Valheim Mod Turns it Into an MMORPG for a Thousand Players
Valheim can be turned into an MMORPG. This is what the modding team behind the ValNGOS project intends to do, enabling us to set up servers for over a thousand players.
More than two months after Valheim's release in Steam's Early Access, the game is by no means losing popularity. On the contrary, the work of Iron Gate just reached another milestone of 7 million copies sold. Such a large number of players translates into a significant number of fan projects, whether in the game itself or in the form of modifications. However, the huge community is a more direct incentive for the plans of a certain group. They are the creators of ValNGOS, which will turn Valheim into an MMORPG that will enable over a thousand users to play simultaneously.
The idea behind VaLNGOS (an acronym for Valheim Large Network Game Object Server Suite) is undoubtedly ambitious, but also its creators did not come out of nowhere. As PCGamesN found out, the team working on the project included not only two engineers associated with the FAANG (five giants of the computer and IT industry: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), but also people formerly working on MaNGOS. This tool was the basis for fan-made classic World of Warcraft servers, with Nostalrius and Elysium at the forefront.
The experience of the team members is supposed to allow the project to be so optimized that it will be possible to create servers that run smoothly even with over a thousand players at once. Even beyond this ambitious goal, the plans of the creators include many important additions. According to one modder, the ultimate goal is to enable Hypixel-like minigames (a Minecraft server in development since 2013) and "other new kinds of massive multiplayer RPG experiences" (via PCGamesn). This will be helped by a simple interface for modders, given as one of the planned new features on the project's official website, alongside a spam filter and anti-cheat measures, among others.
It's easy to guess that even with the team's experience we shouldn't expect ValNGOS to be completed anytime soon, even in beta version. The project is still at the "research stage" and the team is just getting ready to present the basic behavior of ValNGOS' code.
