - ok
all of the above simultaneously - fail

When you enter new biome one of key means to survival is you footwork. And all biomes are flat or have flat enough and large enough surface to effectively kite or trade blows. Even swamp generate dry big spots often enough. Mistlands offer you a limited vision and terrain so uneven, that most of the time you have a "democratic" choice of facetank or kite with high probability to fall down. It will be usually in water(where you can`t fight but mobs can and will) or you fall down in crevice (with a high chance that you can`t jump out fast enough due to stamina) or you just fall down and loose two thirds of hp(bonus points for aggroing more bugs)

Add to this extremely bad vertical fighting mechanics in Valheim... fights stop being fun and challenging and start being frustration festivals.

But there is more!
Bugs have an attack pattern ensuring that if you encounter more than one -you re pretty much done for if your bone mass on CD. That`s especially so when you have a bunch of seekers. fast attacks + fast recovery from stagger and you will take hits. Alot. To make things worse, they are fast, and even worse, they are flying and have aerial attack. So kiting them is a very risky and annoying thing. Draugs have slow and very distinct attack animation, Wolves have loooooong stagger time, fulings have attack pattern with a lot of running around.

And even more, though It`s not about difficulty, It`s about annoyance. Igg wood, constantly falling in water, Insane mob damage to structures. horrible fog eliminating range of moving AND stationaly wisps, brain-dead concept of sap gathering (nono- you can`t tele that. Go and waste time to deliver it by foot or by boat) and so on,

They did a really good job design and idea-wise. But it looks like on the mechanics part they just slapped crap together and deployed.

[Stugots]

I rather drag my balls on nails than fight in the mistlands. It's very poorly designed to inflict artificial difficulty, it add unnecessary frustration to the game and shoe horns people into going magic. Mistlands biome it self is a very poor addition to the game, but the crafting etc side of the game is still good. It's a shame that you have to mountain goat all over the place, the cape helps not to fall to your death but overall i hate mistalnds.

[vinyblaster]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Flux:

What doesnt scale or compare is the potential structure damage the new mobs can cause to settlements. A single Gjall raid could literally destroy your entire settlement with a few shots, same with a lone seeker soldier. Even a troll isn't as destructive as that.

Im enjoying the new patch but if a Gjall raid happens when I'm at a main base I'm devcommanding it away and it'll be the first time I ever did such a thing, I dont care. If they're not going to release all the tools so we can properly equip ourselves to swiftly take care of the challenges put forth by the new threats I'm not going to care using the command.

At over 700 hours myself I really wish they'd change how the food works. The stat degrade is way too steep. You basically lose 10 minutes off a food with how bad the decline is. HP/ STAM/ MANA should be the full amount, for the full amount of time, or at the very least degrade to the same degree it does now starting at 3 minutes or something.

Mistland is so poorly designed that it made me put the game down for a few days. I was clocking 2 or 3 hours a day before, but when I started exploring this disastrous biome I just had to stop. I won't get into why I find this biome so awful, it's been explained in many threads already by others, but if I ever go back to the game I would seriously consider "downgrading" the event level via devcommands. I really hate it, I've never used devcommands before, but there is no way one of my bases would get destroyed in 2 minutes like that.

[Vaylor]

I do agree that the difficulty curve isn't as high as people make it out to be. I remember the first time I did any of the biomes way back when and I definitely would die a few times on most of them until you learn the ways. Dying is a part of the game as you test your limits of what you can and can't do.

I do think that the uneven terrain with poor visibility is a bad design decision. It just makes moving around take a long time as you're always waiting for stamina. Also it limits some of your tactical choices. Perhaps if they added an upgraded mist light option with twice the range it would be better.

My biggest fault is the lack of a clear upgrade path. It took be forever to find enough black cores to build 1 of each new building. I was smashing one building to create another for awhile so I could get things going. I felt like I was just sitting on a lot of materials until I finally got enough cores and then built a lot at once. When going the mage build I feel like you really do need everything crafted to get a feel for the build. The new heavy armor is barely better than padded armor due to a low upgrade ceiling. In other biomes you just get the new metal and build new weapons and armor with it using the same forge and workbench that had been around. I'm okay with change, I just wish that it was a little more progressive and meaningful with the new items. I got the new polearm pretty quickly and that was a nice addition, just need more like that.

[archelonian]

Totally agree with OP. Every time a biome or even a new enemy (tarr) is released people complain because they forgot the challenge of going into a new biome blind. For instance you still see lots of complaints about the swamp from new players, which after you understand it is fairly easy. Yes groups of different types of enemies are always a challenge going in, but after getting biome gear and learning enemy attack patterns they become manageable (not easy though). Mistlands is definitely my favorite of the biomes released so far and offers much more diverse gameplay (in comparison in the swamp you are only hunting for crypts, nothing else is really that important unless you want gunk for decorations). Unlike other biomes though, mistlands tries to discourage you from cheesing things, so if you went through the rest of the game by shooting then running on top of a rock to shoot mobs that can't hit you then you might be very frustrated as seekers can fly and soldiers are pretty resistant to pierce. Once you learn that seekers only strike straight forward with a slight delay that lets you get to their side, they become relatively easy to deal with as long as there aren't more than 2. Solitary soldiers are easier to deal with than lox in melee thanks to the weak rear and their slow AOE attack that allows you to easily get to it.

[Therron Keen]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Konstantin:

If you only comparing monster power it may be so. What makes Mistlands a good-looking pile of bad game design is overall composition,

Hard hitting fat monsters -ok
Difficult to navigate landscape -ok
lowered visibility - ok
all of the above simultaneously - fail

I'm playing 2-player. we finished the mistlands in a weekend. Are people just trying to play with like, Cooked Deer Meat and 1 Bread, and Silver armor or something lol

Get fully geared, if you see anything with stars you pop Bonemass buff. The only thing that's remotely difficult is Gjall + other enemies at the same time. Gjall are *somewhat* challenging if you're on rough terrain.

Mist is negated by pre-Mistlands gear that makes it only *very slightly* annoying, sometimes.

I mean do people just want a new Meadows biome? just start a new map or download mods if you don't want any challenge whatsoever.

[Dornam]

Ursprungligen skrivet av TK:

I'm playing 2-player. we finished the mistlands in a weekend. Are people just trying to play with like, Cooked Deer Meat and 1 Bread, and Silver armor or something lol

Get fully geared, if you see anything with stars you pop Bonemass buff. The only thing that's remotely difficult is Gjall + other enemies at the same time. Gjall are *somewhat* challenging if you're on rough terrain.

Mist is negated by pre-Mistlands gear that makes it only *very slightly* annoying, sometimes.

I mean do people just want a new Meadows biome? just start a new map or download mods if you don't want any challenge whatsoever.

I'm honestly a bit confused with your description of mistlands. I came into mistlands with fully upgraded black metal weapons and padded armor and I was getting my ass handed to me with high tier plains foods. We played with 5 - 7 players, and depending on how fresh my food buffs were I could only tank 1 or 2 hits from a seeker solder before I was in critical health and had to run away.

95% of the mistlands we explored was sheer cliffs and giant steep hills that had to be run and jumped up, with rivers between them, so whenever we aggroed enemies, we were already low on stamina when the fight started.

On top of that, we could hardly see where we were going with how thick the mist was, even with the wisps active, so it was just a pain to navigate the cliffs. We couldn't even keep a consistent path lit because seekers and gjalls both like to attack the wisp torches, so there was no way to light consistent paths.

Like Konstantin said, any one of these issues, or even them together if they were all toned down, and I'd have been able to actually enjoy the mistlands, but the combination of them all together made it a miserable experience.

I really love the aesthetic and the ideas behind the biome, but the combination of the mist, topography, and hard hitting enemies in terrain that you can't properly fight back on make it a supremely frustrating experience. I think they have good ideas behind the biome, but the execution was half baked.

[Flux]

Ursprungligen skrivet av TK:

I'm playing 2-player. we finished the mistlands in a weekend. Are people just trying to play with like, Cooked Deer Meat and 1 Bread, and Silver armor or something lol

Get fully geared, if you see anything with stars you pop Bonemass buff. The only thing that's remotely difficult is Gjall + other enemies at the same time. Gjall are *somewhat* challenging if you're on rough terrain.

Mist is negated by pre-Mistlands gear that makes it only *very slightly* annoying, sometimes.

I mean do people just want a new Meadows biome? just start a new map or download mods if you don't want any challenge whatsoever.

I'm not asking for a peaceful biome, but it'd be nice if they gave us all the tools before putting us on the job site. I mean for gods sake we can only upgrade all the new items to level 2, making them only slightly better than max available items pre patch. Borderline not worth the effort. Magic weapons are really nice and quite powerful, however the way they have the MP/ Stam/ HP bars diminish from food so fast I still revert back to my trusty bow after very short time. Why make food last 30 minutes when the real benefit of it is only like 1/4th of the time or something? So much food is eaten with 10 minutes left just to regain the full effect. It makes me feel like the developers just want to waste my time.

I went on a bit of a rant there about food, so let me bring it back to the subject; I can't imagine what it'd be like to attempt mistlands with low level skill progression. Even with almost max level bow, block, mace it can get deadly in an instant.

I think they introduced the Gjall because they got so salty about Trench/ raised dirt defenses.

Once you learn a few attack patterns of the bugs, they're easily defeated. For example if you climb on one of those giant helmet scraps, the soldiers are a joke, it's not as bad as when I first stepped into it but I'm still not going to let a Gjall raid destroy hundreds of hours of building when we don't even have the ability to make the gear we have the best it can be and even then, idk... I don't see this as a "raiding / base defense game". Maybe this was their intention and if it is, they need to give us more options for defenses. Let us hire the new npcs or something.

Make durability of structures a bit higher so 1 shot from a Gjall doesnt lay waste to nearly everything. I've seen what they do to the Dverger outposts made of Marble, I can't imagine what it'd do to my hill top cottage made of mostly wood with stone foundations. Or the garden area, or god forbid 1 managed to get a shot where the storage area is. Nope, sorry, I'd uninstall. This game is fun but it's not fun enough to rebuild my stronghold and re-organize all the chests that took countless hours to get where they are. They need to give us some kind of shield generator device or something that makes a dome shield like the Goblins have or something that will at least give us a chance to fight them off if we prepare properly.

Not sure what the developers original intention of this game is but I don't see it as a "Dark Souls" like game that is a system of challenges and rewards. The skills take SO long to level. On our first venture into the mist we lost literally weeks of skill progression from 1 simple mistake (friend hitting a crate being completely unaware of the mechanics). Sorry but up until this point the game has been a casual hoarding and foraging simulator with ok building pieces and phenomenal atmosphere.

[oybl606]

I've had two seeker events, which I survived with no real damage to the base. Compare that to the two trolls who just smashed trough my stake wall. Even with a trench, they can damage your buildings by throwing rocks.

Gjall event only happens in Mistlands. So just don't build bases in there, until we get some more defense options. And I agree, buildings should have a lot more resistance to gjall/seeker attacks.

[Glaston]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Flux:

I think they introduced the Gjall because they got so salty about Trench/ raised dirt defenses.

Are you saying that the developers don't like the way we're playing the game? So they're making it even more difficult because of that?
I'm not doubting you. It just seems ridiculous to create an open world game with such a narrow focus of how people are expected to play. To the point where things are being changed or added to force players to play how developers want them to play?
Just make the game linear if you need that much control over how it's played.
That changes my view of the developers AND the game.

[Archie]

thanks good intro, I had decided it wasn't worth going to the mist lands but since your review I will visit.

[Dr.Xance]

I wish i could carry the friendly npcs with me :(

[AlexSledge]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Flux:

the developers just want to waste my time.

Nailed it.

It's a grind game, unless you "fix" it with mods.

Some people like the grind, more power to them. I've got too many games to get to.

[Hiryukaen]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Glaston:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Flux:

I think they introduced the Gjall because they got so salty about Trench/ raised dirt defenses.

Are you saying that the developers don't like the way we're playing the game? So they're making it even more difficult because of that?
I'm not doubting you. It just seems ridiculous to create an open world game with such a narrow focus of how people are expected to play. To the point where things are being changed or added to force players to play how developers want them to play?
Just make the game linear if you need that much control over how it's played.
That changes my view of the developers AND the game.

The people who presume the devs only added a strong flying monster to counter the extreme cheese of terrain walls/moats is some serious copium. "Things were changed to specifically target the way I was playing the game and trivialize it. Waaah"
I wonder if it would be the same if they stuck with the arachnid infested theme they had originally. I was kinda hoping they'd add monsters that could climb over walls, since bugs can climb walls. Not sure if it has an validity, but rumor is that got changed due to arachnophobia feedback due to the spiderwebs covering the launch version of mistlands.

The game needs more enemy variation to make biomes seem different. It would be boring if everything was ground based with busted pathing that is easily exploitable.

Meadows and Black Forrest have no flying enemies. Has enemies with ranged attacks although the distance is very short.

Swamp gave us Wraiths, which were a slight annoyance in swamps, mostly because they'd come at you from out of view. Other than that they weren't much of a threat, they don't attack fast and have low hp and are kind enough to attack at melee range. Drauger archers are typically more of a threat.

Mountains gave us Drakes. First enemy to attack and stay outside of melee range, typically. Still not that difficult, fairly slow attack speed, not much hp.
And bats, but bats have no hp and low damage. Wolf packs are more threatening.

Plains gave us the immense annoyance, Deathsqitos. They were a huge pain because of the high damage they could deal with 1 hit and have spawn points that are typically near other monsters so you can be flanked. But the fact they have like a whopping 10hp, makes them near trivial. Again, the basic melee enemies of the biome are more threatening in most circumstances.

As for base cheesing. The best cheese is not spend too much time at a furnished base.
If you're not there raids can't happen. I haven't tested anything, but I don't think the "base" trigger for raids has been changed either. So it should also possible to have things far enough apart it won't trigger a raid.

Granted the distance of 40m between placements that add towards the trigger is pretty far and in many cases impractical, but if you segment the places you spend a lot of time at you can easily prevent a lot of raids from happening when you're under prepared. Which also allows you to not have to attempt at heavily fortifying everything.
Like tending to a farm where agriculture and husbandry eats up a lot of time for some. While you don't have to be near crops/trees for them to grow, if you want new breeding to happen you'll have to be near by for a while. Cant lose your farm to a raid if a raid can't trigger because the only placement is a portal.
It's slightly harder to get away with mass smelting, but at least you can pop in load them up and pop out and collect the mats a bit later instead of just watching them smelt, which is the worst option for avoiding a raid. You can also sleep to instant complete the process.