I remember shortly after Dragon Age: Inquisition came out, there was a flood of tips online of people saying "Get out of The Hinterlands ASAP." While I still tried to do as much in that starting area as possible, those people were right, you started playing a better and more interesting game when you left the Hinterlands.

I'm about 5 hours into Valhalla and I'm enjoying it, but I haven't made a lot of story progress, mostly just wandering from marker to marker to see what I can find. Is this a game I'm going to find even more rewarding if I "fast track" some of the main story? I'm getting that impression, and hope if that's true I can come back to Norway and don't have to try to do/find everything here before moving on.

I've seen this comparison floating around.. and I don't really see it personally. It's a matter of scale I guess. Norway is just a some story missions and then map collectibles. You can get as much of them as you want but it doesn't take very long to get all of them if you wanna do that. Do what you would when faced with any collectible checklist at that point.

You can come back to Norway at any point, so no worries there. I definitely started enjoying the game a lot more after that section. Getting around there was such a pain for me, and I was worried that it was going to be 100 hours of that.

I explored a bit but then I remembered that I always got super burned out on AC games trying to chase after every point of interest. So I just said fuck it and went on with the main storyline and eventually saw the title card!

You can pretty much go back to Norway straiiight away.

All you really need to know is that you can come back later. So if you're itching to move on, go ahead.

@asmo917: You can always go back to Norway and the story quests in that area advance you pretty quickly into the main game. This might be surprising to hear, but the actual game hasn't even started for you yet. Norway is a gigantic prologue zone. Once you move forward you will be introduced to a great many new systems and tutorials.

That said if you're enjoying it then by all means stay in Norway and have fun until you're ready to move on. If you do want to move on then rest easy knowing that you can always go back.

@mikewhy: I think you hit the nail on the head - I usually chase damn near every collectible/point of interest in an AC game but while in Norway I feel like moving from place to place is more tedious than I'm used to, and I think some of that is knowing, like @humanity said, that there are a lot more systems and things waiting. Since I can always come back, seems like it's time to kick the story stuff into high gear tonight.

It seems smaller than the Hinterlands, but I'm not sure about that. I didn't spend too much time in Norway, partially because I assumed I'd be able to return to it and partially because the marketing for this game made it clear that the main story was in England. I definitely spent far more time in the Hinterlands.