For a while over this year a friend and I have been playing the viking survival game Valheim together.  There’s lots to be said about the quality of Valheim, it’s building is probably one of the best I’ve seen with it’s structural restrictions while still allowing for some creative builds, and how it uses food and mead is creative.  However, one of the most interesting experiences I had in the game was how my friend and I played it together.  My friend had set up a server and that meant I could hop on whenever, even when he wasn’t online.  Being four and now six time zones apart and both with families and jobs means that playing a game together and at the same requires dedicated planning, and even then can only occur in limited quantities.  However, playing a game together but at different times was something we could do.

What followed was our own separate play sessions, shared via texts and screenshots.  Valheim offers direction through biome and boss progression and that meant we both always knew what resources we needed to progress.  However, we also both took on our own little projects within our world, or would take time out of exploring to complete simpler, but no less necessary, tasks like farming or organizing our storage.  At one point, I was working on building a structure to house all the portals we had constructed.  I had decided to build the structure out of stone, and despite our stockpiles from earlier in the game, I quickly used up all that we had.  I mentioned this to my friend, and the next time I logged on I found several stacks of stone beside my construction site.  My friend, knowing my shortage, had gathered stone and left it for me to continue my project.

In another case, my friend’s character died far from our base and had set his spawn point while on his adventure without realizing that it might maroon him.  He was now stuck in a hostile area, with no food, no gear, and no clear way home as he’d lost his ship when he died.  He holed up in a ruined longhouse and logged out but not before sharing a picture of his location on the world map.  After he had shared his plight I logged on, loaded my longship with supplies and gear for my friend, and proceeded to sail for over an hour to reach him.  I faced raging storms, sea serpents, and deathsquitos.  I moored to make repairs to my ship, made navigational errors, and abandoned an overland delivery when I faced tough enemies.  It was one of the most enjoyable moments I’ve had in my recent gaming memory and when I finally arrived at the ruined longhouse I left my friend his spare gear, built a portal back to our base, and logged back off with an extreme sense of satisfaction.  My friend was able to retrieve his lost gear and made it back to our base.

My friend and I will find time to play together when we’re ready to take on a boss or explore a particularly foreboding cave as we work to progress the game’s story.  However, the excitement each time of logging on to see what my friend had built or what he had discovered on the map?  Those little thrills were something I had not expected and yet created so much of the enjoyment I was having with the game.  Seeing signs of my friend in the world, little echos, and seeing the world change while I was gone lent it a sense being alive and I’m just really appreciative for getting to have had such a cool experience.  I greatly miss getting to see my friend more often, but that is part of life, but to live in a time where I can stay in touch (even if it’s just an echo from seeing the mead barrel he built) is a great blessing.

Not much else to relay this week.  I’m still playing a bit loose with what strikes my fancy to write about but I do have several stories in the works.  So, there will be something come Saturday and there may be a few more things in the backlog to boot.  I have continued to play Baldur’s Gate 3 and that does mean another Quartes and Keto screenshot courtesy of the game.  This one being an attempt at a moment from “Upon a Sunny Hilltop”.

I hope you all have your little moments of magic this week, and go forth and do good things.

Sean