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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 a Battle Royal, basically a big map that shrinks over time and if you are outside the “play area” you receive damage until you get inside again or you die.
Pubg wasn’t the first. The crown for that is for H1Z1 or Z1 battle royale as it’s known these days. It was a dayZ clone with a stand alone battle royale version.
Even H1Z1 wasn’t the first if you include mods for Arma, minecraft, DayZ and probably more.
Pubg standalone may not have been first, but in its mod form for arma i think it was the first. Someone less lazy can probably look up the specific dates
Is this game really that good or is it just massively overhyped? I watched a videogamedunkey video about it, and I know he overly satirizes things for humor, but it just didn’t look all that great.
It’s a very specific type of game. If you don’t like Rust, Ark, Raft, or any of those games like it Palworld probably isn’t for you. At least not until mods come out.
I’d put rust aside from other survival crafters because the challenge is pvp. Actually surviving alone in rust is easy and even boring. Though I also haven’t played palworld multiplayer yet, but you definitely shouldn’t jump into MP to start a game like this.
It’s a very fun, silly, well-made game with a very addictive loop where you’re given a lot of small, easily achievable tasks that have you going: “one more and I’m done”.
On Sunday I played for 13 hours. I don’t know if they have a team of psychologists that found out how to make the game addictive, but the results speak for themselves.
It’s a fun and beautiful place to explore, full of vibrant colors and cute pals. Your base building is not boring because the boring resource gathering is automated by your pal slaves. It scratches optimization itches, and you also get raided which can result in hilarious outcomes that give you an opportunity to rebuild and organize your base more efficiently.
The main dev doesn’t seem capable of such well thought out tactics.
He has more of a “monkey see, monkey do” sort of approach to making games.
He just nailed it by jamming creature collection + survival. I love both and I’ve been addicted to the game. If this game doesn’t get more work done on it (from the devs or modders) these numbers will fall hard. It’s fun but it’s a quick high that will last a couple of weeks.
It hits the sweet spot in different areas. You can tell it’s a bunch of ideas from other games stitched together. Its Ark but more accessible, with pokemon flavor, elden ring’s tough enemy in the newbie area, deep rock galactic pick your friend up off the ground, automation lightly inspired by factio. If you look closely it’s got dark humour in all of the Pal descriptions. It’s just broadly appealing and enjoyable If you don’t take things too seriously, or if you can find the humour in the fact that everything is extremely familiar and just slightly altered to avoid being sued into extinction. If you read the developer interview it’s pretty funny too, new daily flash drives as version control, he couldn’t get hired at a big studio and was super surprised that steam would let Just anyone publish anything. It feels like it shouldn’t exist
I think it's overhyped, but it's not as if there's nothing good there.
It's goofy, it's got those building and travel mechanics people like from other games, you can capture a cute/funny team of animals that people love from pokemon, it's a good stream game with multiplayer which means lots of free publicity
I think it could be way better than it is, but it's easy to see how it got to where it is.
It will depend on how (if at all) will they maintain the game, and how that will turn out. Some might be just buying extra copies and leaving it running on a backup toaster PC, just to stick it to Nintendo/wokes/artists/whatever. Most people seem to having fun with it.
Culture war rots people's mind, and many just wants to win either internet points, still have the "early age of console wars" mentality, don't want to criticize the underlying systems, etc.
Survival crafting games have always been extemely bare minimum effort by most studios. Look how well Ark did despite it being buggy garbage with dlcs. Palworld has almost everything you’d want from a survival crafting game and is 10x more polished than its competition. Dunkey highlights the bugs, which are definitely there, but for day 1 it is actually very well done and includes a lot of polish and QoL features that I would normally expect an early access game to add months after launch. I don’t know if he made a video from day 1 of ark or rust but it would be orders of magnitude worse than this. Also keep in mind this is the opposite of the type of game he usually plays.
Besides all that, it’s multiplayer and the core gameplay is simply fun.
It’s a survival crafting game. It’s functional, but yeah, I think overhyped. Most people play for the novelty, and that covers for the boring gameplay.
That’s overly reductive. I don’t play it like a crafting game, I play it like a pokemon game and I’m having fun catching new pals while barely touching the base building.
After how many years I still complain about Arks shitty AI for Dino’s. They could have made something special but it can’t even follow you right sometimes.
In all fairness, the AI in Palworld is abysmal, too, but they at least acknowledge it (it’s one of the top items to fix in their roadmap), and it’s a just-released early access game, rather than a been-out-for-years title.
It’s incredible for early access and will be the game of the decade if the devs continue to polish and refine it. And if it doesn’t get sued for its similarities to Nintendo IPs, which I doubt will happen but is still possible.
Don’t get me wrong, as-is it’s already very playable and fun. Worth the price by a long shot. I’m hopeful it will continue to improve but even if the company vanished tomorrow and left the game in its current state, I would be satisfied with my purchase.
Its pretty clear that the automation aspect was a little over sold in some of the trailers. In one trailer, two lines of cattiva are carrying iron bars from what appears to be a forge.
Pals won’t pull out of forges AFAIK. So it feels like they threw 2 stacks of iron behind the forge and recorded it as an automation demonstration.
I think I’ve spent the last 4 days not doing anything except trying to get the pal automation to be a little more controlled…
Yeah it would be cool to see something similar to the factorio logistics network for pals, crafting stations, and storage. Requesters, providers, and storage settings on inventory slots is all it would take
Probably something more like RimWorld would be it. Filters on boxes, task bar to tell your anubis to stop wasting time on mining and prioritize crafting, stuff like that.
I normally agree. In 99% of situations skip that early access and wait for, at minimum, fully supported Beta release after the major issues have been ironed out. This is that incredibly uncommon 1% that’s worth it. First Early Access title I have grabbed in years.
I took Pokemon Legends Arceus to 100%. I can firmly say Palworld has a better loop than PLA.
We were almost capped on Palworld and reset our server yesterday. I have spent over a dozen hours since our reset playing the game. I would have put PLA down permanently if I was almost done with the 100% dex and lost my save data. I am missing 2 achievements on Horizon Zero Dawn on steam for that exact reason.
Early access is fine if you look at the game as it is now instead of thinking about “what it will be”.
My rule of thumb with early access is that if you’re happy in its current state, then it’s worth it. If you’re buying on the idea of future promises, you’re a sucker. If they were to suddenly declare the game finished, the content right now would be worth the price tag imo. It needs some polish, but then again it’s more polished then anything game freak has put out in recent years lol.
yeah it seems like Genshin Impact copied Breath of the Wild, and Palworld copied Genshin Impact, and added Ark Survival Evolved (which copied Pokemon and Don’t Starve), and Valheim (which copied Minecraft and Fortnight)
(just speaking generally here, please don’t do a deep dive into how accurately these examples align)
I’ve been enjoying it. I’m midway through the game right now and I will admit the mechanics are getting rather repetitive and I feel like I’ve seen most of what it has to offer, other than new technologies to unlock at higher levels.
If the devs add some more content for the leveling and endgame stages of the game, I would say it absolutely lives up to the hype. It’s still early access so anything is possible, but I know better than to get my hopes up
It’s overhyped, but it is a fairly good Breath of the Wild mixed with Pokémon with light survival game elements and base building. It’s nothing particularly new or special, but it is pretty good at being what it is, which is a weird combination of a bunch of existing things.
It’s not game of the year or anything, but it’s fine. I got bored after a while because there’s no real challenge to the game. It needs to have something pushing you to progress, and that really isn’t there at the moment.
Huge world map to explore, a variety of different monsters to capture, bosses to work up to, automation that allows the more annoying parts of survival games to happen in the background as you explore, space to fiddle with the monster capture stuff through breeding and condensing.
A lot of people I know enjoy it for the shock value of pokemon-with-guns that you put into a sweatshop and then butcher, but you don’t have to do it that way and it can just be a not-pokemon game where your gardevoir helps you craft stuff.
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