Valheim leaves early access after four and a half years, and we cannot wait to see what the Deep North is really worth

February 2021. A small Swedish studio of five people releases a viking survival game into early access, and it sells millions of copies in a few weeks. Then the promise: the missing biomes will come.

It is September 2026. The Deep North arrives today, with version 1.0, and Valheim finally leaves early access.

Four and a half years. There is room for impatience, and a little suspicion.

What to bear in mind before judging 1.0

Start with the numbers, because they are extraordinary and they frame everything else.

458,870 Steam reviews, 432,166 of them positive. That is 94 per cent satisfied across nearly half a million reviews. And as I write, before 1.0 even goes live, more than ten thousand people are playing simultaneously, five and a half years after the initial release.

This is not a game being rediscovered, it is a game that never left.

That context matters because it changes what a 1.0 is for. Nobody is asking whether Valheim is good. The question is whether Iron Gate managed to finish what it started.

Why the game worked, and it has not moved

It is worth restating what makes Valheim particular, because five years on its imitators still have not understood.

Hunger is not a punishment. You cannot starve in Valheim. Eating grants health, stamina and regeneration bonuses depending on what you consume. It is the exact inverse of the standard survival game where you spend your time extinguishing red bars. Here, eating is preparation before an expedition, not a chore.

Combat rests on stamina and on reading. Parries, dodges, different blocks per weapon, ranged fire. It is not deep as action games go, but it is demanding enough that a troll met too early stays a traumatic memory.

Building accounts for structural integrity. Your beams carry load, your roof can collapse, and your hearth needs ventilation. That is what turns building into a problem rather than decoration, and it is what most competitors copied without understanding.

And exploration remains a matter of nerve. Every biome is a wall: you do not progress by levelling up, you progress by equipping yourself to survive the climate and the creatures of the next zone.

The Deep North, the missing piece

This is the biome players have been asking for over years, and it arrives with 1.0.

Iron Gate spent recent months preparing this launch, with a public test devoted in particular to a rework of the save system, which says a lot about the seriousness of the effort: you do not rewrite the saves of a game with half a million reviews for fun.

The studio recommends starting a new playthrough to get the best of the finished version, while acknowledging that many will want to head straight for the Deep North from their existing world. An official FAQ was published to answer that case specifically.

My advice, if you have a four-year-old world with a base you love: keep it, go and see the North, and start a new world alongside. The two experiences have nothing in common, and rediscovering the Black Forest with what you know today is a pleasure in itself.

What else changes today

Version 1.0 is not only a biome.

The game arrives simultaneously on PC, Linux, Mac, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, with full crossplay. For a game whose main appeal is building together, that is probably the most important announcement after the biome itself: your group no longer has to be on the same machine.

Multiplayer still runs to ten people on player-hosted dedicated servers, with enemies whose difficulty scales to the number of vikings present.

What I cannot tell you yet

Let us be honest about the calendar: the Deep North has been live for a few hours.

What I can assess today is Valheim, and Valheim is excellent. What nobody can assess yet is whether its final biome stands comparison with the Mistlands, which divided people, or with the Swamps, still the game's high point for tension.

There is also a deeper question that 1.0 raises without solving: Valheim has always had a soft middle in its progression, that moment when you have understood every rule and there is still a great deal of ore to haul. One more biome does not erase that.

And stability will need watching. A save rework, six platforms and crossplay on the same day is a lot of things that can go wrong at once.

Why the score is what it is

Because at 29.99 euros, Valheim is one of the rare survival games that managed to be both demanding and welcoming, and because it held for four and a half years without ever selling a single paid expansion.

That last point deserves a pause in an era when every biome comes with an invoice. The Deep North arrives free for everybody who bought the game in 2021.

That is also why we are eager rather than merely curious: this studio did what it said it would, in a genre and an industry where that has become the exception.

Are you starting from scratch or heading north with your 2021 viking? The debate is open on the InsertCoins Discord.