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.
Game Freak will learn absolutely nothing from this, except “People like Pokemon, lets crank out one every 6 months instead of yearly and make them even shittier!”
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
Maybe. Maybe not. Pokémon isn’t successful because it’s good. It’s successful because people want to play Pokémon. If they can have the same experience of capturing and training Pokémon in a different format and name, it may compete with them. Admittedly, PalWorld is missing a lot of the higher level Pokémon things, but I don’t think that matters to the vast majority of players, and hunting for perfect traits may make up for it.
I don’t think it’s a particularly great game, but I also don’t think Pokémon is.
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
Honestly? I think they should be more disposable. You can do stuff like sell, butcher, overwork or fuse away your Pals (all of which are rather deliberate on the player’s part), but I genuinely think if there was some threat of permadeath or having them stolen by the Syndicate baddies if you get sloppy, it would give the adventure a greater sense of threat/risk. People seek out Nuzlocke rules for a reason, and currently I find the options for dropping your items and Pals on death don’t really make compelling gameplay sense (you just walk back and get them).
Setting/story-wise, Palworld supports that kind of thing so I figure it’s most likely coming as an option eventually. The game is on track for some interesting things, and as half-baked as parts might seem now, it’s already fairly fun. Definitely an addictive formula.
It’s worth waiting to see where they take it if the journey and developing those bonds with the creatures are a big part of the draw for you. I doubt you’ll get compelling turn based combat at any point, though.
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.
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. :(
Their little death squeals fuel me
Have you seen the most recent Let’s Game It Out?
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.
FYI, when you get more pal tools it lets you do things like riding pals where you have direct control over them.
Too bad you can’t dodge or move out of the way for shit. And some of them (especially bosses and shineys) are so big, it fucks with aiming.
Yeah I definitely think that the whole direct control of pals could be improved. I’d like to see something like holding a trigger to issue direct commands to your pal with face buttons. Would require rearranging the buttons a bit though.
With how the purple elk things (I’m so bad at remembering the names lol) double jump, I immediately thought of Torrent from Elden Ring. You can dodge on him (kinda) and doing it that way would at least feel like you’re not just taking a huge disadvantage by fighting mounted to control the attacks.
I actually like it. It’s kind of like ARK but mixed with Factorio/Satisfactory
It is missing too much to call it like factorio or even rimworld as you cant even set task priority or do much optimization, but it has the foundation and could certainly go that route with some major ai improvements.
My friends all call it Valheim, but with cute fluffy animals.
The ability to customize difficulty settings is also a big hit.
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.
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.
Kind of how Fortnite was a rehash of stolen ideas (originally) of PUBG
The reason people originally hated Fortnite was because not only did they blatantly plagiarise PUBG, Sony also intentionally screwed over PUBG to make Fortnite more popular
I haven’t heard of the Sony-PUBG shenannigans, would you care to tell me more about it?
It’s been quite a long time but iirc there was originally a deal going on between them that got last second tossed out for Fortnite instead. Sadly I don’t fully remember
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.
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.
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’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.
Exactly. Cassette Beasts and various other indie games have made bigger rounds before.
The only reason Palworld got popular was because of clickbait youtubers
The studio doesn’t make games for the good ideas, but to make money. Shocker, I know. But get this; the developers are paying for this parser that determines what kind of product will sell well, based on social media.
The developers have admitted to using something like that to decide what kind of games they’ll make.
It’s surprisingly entertaining, but you might want to wait until it leaves early access if you’re on the fence. It’s very buggy and there’s big aspects of the game that aren’t filled out yet.
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!”
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.
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
Dang are you the hypeman for sailing, because i’m feeling the energy haha. I’m sure real life sailing is actually fun. My grandfather had a sailboat back in the day, and while I never got to go sailing on it, I did get to step aboard, and I could imagine the adventures one could go on with it :) But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween. I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅
I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅
Oof I got attacked by a “mosquito” and lost all my stuff way far from home in valheim and it made me temporarily quit. The mosquito was weird though, it was like 100 feet long with a big menacing mouth full of teeth, no wings thankfully.
Also some of the most fun sailing is in the tiniest sailboats you can get like sunfishes, lasers, j20s etc… they are simple, quick to tack (i.e. they keep speed through turns) relatively inexpensive and easy to get in the water and a blast to sail like a fool and capsize. Sometimes there are sailing clubs/classes you can sail these at that are pretty affordable if you live near water.
But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween.
This is true but it is so silly, if you ever get the chance to go out sailing on a windy day on like a 20 foot hobie cat style catamaran with someone who knows how to sail it and you would NOT say the experience was boring or full of long periods of nothing stimulating. Even if the water wasn’t its own unique dynamic environment just the mechanics of keeping the sailboat hiked over with your body weight to get maximum speed without flipping over are complex and stimulating and those things FLY. In a video game there is no reason game developers couldn’t dial up the arcadeyness and speed to make this experience even more fun, but I just don’t think most game developers give a shit about sailing so they don’t even think to try. They just program a motorboat and animate a cosmetic sail on top of it that swings around to whatever direction you are going and call it a day.
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 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.
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?
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
I don’t really give a shit
The one thing I don’t care much for in PalWorld is building structures (walled structures), it feels kinda janky and restrictive at the moment. Which it hasn’t been a major part of the game so far, but it’s one of the few things that’s bothered me about it. Otherwise, it’s been a breath of fresh air compared to Pokemon’s recent outings.
You don’t want to build much anyway, because you need every inch of your base ring for pal stations, but yeah. We have a 1x1 lean-to with 2 beds in it, the rest is the massive fucking breeding operation we’ve set up
I’ve got a dedicated server I play with a few friends, and I got really stoned on the first day and just kept building a building for our base. Next thing I know I’ve spent six hours on 5 floors (not including an attic space and WiP rooftop garden… need to unlock more building stuff).
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.
zelda is awesome now what are you talking about. botw was the best zelda ever made and the only one i enjoyed playing, and totk is even better.
It’s their personal preference just like yours. I know, crazy how someone might have the opposite opinion on something.
yeah and i was trying to engage in discussion to learn more about why they think that. what a redditor attitude, i know you don’t have friends irl if you act like that
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.
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.
Is this some kinda joke I’m not in on? It’s just a shitty ark knockoff
It did what ark failed to do for years and polished the shit off
Ark never has been a good game
It’s really not though
It’s a good Arc knockoff.
