[An early access survival game like Valheim has appeared at ...... No, it's probably the first ever. With over 2 million copies sold in less than two weeks and the 10th highest number of simultaneous players on Steam of all time, Valheim has more virtual Vikings playing it than there were real Vikings at its peak in the 1300s.

For me personally, Valheim has rekindled my love for survival games, so when I had the opportunity to speak with Henrik Törnqvist, co-founder of developer Iron Gate Studios, the Iron Gate team (just I asked him if the Iron Gate team (only five people) played a lot of survival games and drew inspiration from them.

"No, not really," said Törnqvist. In fact, he said, "Valheim" is more inspired by single-player RPGs like "The Legend of Zelda" and "Skyrim" than by other survival games.

"I wanted it to feel like a single-player adventure game, like the old Zelda games," he said. 'You get new equipment when you defeat bosses. And I thought that would mesh well with the survival aspect of the game, and I hoped it would. And it seems to have worked.

In Valheim, bosses control the entrances to important paths. The first boss, Eikthyr, drops his horn when he dies, which is the only way for players to make the first pickaxe used for mining tin and copper. The second boss in Valheim, the Elder, must be defeated to obtain an item that will allow players to begin collecting iron. Finding and fighting these bosses in the vast open world gives Valheim a campaign-like feel, as if the player is paving the way to fight Zelda bosses like Dodongo and Gorma.

Another reason many are so enamored with Valheim is that it does not at all follow the survival game blueprint we are used to. Certain systems are much more forgiving than the typical survival game. For example, there is no resource cost to repair weapons, tools, or armor, and once something is built, you can destroy it and get a full refund of the resources used to build it.

The generosity of these systems goes back to Valheim's roots, when Iron Gate CEO Richard Svensson was working on a "more complex" open world simulation game. Richard quickly came to the conclusion that an open-world simulation just to simulate things was pretty redundant. He wanted to focus more on gameplay, where the simulation would help rather than hinder the player's gameplay experience."

If you've ever been in a survival game and had to stop exploring or building a fort because you were about to starve to death, you must have felt that the simulation was a distraction. In Valheim, however, cooking and eating are very important, but one does not die of hunger or thirst.

"Simulation should not get in the way of the gameplay experience," says Törnqvist. 'Eating should improve player performance, but it shouldn't ...... It shouldn't be something that will kill you if you don't eat. It shouldn't be something that will kill you if you don't eat.

Such a forgiving survival system combined with open-world exploration and boss fights often makes Valheim feel more like an RPG than a survival game. And now we know why.