I mean you’re definitely right, but I’ve never tried to actually read anything in those spaces, it’s always just fluff and “BUY MY NEW GAME” and 30 pages of patchnotes for a game I played once 3 years ago.
I mostly follow devs/games that write insightful updates or interesting news so it's a pretty good source of info for me, but yeah occasionally there's stuff id like to easily skip or ignore without having to scroll for days.
It’s weird. I would say it feels very unpolished, yet at the same time, it works way better than I would have thought for an early access monster collector. It totally feels like a meme, but it’s actually quite fun at the same time. I don’t think I’ll play it forever, but it’s definitely my addiction this week. I only downloaded it because a friend suggested it, it has Pokemon elements, and it’s included in game pass so I had nothing to lose, but I’ve already put probably 15 hours into it this weekend.
I keep hearing “pokemon elements” is there actually the move selection, level system and typing strategy that went into Pokemon? Cause as fun as monster collecting is, if the combat lacks depth idk how long the game will last.
There is typing weakness and resistance. Each Pal can have 3 moves and you can swap out the moves from whatever they know and you can also teach them moves using move fruits (aka TMs). However you don’t directly control your Pals. It’s real time action based combat. So you are running around shooting and dodging and your active Pal is doing the same all on their own. So no, it’s not a pokemon game, it just has some elements of it in the form of catching, leveling, learning moves, breeding, and having some pals prove utility skills.
The combat definitely lacks depth, but they have also provided other gameplay elements to offset. Base building is a big one. Your Pals can be assigned to do jobs in your base, and different pals are capable of different tasks. It’s first and foremost a survival game and setting up base automation is a core part of that. Your base occasionally gets raided by wild pals or bad NPCs that you have to fight off.
I actually agree that I don’t think this game will last long, for me at least. But that’s fine. Not every game needs to be a forever game. For $26 on steam (or included in game pass), I’ve already had enough enjoyment out of it just in the last few days to make up the cost. I mean, that’s pretty much the cost of going to see a movie.
The trailer reminded me of that other game craftopia that really didn’t click with me. Pulled up the trailer for that and wouldn’t you know it, same developer. Craftopia still isn’t out of early access and sits at a comfortable 57% (recent) steam user rating. So I doubt I’ll get palworld.
FWIW, I tried to like Craftopia and it didn’t click, but I’m really enjoying Palworld. If you enjoy Pokemon you should be able to get your money’s worth.
Honest opinion: Gameplay mechanics are really interesting, visuals are quite good. If you ever wanted a “pokemon but without keeping it kids friendly” game, this might scratch that itch just fine.
I didn’t got deep into this game, but it has a noticable lack of direction. The game doesn’t tell you what to do aside from the basic base building; but I like it.
Oh also, it’s quite buggy in this state and crashed occasionally; so you might want to give it a few more updates before buying if you dislike that.
For somebody specifically interested in the online competitive format of Pokemon - is there anything of the sort in Palworld? The last game that kind of scratched that itch for me was the Digimon Cybersleuth series.
Xbox and PC Gamepass launched with an older version of the game than Steam waiting for MS to approve the update.
It just got patched this afternoon, I imagine it runs better now. Although, I had only minimal problems launching and playing the game from PC Gamepass this weekend.
Huh and this isn’t even free and it’s still in early access.
Also from the steam page: “Don’t worry; there are no labor laws for Pals.” Ew. Not even the fact there are no labour laws, as it is expected from primitive game, but the fact some gross brain decided to specifically mention it as a perk of the game.
“Build a factory, place a Pal in it, and they’ll keep working as long as they’re fed—until they’re dead, that is.” - no seriously, fuck them.
Jesus Christ I hope you’re vegan. If you’re upset about a silly joke considering the diagetic implications of monster collector/automation games: what we do to beings that have actual feelings should be a real concern for you.
Pokémon spends a lot of time—a silly amount of time, really—explaining how the fighting you’re doing against other trainers isn’t a bad thing, it’s not cruel. It’s more like sport. They like doing it. You bond with them over it. Everyone faints, no one dies. And when you’re fighting Team Rocket, well, that’s just a good cause. Something your Pokémon believe in just as much as you do.
So the lore goes, anyway. A bit naive, but sincere and earnest. Good values.
This very funny Palworld description is saying it’s okay to treat them like slaves.
Like, they might not want to work on your cabin for you, but actually, there is no labor board to stop you from forcing them to. Do you think that keeping slaves is funny? Like, no other context, just: I have slaves, that is funny to me.
If the writer of this laugh out loud, very funny steam description doesn’t mean it that way, they should change the joke. As a high-school graduate, you should be able to pick up subtext like this. It’s very simple.
Sorry for the bold, I just wanted to make sure you saw me insulting you.
Keep in mind, I’ve never played this game: I have no opinions. Are they treated like slaves? Would you care to enlighten us?
Yeah so it doesn’t really matter what the “lore” is. Like if I write a book series with a slave race but I put in a line where a representative of the slave species, let’s call them uhhh mouse-elves, says “oh master we love being slaves!” that doesn’t actually change anything meaningful.
There is always this disconnect between the fact that in Pokémon, Digimon, SMT, whatever else I’m forgetting for all the “no this is actually good clean fun” (ok smt goes a bit darker but still very sanitised) the creatures exhibit almost 0 agency and at the end of the day mudkip is facing down a moon sized laser beam from a galactic god. Further in the media around at least Pokémon trainers are legitimately worried when their “pets” are overmatched or hurt.
So as much as they say “oh it’s ok because mc gobbledygook” there is an enormous dissonance between what the audience sees/what the player does and what the media presents it as.
Also I note you’re not vegan, so it’s utterly bizarre you’re concerned about the imaginary welfare of animated fantasy monsters but not actual earthlings we share the planet with and murder for pleasure.
also edit: I never graduated highschool, I was a bit busy being abused, I do have a masters and the ruins of a PhD though. I would tentatively suggest you focus your outrage on actual real problems and not kinda lazy filtered through a different culture and language parody of a genre advertising jokes.
mouse-elves, says “oh master we love being slaves!”
You can just say Harry Potter. I’m not going to defend JK Rowling.
so it’s utterly bizarre you’re concerned about the imaginary welfare of animated fantasy monsters
If you’re critical of Pokémon’s lazy handling of its own premise, why are you castigating people for being critical of this one?
If people are making pro-worker or anti-animal-abuse arguments, and “wow, animal slaves isn’t cool” is certainly one of those, embolden them. What are you doing?
I don’t even know what your position is anymore. It’s bad for a very tongue in cheek game to make a joke about lack of labour rights for monsters in their advertising, but it’s fine for other monster collectors to just not acknowledged how disquieting the premise is because they explain it away by lore, but when Rowling explains something away by lore it’s not excuseable because lore doesn’t have any material impact on what people are implicitly writing about?
I think you should probably just learn about the game before having an opinion about it. It is very unserious. It is parody homage, and also just dumb and cute. It’s like getting worked up about mario kart encouraging teen destruction derbies or something. We’re not looking at something like the skeezy line blurring between Hollywood and the usaian MIC as the usaian department of war requires films to adopt pro imperial stances in order to grant access to military hardware which in turn makes movies more visually appealing.
It’s just a ridiculous little toy going “Monster collectors are very silly hey?” where you can pat the cute mammoth in the spa and also work 100 cats to depression making bombs.
This doesn’t have any meaningful impact, if you want to improve the world go do a weekend at your nearest animal rescue, volunteer your time teaching your local language to migrants, or promote a Union at your job.
Yeah, I’m like 18 hours in. Adjust the settings before you go in to make it be the Zelda/Pokemon/COD clone you prefer and have fun exploring and letting fake pokemon do your work for you. Interesting bits of mysterious storyline so far too.
I mean half of them are obvious merges of Pokémon with assets copied one for one in some cases. Really wouldn’t be surprised at all of they used an AI for this
There are already people claiming this, but I have yet to see any actual proof of claim. Unfortunately the court of public opinion has already started to turn even without actual proof. Got to love a good witch hunt.
I feel like I’ve already gotten my money’s worth with how much I’ve played the current version. If they somehow pull a cubeworld and make it worse, I’m sure the community would love to source an old and good version.
Definitely considering this one, it looks like Pokémon flavoured Ark. Ark is incredible but also hot garbage and player experience hostile (micro raptors? Ichtheyornis? Pegomastix? The fuck outta here) not to mention the insane bugs that are just completely ignored for years… Something similar from a different studio is pretty appealing
There’s a lot of other parodies/references to other games in there too, like a dungeon entrance that looks almost exactly like an elden ring evergoal circle :p
Maybe not the game for you if your hatred of ark comes from bugs lol. This game is fun but very jank and buggy which makes arks mechanics look like a masterpiece in comparison and I’m no ark fan.
Seems friendlier than ark though. Ark will just bug out and remove your favourite creature from existence permanently. Or just kill you and every creature you own by having terribly balancing. I’ve fallen through the world in palworld but it just pops you out at your homebase with your gear and your pals.
Okay so “very” may be a bit too forceful of a word. There are bugs, though they are fairly mild to medium at worst. The most common ones are pathing issues on base, the rare humanoid enemy getting stuck under ground, and some hitbox-related problems that are easily circumvented. The biggest issue which the devs are aware of is multiplayer save game corruption and they’ve released a guide on backing up saves as a temporary bandaid. In all, this is a rather impressive release and should improve rapidly. MUCH worse games with heavier budgets have been released in the last year alone.
I mean the dude literally said he hated ark because of bugs so very is putting it lightly imo. In my two hours I was trying to play my friend and I were constantly crashing, dying to glitched were probably responsible for, and eventually not being able to play anymore because we couldn’t spam past ‘OnCreateSessionComplete Delegate bWasSuccessful == False’.
My friends and I started playing yesterday, we set up a dedicated server and played for 6 straight hours without a single crash from any of the 4 of us.
It is buggy, but in a Bethesda kind of way in my experience, it’s not game breaking bugs, it’s weird pathing, some jank animations, but overall it plays extremely well for early access. I was quite impressed as a fan and player of several early access survival/crafting games.
You’d have a point, if the comparison wasn’t between a decade plus old game and one that released in the last week, as early access. ARK is genuinely one of the single worst experiences to try and get into, and has multi year long bugs that haven’t been touched.
I haven’t bought Palworld, but you can actually launch the game, and join your friends in a few minutes tops. I have attempted to play with friends on ARK. Repeatedly. I have yet to actually do so, even after self hosting my own server on a couple occasions. IMO, this makes ARK as a title and game to play, completely worthless.
I haven’t bought Palworld, but you can actually launch the game, and join your friends in a few minutes tops.
Um dawg I couldn’t even get into a game with a friend when we tried the other day because of the ‘OnCreateSessionComplete Delegate bWasSuccessful == False’ errors. I’m sure it’ll be fixed in time.
All im saying is to temper expectations and don’t go into this game expecting a masterpiece. It’s a janky meme game from the two hours ive put into it.
Um dawg I couldn’t even get into a game with a friend when we tried the other day because of the ‘OnCreateSessionComplete Delegate bWasSuccessful == False’ errors. I’m sure it’ll be fixed in time.
Very true, I had heard that one popping up but for the live streams I saw it seemed to go away with time or at random.
Fair enough to temper expectations, it is after all an early access title. They still seem to be handling things better than the ARK devs is all I was getting at. I literally have not been able to play it once, since purchase, outside of joining random public servers and having a uh… “Rust” ^(cough turboracism cough) type of experience if that makes sense.
thanks for actually trying to help instead of mindlessly using the little funny internet number for some reason, that i did, i was checking it multiple times yesterday but never noticed it
Well... Who's ready for an endless stream of low quality AI asset flips?
We've already seen what AI-generated books have done to platforms like Amazon. I suspect that this will eventually be the end of "open" uncurated digital storefronts, since AI will eventually allow for crappy content to be produced at a faster rate than it can be consumed and it'll become impossible to discover anything worthwhile.
I am not sure whether AI will make the creation of asset flips much easier though, given that store bought assets are already being dropped into a ‘game’ already.
There are only a finite number of easily purchasable game dev assets out there, but in theory there is a nearly infinite of assets that can be generated by AI.
Mark my words, soon we're gonna be inundated with lot of really shitty, mostly AI-generated games by con artists trying to make a quick buck.
AI struggles to make a complete, composite product. This is the limit on game creation as it is anyway, not number of assets available to steal/download/buy. There are thousands of options for near-complete games out there that can be easily customized further with the millions of art assets out there as it is.
Even then, Steam isn’t completely without moderation. It’s been possible to automate the creation of asset flips for a while (and we’ve seen it done plenty of mobile), but Steam makes some effort to remove the lowest quality games and make it ineffective to publish low-quality shovelware. AI is still quite a ways off from being even remotely faster or more effective than just buying a template and filling in the resources with cheap or free assets.
Why take already created assets if you can generate everything the way you want it? I found lumalabs.ai yesterday wich makes text to 3D. Right now it could be a good base for someone to generate an idea of the final product and then have a 3D artist re-do them in more details for the final project or just clean them up a bit.
There are also good stuff done with AI, for example there is this game called Suck Up where you are a vampire and you go door to door trying to get people to let you in. People you are trying to convince are basically chatbots and it works a lot better than you’d expect
Yeah I can’t get too all fired about this honestly. I think llms and the like could be a great tool in a game designer’s belt provided it’s used well.
And you CAN use it well. Don’t believe the hype. If you’re a programmer or designer, play with this stuff yourself, preferably using open source models run on your own machine (it’s falling off a log easy now with tools like Ollama, even have AMD GPU support these days!).
Of course AI generated drivel is corrosive and horrible, and we should consistently downvote it and educate people about it so it stops being profitable.
For an alternative and erudite take on why all this AI generated crap may not actually spell doom, give this a read if you feel like it.
I typically don’t download games in preview, but I’ve found quite a bit of depth and cozy fun here. There’s some weirdness and definite room for improvement, but I can recommend it.
It’s basically Pokemon in a survival world, but both your character and the Pals level up which is interesting, and the tech tree had some significant depth to it
steam
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.