Players looking to pick up the one of the best co-op experiences we’ve seen in a while may be wondering if the game has any kind of region lock enforced on their multiplayer servers. We are here to tell you what region locked servers are and whether or not Valheim is region locked.
Does Valheim Have Region Locked Servers?
The short answer is no. Opening up a Valheim server in a country will not mean that players from other regions are excluded from joining. I can personally vouch for this as I have played, from Germany with a friend who was hosting their own server in Australia. Although the further away you are from the server, the more chance you have to suffer from lag. Even when playing with a friend on the other side of the world the game is very, very much playable.
There is some minor lag sometimes with enemies in the game moving quickly towards my character but otherwise the game runs smoothly and well. Having more people in the server may affect gameplay but when playing with one other friend I had very little connection disruption. Valheim game servers are joined together through Steam. This means that you can join in any server through your steam version of the game as long as you know the password to the server. There is even a special tab in the in-game server list that shows friends’ servers that are currently online.
Players can even keep their characters across different servers including their inventory. All skill levels, armor, weapons and whatever the player has in their inventory will be saved to the character. If you’ve been playing single player for a few weeks and want to join in a friend’s game you can bring all of the things you’ve collected and your characters experience along with you.
What are Region Locked Servers?
Region locking is a general term applied to not being able to use certain features or even play some games. It refers to digital and physical copies of games. For example, earlier versions of consoles had region locking meaning you could not play a game bought in India on a game system bought in the USA.
Some multiplayer games have region locked servers. Meaning, if you were to start a server within North America players from other regions of the world could not join the server. This helps the servers stay relatively lag free as a player with a very high ping will cause strain on the server that they are trying to connect to. Region locking also helps keep a lower player count across different game servers.
Check out this Wikipedia article for more information on region locking.
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