Awesome. Game Freak needed some competition, they’ve been coasting for at least a decade.
I mean, it’s more competition for ARK than Pokemon. I doubt Game Freak learns anything from all this unfortunately.
I heard cassette beasts is providing some direct competition but it wasn’t nearly as successful.
Yeah, that one is real competition - at least gameplay wise - and a wonderful example of taking inspiration from Pokemon while still making something their own. It really deserves more attention than it got.
Instead we get plagiarism simulator 9000 because it made for great YouTube clickbait.
Cassette Beasts has so much soul put into it, it’s a fucking crime that it ain’t more popular
I like Pokemon games for the adventure, turn based combat, and polished stable of monsters. Does palworld have those things?
adventure
uuuuh since G5 the Pokémon plots are rehashed and banalised as heck, and there’s almost never any sensation of valuable risk or conflict to the plot. G6 literally makes the first arc of the plot “join this bunch of loser schoolers and do nothing”.
Yeah I would like a better Pokemon game, not an fps survival with monsters. The idea is that people looking for a Pokemon game probably aren’t simply looking for a collectible monster game, they want the things that are associated with Pokemon games.
Yeah I would like a better Pokemon game,
Don’t we all.
For long I’ve dreamed of the heights Pokémon could reach if the mainline videogame production was handed over from a small indie company to a respectable developer with a better track record such as Camelot or CDPR.
Camelot can’t write themselves out of a paper bag. The Golden Sun games were good for their time, and had me hyped as a pre-teen, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the dialogue or story was actually good. Seriously, if you took off the portraits while characters were speaking, could you tell just by the way they talk who is who (besides Kraden, cuz that mofo likes to TALK)? Could you describe their personalities based on their dialogue, and not the character art? It’s part of why the third Golden Sun failed: it was just too generic, and they tried to stretch the little personality they could muster across 8 characters, just because the 2nd game had 8 characters, but it left them all feeling like hollow husks for the most part.
I’m not saying the games are bad, but there are definitely much better JRPG devs out there.
I like Pokemon for making me feel connected to my Pokemon, and for exploring the world with them.
Imo Palworld had those and does them even better.
Interesting, I thought they were more… disposable? But now that I think about it, in ark, you had your near and dear creatures and then you had the faceless workers.
They are as disposable as you want them to be. I personally try to take good care of my pals
I have the ability to learn the butcher’s knife, but I will never learn or use it. Just awful. But I like that it’s there…
I hope the devs add a way to release the pals withou the butcher knife. My box is starting to fill up and I need space
You can sell them to the pal vendor! I refuse to butcher my pals too
no pal world is not at all a pokémon-like game. the adventure aspect is idk what to call it, the only adventure really is finding new pals for the first time. it’s kind of like ark with some inspirations from BOTW mechanics but you throw some pokemon in there
it does have a good variety of pals but honestly the only thing that feels unique is the appearances/sizes and sometimes the modifiers they have. the actual movesets don’t feel very emphasized
in my opinion the actual pal vs pal combat is pretty lackluster, it’s definitely not the focus of the game (although using slave labour is a focus of the game)
Nah, this has nothing to do with Pokemon. The whole survival & building aspect isn’t Pokemon at all, and was never what was missing from Pokemon.
Palworld is more like Ark, or even Minecraft, than it is Pokemon. The only thing that’s Pokemon about it is the blatant ripoff monsters.
It’s silly fun. No idea if it’ll last, but I’m enjoying it.
Gotta be honest, rockpapershotgun’s coverage of this game hasn’t gotten me very interested in this being anything other than a hyped flash in the pan but we’ll see
I had no intention of getting it after finding out it’s less like Pokemon with guns and more like Rust with Pokemon, but a friend got it for me a few days ago.
I am already bored. I never got into shit like Rust or Ark before, either. The loop is the same, except with the addition of capturing critters to use as laborers in your base or to help in combat; not the sole means of combat and relying on them sucks because you don’t command them like you do in Pokemon but like you would in Elder Scrolls with AI about as smart. You level up to learn new tech that ultimately just helps you do higher level areas or lower level areas faster.
I think with most players it is just going to be forgotten in a few months; but the people who really like Rust and Ark and things like that, will keep Palworld going a long time because it is, at least on a technical standpoint, better than those and does have quite a lengthy tech tree to unlock. Plus it’s cuter.
Katharine’s review today steps back from that flash-in-the-pan take (and it wasn’t a good one).
No doubt there’s some empty calories here, though.
Idk I guess I still didn’t get the vibe it was anywhere as special as the hype train is treating it. It honestly feels weirdly artificial for a hype train too.
This feels like a weird take if you haven’t even played it. Like, how would you know?
The game is flawed, but genuinely super fun, and has a ton going for it outside of “Pokemon with guns”. In a lot of ways it’s what I always wished Pokemon could be, at least in the ways it makes its monsters feel unique and like actual partners instead of battle slaves, which is ironic considering Palworld is the one with actual slavery.
I doubt a no name company would be pulling all this attention out of marketing alone. If it was this easy everyone would do it.
In all fairness, this is not a great game. It’s a very derivative game whose only appeal is that it combines things in a way that hasn’t been done much. Like many other hype trains of questionable quality, it just happened to scratch the right itch for the right people at the right time.
You’re getting downvoted, but I think there’s something to this, even if it’s not the whole story. The game had a robust presence unnaturally quickly on Tiktok and among streamers. This studio isn’t big enough to have engineered a big campaign, but it’s quite possible they did some small, targeted marketing and it really paid off.
I’ve been seeing people mention “the game has been in development for 2 years” and all these trailers and stuff but… I didn’t hear a thing until the game released, it exploded and now it’s all I’m seeing.
Yeah but also I think the nature of viral content is just spinning out into chaos with the amount of AI generated content and bots. I am sure palworld deserves its popularity to an extent but it’s the velocity and utter completeness of palworld’s popularity that feels weird. At some level I think algorithms are heavily distorting cultural phenomena like this to be much more “winner takes all” in terms of popularity. It is not only how humans tend to act but it is also the most profitable way to monetize culture.
I actually like it. It’s kind of like ARK but mixed with Factorio/Satisfactory
Literally the only thing I know about it is “pokemon with guns” and “it’s SOOOOOOOO popular! You should try it because it’s popular! READ HOW POPULAR THIS IS!”
i mean the good part about it is the survival aspect. it’s a pretty similar direction as ark except it’s actually playable (unlike ark). and it deviates from some other games like valheim enough for it to feel like a unique experience
the enslavement is just a neat bonus
right now it already feels like it had a lot more player-experience effort put into it than many already popular games (and way more than pokémon if that’s relevant lol), and even though it has some noticeable bugs and doesn’t have as much content as you might want, it definitely is something that feels like it has a lot of growth ahead of it. the mechanics on their own set up a good foundation for new additions ahead
the main thing that bugs me about it is some quality of life things, probably the biggest being storage management/sorting (god damn it this happens in every game i play) & not as much automation as i’d expect. if they made it so you could, i don’t know, link all your chests/storage nodes with some storage interface (maybe that pal computer that is already used for a lot of stuff), allowed you to assign which chests/chest slots pals can put which items in, allowed pals to take items from specific assigned chests to e.g. automatically craft certain proportions of items, etc. it’d make me want to play the game 100x as much. add a “factorio but with slaves” aspect to the game to appeal to a wider range of players, you know, even the minecraft redstoners might get in. basically adding a “storage & task management screen” would be sick
another thing is that i’ve found it really tedious to manage a large number of tasks/pals currently, which is why i mentioned “task management”, it’d be cool if you could easily manipulate priority/necessity to certain tasks and stuff
overall though they just need to focus on ironing out the bugs and then adding more content to the world to make it feel actually rewarding/interesting to explore (i guess this basically just means add more lore to the world, because it is severely lacking in story), and it’ll be an actually really worth-it game
Everytime i return to my base the first thing that needs doing is checking which pals have now clipped Themselves into impossible locations.
That got to me overtime. That, and the fact that every pal left out overnight would be depressed/weakened and it’s an utter pain in the ass to make medicine, let alone administer it to each and every one individually…
I just feel like what you are saying is “once the game is actually developed it will be good”. It sounds like an early access starfield.
Once the world is fleshed out I will play it, I could care less about an empty open world with vague promises. I could also care less about mediocre mechanics (is anything in pal world as fun as trying to nail a deer with a spear in valheim?).
To be fair Valheim has actual sailboats that sail according to the wind which is my pet peeve that other games don’t ever play around with this (sailboats are magic motorboats usually) so it is going to be hard to beat for me.
Meh, the sailboat part of valheim was the least interesting part for me. The wind would ALWAYS blow against me, seemingly by design, so getting anywhere would take forever. Yeah you get a way to somewhat alleviate that, but it doesn’t last forever, and you have to sail a LOT. I’ll take the magic motorboat any day.
Ok for sure, no judgement if you don’t like sailing but I grew up learning how to sail sunfishes and other derpy small sailboats.
Sailing is fun as shit. Yeah intense racing type sailors are absolutely insufferable but if you have ever had the pleasure of having a sailboat to fuck around in, it is like kayaking except you don’t have to do work. Wonderful. Amazing. Sailing is so god damn underrated in video games.
The basics of sailing are pretty simple and easy to grasp. Yet… 99% of games with sailboats as optional craft never actually make the sailboats behave like sailboats. They are just lame motorboats you drive until you can manage to hijack a speedboat. It sucks.
Or there are pirate/tall ship games where the ships just magically go in any direction you want and it just utterly kills the vibe.
There should be entire genres of sailing games by now that are basically just open world space trading games but with actually interesting vehicle controls and living dynamic universes (the fucking ocean) with regional wind patterns.
WHERE ARE ALL THE SAILING GAMES???
sigh but again no judgement if you hate sailboats but as long as a game implements them like Valheim, than rowing gets you there plenty fast enough i.e. you can just ignore them. Valheim sadly undersells sailing though since if the wind is blowing against you sailing upwind is slower than rowing which robs you of one of the fundamental magical feelings of sailing (how am I rapidly traveling my in the opposite way fronthe force powering me??).
There are so many reasons to love sailing, it connects us with human history, it is fun, and it provides a vehicle piloting experience with lots of mechanical depth.
/endrant
Wellinaturally assume any game is shit on release in regards to bugs and stuff so I try to avoid games for a few weeks minimum. I’m more of the Patient Gamer type. I can wait a few years until the game is more or less in final form before getting it.
It sounds like that’s exactly what I should do here. I might toss gamepass a few bucks this month to try it out. it sounds like as is, I would stop playing when I go to build. I absolutely love building things, I used to crash fallout 4 all the time because my cities were so filled with things. Then there’s starfield where I got to s point and realized the entire cargo system was broken, and stopped playing the game entirely. Not like I was playing it for it’s gripping story…
This game might be perfect for others as is, but imma wait a bit and try it Soonish.
The building in this is not great. I kept getting frustrated trying to build around its weird limitations. If you want a game with good building, you may want to give Enshrouded a try. It’s the first game i’ve seen where I can actually build caves and even tunnels! I watched someone on youtube make a whole hobbit house in the ground… pretty cool!
It’s just a well made game in an era of badly made games that hype themselves up bigger than they are.
Palworld is “just” good monster collection, good combat and some good survival crafting. I’m not going to play it, but it’s very easy to see the appeal.
It’s like the newer doom games. They’re “just” good shooters. You “just” get to go through well built levels, nice visuals and good music.
It’s certainly not well made, as it’s buggy as hell, but it is fun, and that’s been missing from a lot of games recently.
I’m playing exclusively in a multiplayer world with my brothers, and we’re having a blast. If I was playing alone it’d probably be less fun tbh.
There may be a few catches here and there, but overall the game works, the world is pretty big / big enough and the features are well designed and well paced enough to keep people entertained for several dozens of hours.
That’s what I mean by “well made”. It’s not an actually unfun game with bad explanations.
All valid points.
Whatever it is, I’m having the best time gaming I’ve had in years with it, and at a $20 price point, I’m well happy to have bought it.
It’s one of the best survival rafting games in the market right now to be honest. That’s why I’m enjoying it. I’m 36 never played Pokémon.
Happiness is a dead lamball rolling down a cliff
All this time and I still feel horrid farming Lamballs. Why on earth is the fodder creature so damn cute?
I still avoid killing them. :(
Have you seen the most recent Let’s Game It Out?
Their little death squeals fuel me
All the people blaming “clickbait youtubers” or “AI bots” for this game blowing up are idiots. Its actually fun, it delivers a satisfying game loop that no pokemon game ever has, and it has support for multiplayer. It’s big enough to explore a lot, has a deep tech tree to unlock, some pretty interesting base automation mechanics, and over 100 pokemon to discover and catch, and a surprisingly robust breeding system to unlock new pokemon instead of evolving. It’s just FUN, and lots of games lately lack that. Despite it being buggy and early access, its very playable. I hosted a dedicated server and my friends and I can play together and explore and adventure and find bosses, and work on our base together. Haven’t had a game that lets me do that in a long time.
The fact that you call em pokémon instead of Pals tells a lot.
Well, it is Pokemon you’re capturing and using after all
You’re not realising the implications of refusing to give Palworld it’s own identity, are you?
I don’t really give a shit
Oh god
We are getting hit by “What Pikachu is that” from the younger generation now, just like we did back then by our parents ʘ‿ʘ
Is this some kinda joke I’m not in on? It’s just a shitty ark knockoff
It’s really not though
It’s a good Arc knockoff.
It did what ark failed to do for years and polished the shit off
Ark never has been a good game
Neat. Hopefully it doesn’t corrupt Pokemon into being a survival/builder game.
Pokemon has barely deviated in almost 30 years, I think it will be fine
I can only hope. I’ve already watched Zelda be ruined.
Yeah could you imagine the horrors of Pokemon changing their core gameplay loop after decades of stagnation? Horrible. Just look at how it ruined Zelda!
Pokémon can’t even shake up enough to figure out what to do with an open world. They took away puzzles and mazes and replaced them with… nothing. Never seen a more boring open world than Scarlet/Violet. No events or minigames, nothing to discover along the way, only bland scenery and low draw distance creatures.
BOTW ruined Zelda for people like me who enjoyed the dungeons, unique items and narrative progression of older games even if it was a great game for open world fans. Pokemon is even further removed from that action-survival gameplay so it’s not hard to see why people would want new games to be similar even if the current formula is stale.
Yeah pretty much. BOTW is flat out not a Zelda game. It’s a Zelda skinned game.
Yeah, basically. Breath of the Wild is the worst Zelda game, mainly because it’s not a Zelda game. I know lots of people like it, but it’s not a Zelda game. Same with Palworld. It’s not a Pokemon game.
Wouldn’t want Gamefreak to deviate from the same formulas they’ve had for decades and have never bothered to change, while putting out worse and worse quality games every year.
