Iron Gate "never actually thought" Valheim would need an Obliterator

Last week, Iron Gate Studio released the first major update to its massively popular survival game Valheim. Known as Hearth and Home, the update included a huge amount of new features and content, including more building options, a Viking hot tub, and even a tool known as the Obliterator, which is ideal for destroying hoarded items. But as Valheim's success was quite a surprising one, the developer was also surprised that it even needed to add an Obliterator at all, as we were told by lead designer Robin Ayre and community manager Lisa Kolfjord in an interview.

"We do get a lot of stuff in the Discord channel and a lot of suggestions everywhere, but a lot of what Hearth and Home is, is stuff that we wanted to release before Early Access, and now we have the chance to fix all of those things," said Ayre. "Obviously, the Obliterator was something that people asked for a lot."

Kolfjord chimed in, "I think content-wise, we have a lot of it to base on player feedback. We have the map table, where you can share your map with your friends, we have Lox riding and the Obliterator, and also things that people have asked for a lot. But then we have also balanced it a lot by making it our vision."

"We never actually thought we would need an Obliterator in the game" Ayre then mentioned. "But since people like to hoard a lot of things - it's not okay to pollute the oceans by the way - we had to take action, we had to take action and create the Obliterator, with the nice co-production of Thor, who comes in and obliterates things for you, which is nice. But yeah, the map table is something we have discussed, a lot of the suggestions we get are mostly stuff that we discussed last year, so we've already discussed and talked about it, and some of the things end up going into the game. But a lot of the things, right now, we're balancing a lot of the things after the patch, which is also just from community feedback, which I think is super important to listen to how harsh Valheim has become."

You can check out the full interview with Ayre and Kolfjord below, where we also chat about Valheim's rise to success, and what the future holds for the game.