- cross-posted to:
- palworld@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- palworld@lemmy.world
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It’s significantly more fun than any recent pokemon game and its not exclusive to a console. It’s fantastic for an early access release
It’s also just a really good survival game.
I justify it as even if it never receives an update, I’m still satisfied with what I paid for it. It’s brought me and my friend many hours of fun.
Agreed. Not really for kids though. It has a different vibe. I liken it to a tamer version of Animal Crossing v. Cult of the Lamb.
A lot of early access stuff popping lately. I’m seeing Enshrouded a bunch too.
Please don’t let there be a mass early access thing again. Waiting two years for a complete game ruins the fun sometimes.
I could see why PalWorld would do it early though before the cease and desist letters come en masse from Nintendo.
Huh? Early access games have been a thing for at least the past 5 years solid, no question. At this point it’s just a standard. It’s rare to find a game come out that isn’t early release. The trend isn’t going away because there will always be a line of morons to buy the game full of bugs and people lap it up.
It can help some indie studios out with continued development, so I think it’s fine as long as they continue to refine the game and put out timely updates. Some games even feel finished already even if they technically aren’t.
I agree there is a place for it. However it’s heavily abused by the industry to make an extra buck at the expense of the consumers
It’s worse because this particular company has a habit of doing a bunch of unfinished games. Palworld, Craftopia and Never grave are all by the same company. They’re all also unfinished.
Pocketpair is also 100% not an indie company as the head of Pocketpair is already a Businessman who owns an exchange for cryptocurrency
They definitely needed the cash flow to keep going. I think the other part of their early access, aside from public testing, is they needed a target. It feels like they had an idea for a game but didn’t know how to flesh out the game. Just like Minecraft, the community will heavily influence the dev. That community feedback before a full release is a good thing and it will make Pal’mon an iconic game if the devs can deliver.
Early Access has its place, we’re far better off with it existing than it not. I do still feel it needs to be an opt in thing for you to be able to see on Steam though
It just always feels like you lose so much of the cultural zeitgeist when the game goes full release.
Slime Rancher. Eventually Valheim. 30XX. My Time At… it’s like a tepid glass of water rather than hitting that nice ice cold cube glass like you’re trying to get in my pants.
Yeah it dilutes their release hype, but a lot of these games might also have not released at ALL had Early Access not existed in some form
I feel like recent pokemon is a low hurdle
Pokemon fans should appreciate Palworld just because it may force Gamefreak to stop fucking around.
It won’t. Pokemon is such a guaranteed money maker they won’t sway far off the path and this is ESPECIALLY true when you look at Japan where they have entire cities made around the stuff. Pokemon outside of Japan is nothing when compared to what it is over there. Palworld was also released outside of a pokemon release so it isn’t going to really effect their sales either. Gamefreak and Nintendo are probably gonna have issues with how it certainly pulls inspiration from a new titles.
With all that said I really enjoy palworld it’s loads of fun and I usually hate survival games.
It’s exclusive to PC and XBox just FYI. They have a contract going on with Microsoft that forbids them from releasing to other platforms.
It is fun. Of you played Ark it has the same vibes minus the 12 hours of berry hasting to catch one Dino.
It’s better than ark.
As someone who spent tens, maybe hundreds of hours on ark… It’s so much more fun than ark. I have some good memories from that game, but it’s so not worth logging in every single day to feed the dinosaurs
It’s Ark, but with all the terrible mechanics and blatant playtime stretching removed. The longest anything takes in Palworld with default settings is hatching a large egg, which is entirely passive and caps at 2 hours on Normal (according to the settings page, but I’ve yet to see a hatch timer longer than 30 minutes), and even that can be greatly sped up by matching the egg’s preferred climate with a heater or cooler next to the incubator. Most things that require player intervention take minutes at most. After Ark’s “this basic task takes hours, you have to be there for the whole process, and any mistake means you might as well start over”, this game is a breath of fresh air.
Definitely room for growth though, especially on the automation and AI side of things. Even in its current state it’s still one of the best survival games I’ve played in years. Between it and Enshrouded, 2024 has already spoiled me.
From what I’ve seen, it’s like Ark + Breath of the Wild.
they basically just looked at the recent popular games and yoinked the good bits, which entirely unsurprisingly results in a fun game when executed decently
like honestly palworld feels like something that should be used as an example in game design courses: this is what it looks like when you just set out to make a successful game, without any particular vision. Resist the whisperings of satan telling you to add microtransactions and charge 60 bucks for it, and people will eat that shit up
That’s my biggest standout point too. They choreograph exactly what points of the game could be micro transacted… And then they don’t.
Purple tech could be paywalled. Would be by most modern game standards.
They did not. They have my thanks for that.
and like, that decision has probably earned them way more money than they would ever have seen otherwise, along with the sustainability to KEEP earning hideous amounts of dosh for a good long while
As much as it pains me to agree with you, I think I agree with you.
Lmao you clearly haven’t played Ark.
I played Ark, got a random disease that apparently can only be healed with items from a high level area and didn’t go away on death. So my options were: play with the disease for the foreseeable future or restart from scratch and lose days of progress.
I chose to uninstall.
This game is dangerous…
I played it for the first time yesterday with my S/O, and we looked at the clock only to realize we had played for a little over ten hours straight… only stopping for lunch/dinner
It’ll wear off. I felt like that for Valheim and then when I reached the end I went “Oh. Alright. Whelp.”
I mean, any survival game is like that. Hell, just about any game is like that. Eventually you’ve done about all you want to do, and then it’s time to move on. And that’s fine.
I don’t know, games like Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory, Rust, they all have a lot of staying power. There’s always burnout but I don’t think that Palworld is going to survive to the “We should go back to that” stage.
I burnt out on Factorio after I had fifty ion cannons in orbit and a few battalions of remote controlled mammoth tanks. It got boring after I had finished everything. And restarting was too daunting.
I’ll definitely be back for the big update though. The new trains look incredible.
Personally I do think palworld will survive though. The core loop of capturing pals, leveling, and attribute hunting, is very fun.
I just got done with an eight hour session. This game is exceptionally dangerous
I’m absolutely loving it. I was expecting a total shit post of a game but there is actual depth to this. And for a game this early into early access it’s running amazingly. The only real bugs I’ve run into so far is occasionally my worker pals get stuck and start to starve so I have to throw them into the box and then take them back out real quick. In the end though that happens like three or four times in several hours?
I just started playing last night. I got raided ans my entire base got burned down. I could not figure out any way to stop it from spreading. Why would i spend any effort on building an awesome base if one fucking fire will burn the whole thing to the ground without me being able to do anything but watch it all fall apart?
Im really hoping its a bug because its going to nope out a lot of people when it happens to them.
If you ever had a sibling overwrite a save file you had put dozens to hundreds of hours into you know what im talking about (sorry bro, i still feel bad a about accidently saving over your 90 hours on ff9)
Honestly I had the exact same thing happen to me but once you get just a tiny bit further it’s no longer a problem. You’ll have enough pals running around to take care of the raid all by themselves even if you don’t help.
But yeah at the same time that was a tad bit bullshit
Thanks for letting me know it is a temporary problem. I had 6 pals fighting when it happened and they killed everyone but it was fire pals and one thing being on fire spread to the whole base. Just was like this is a dumb game design. Probably is a way to deal with it, and it is still early access so presumably it will get addressed or it was just something i missed.
Keep leveling and you can build with stone so fire will be less a problem in the first place
also raids are in server settings if you are playing single player
A good strat is to destroy/dismantle the thing on fire, so the fire doesn’t spread.
Water pals can put out fires in your base I’m pretty sure
I have about 40 hours into the game. My friend about the same. He knows three people with 20+. I have read several forum posts and watched reviews on this game. In a handful of instances the fire is mentioned. It’s a rare occurrence started by a Pal being on fire or using fire very close to your building. You can stop this by scrapping a section not on fire and by keeping anything that requires fire away from buildings. That said, I spent a day roasting an egg next to a furnace inside my wooden hut and nothing happened.
Also, it’s early access.
And one situation create bad does not a game make. Or something. :D - Anyway, gather stone and build your shit outta stone. Looks decent too.
the raids are definitely something i’d polish if i were them, it’s rather arbitrary and not really fun in any way.
i like the idea of having a reason to build defenses, and the risk of losing stuff, but it’s rather wack to start by flinging gravel at you and then at some point start dropping meteors, neither are particularly engaging and with the swarm of pals you’ll have after just a short while there’s not really much you yourself can do to affect things other than build walls…
i think it’d work better if it sent a mini-boss and some normal pals, so you could either focus on the miniboss or pick off the small ones.
Not to mention that if one of your pals can send the raiders flying away, they won’t try to pathfind their way back. I’ve managed to fend off some very annoying “deadly pals” raids with a couple of reptyros. After some minutes, the raiders will start fleeing and despawn.
The base diameter is very small, too, so making something like a maze or something like a kill corridor requires a lot of pre-planning
I’ve mostly ignired raids. So far my guild and I have lost a total of “3 signposts” to raids over the course of a week. Just have piles of pals in base that aren’t completely incapacitated and they fend off the raids more or less by themselves.
Pals with watering ability will put out fires, if they’re not busy fighting. If you have stashed repair kits, handiwork pals will also grab them and fix your stuff.
I do have to ask, why did you make a wooden base when stone doesn’t take that long to unlock?
It’s clearly got more potential than it’s currently using right now, game is fun but will almost certainly be better in 3-6 months. No shame in waiting for a finished product, either.
i mean they’ve sold like a million copies, i don’t think they’re going to be hurting for cash any time soon, just pirate it and maybe buy it later if you feel a desire to.
Dude. They sold a million copies in the first 8h. They’re at 5m as of a few days ago.
Judging from their previous games, like Craftopia, don’t expect a 1.0 release, like at all.
I wonder if anyone involved in this debate has even played both games… because outside of having a bunch of adorable yet vicious critters with grimdark world implications… they’re nothing alike
Might as well be comparing Resident Evil to House of the Dead, both have zombies, both take place in a house, both have terrible voice acting… but one’s intended to be scary and has very limited resources and depressing music to give that feel, while the other is a goofy action game intended to be B-Grade schlock where you just mindlessly shoot things
Dude, I love House of the Dead
So do I, I’m not knocking it, but you play it for the schlock and awe, not to be legitimately frightened or experienced a tense environment… and in that sense comparing it to Resident Evil because they both have zombies in a mansion made by mad science, is foolish.
I know, and you’re absolutely right.
I just wanted to let you know that House of the Dead rocks.
It really does
Palworld gameplay isn’t even remotely similar to Pokemon. Its basically Ark Survival that just so happens to have plagiarised pokemon designs instead of dinosaurs.
I kinda wish they didn’t go such overt plagiarism in terms of design because then Palworld could be a nice game on its own
I’m reminded of how Fortnight, arguably the most popular game ever, is a direct rip off of PUBG, which is itself a repackaged Arma 2 mod
Fortnite Battle Royale was an afterthought, a gamejam project at Epic, made with assets from Fortnite: Save the World. They hoped to use the BR hype to get some more players to the main game, but it got so ridiculously popular it quickly overtook StW and became the Fortnite we all know today.
(FYI, by raw numbers Minecraft is still the #1 popular game. Not relevant to the discussion but a neat statistic. It’s kind of mind boggling how popular that stupid block game is)
Which is just an infiniminer clone.
And dwarves fortress
the only explanation i can come up with is that they wanted the free PR, i mean would the game really have been so popular if it wasn’t teetering on the knife’s edge of plagiarism?
if they made the creature designs comfortably different from pokemon it would kinda just be yet another game
But honestly, what can even be considered “comfortably different” from Pokemon? If you make funny little animals, they’ll probably resemble at least one of the 1025 Pokemon currently in existence.
that’s my take on it really, they clearly knew their designs were copied bs, and totally did not have to make it that way. For me personally it totally throws off the potential vibe and just feels like poking a bear for absolutely no reason. Plus I also think the game is kind of offensive and in poor taste but that seems to be a minority opinion to say the least.
It may be fun but I’ll never know because it looks very not fun.
It’s fun
I know I’d hate it. It looks like a mix of my least favorite game mechanics: grinding, foraging and crafting.
I have the same feeling as you.
Yeah it’s a bog standard survival game at its core with not-pokemon tacked on, so if that’s not your thing then avoid it
If you like survival games (Ark, Rust, Valheim…), you’d probably like it. It’s a pretty decent survival game, and getting it’s nice having the Pals grind your resources for you.
I don’t like those, but I liked the OG DayZ (the ArmA II mod).
It’s a $30 game that looks like a $5 game but somehow plays and engages the player better than most $70 games I see these days
In what way does it look like a 5$ game?
just pirate it
Can confirm: It’s fun enough for $26. It’s kinda like if ARK, Pokemon, and BOTW had a baby. It is most similar to ARK though, so if you’re looking for a straight up pokemon game, this might not be what you’re looking for.
I don’t think I would have purchased it, but it was a blast to play with PC GamePass. Had a solid weekend where I couldn’t put it down, eventually I got into a loop of just going egg hunting and waiting for them to hatch and uninstalled because I was finally burned out.
Considering that Pocketpair can’t even seem to be able to finish their other (highly plagiarised) games “Never Grave” and “Craftopia”, I’m not spending a single cent until they actually finish it.
Why are we holding big corpos accountable for selling unfinished games that later get patched with free DLC, but then allow a faux indie company (The CEO of Pocketpair actually is a businessman who owns a crypto exchange. So not at all an indie company) to do the same for the same price as the whole ark survivor bundle?
You could always just set sail to play it matey!
Piracy is ALWAYS morally correct!
I played for 15 minutes and said “I’d rather play BotW.”
Beating fluffy animals with a club to death or enslavement just isn’t my speed.
Especially when they start running from you…
They know. They’re afraid. They won’t let you make their name Toby.
You’re doing it wrong. Fun hot take, sure, but yeah…
Ah, so you convince your Pals to get in the pokeballs with hugs and kisses before sending them to your voluntary free labor camps?
I love how we have higher standards for fake digital animals than we have for actual living humans when it comes to labor.
Wow, recruiters in your area play hardball
They get a cozy bed, a warm fire, and prepared meals to eat in exchange for their servitude. You can also catch them by sneaking or while they are sleeping and not need to hurt them. There are also caged ones in bandit camps you rescue and they join you; presumably willingly.
You could also just catch the bad humans that shoot you on sight and make a prison camp without resorting to enslaving innocent chibi animals. We all know humans suck anyway.
Read this again with slavery plantations in your mind and see how it feels, just once!
Ah, so you provide basic food and shelter for their labor after capturing them in their sleep or otherwise unable to defend themselves?
Interesting, interesting.
Basic? I built them things a stone castle while I sleep in a wooden shack. I eat nothing but berries and feed them the finest meats and cakes. They have a bath house that I can’t even use! My Kinguins live like kings!
(just don’t ask where the meat came from)
I’m pretty sure John Daly sold his soul to the devil. The more I hear about how he treats his body the more amazed I am that he can still play golf. Or live.
He’s a freak of nature.
I have yet to have a solid informed grasp of whether Palworld manifested their sources of inspiration in good faith, but my tentative opinion at the moment is that hopefully this presses the Pokemon Company to innovate and elevate their overall game. The switch generation to me represented a generation of mismanagement and obvious management generated timelines and barriers, which is super unfortunate for Pokemon’s transition to a console.
Competition hopefully might change that.
The aesthetic is very similar, but the only thing I’ve seen that looked like it was straight up ripped off was a statue of a Lugia, the Lizard Punk dudes look very much like a creature from Final Fantasy, and the fact there is an area of the map that is the Altus Plateau from Elden Ring; like nearly 1:1 except the scale is smaller.
Everything else could just be chalked up to the fact the designs are pretty simplistic representations of real animals, but you can also see clear inspiration taken from a plethora of games even if they aren’t straight up duplicating anything.
Transition to console? Where did they live before?
Pokemon was a handheld franchise. All main series titles were Gameboy/DS games until the Switch came along.
Consoles had spinoffs like Stadium and Snap.
The funniest thing is how many people are taking the game setting way, way too seriously. “OMG YOU ENSLAVE CUTE CRITTERS AND MAKE THEM WORK!!!111” - Like that hasn’t been a thing in Pokemon since Green/Blue. Remember Lt. Surge, “fighting the war” with pokemon? Or the first episode of the anime, with a bunch of pikachu generating electricity for the pokecenter? Every mainline game has shown pokemon being used as workforce in one way or another, in Vermillion City there’s even a house being built with Machoke doing all the heavy lifting.
Regarding Palworld proper, I’ve been enjoying this game a lot. It scratched some itches I didn’t even know I had. Might last me a number of weeks yet, then I can wait for future updates while feeling duly sated.
Meanwhile, I’ve just downloaded a DS emulator, finna proudly play the old games. Lmao.
Yeah I’m in the same boat where my time is limited and I’d honestly rather be on here arguing about feline genetic differentiation than playing the equivalent to a game made by PETA that caught on with the crowd who responds to every Nintendo Post with just the word “PalWorld”.
Nothing else, no discussion, I think some of them are actually PalWorld fans who don’t realize they’re hurting the case of PalWorld being different enough to avoid legal disputes by associating it with competitor titles.
Actually, you know what, now that I talked through it I know I would love to play this title but I want absolutely nothing to do with the community around it.
It wouldn’t be a good game if it wasn’t so much fucking fun. It has basically no coherent story, the gameplay loop is not that complex, but the many different pals, their abilities, and the exploration are all fun as heck.
If you don’t want to associate with the people, then don’t. Don’t join the discussions.
If you want to be 100% incognito, just set yourself to invisible on Steam.
If you want to be 100% incognito, just set yourself to invisible on Steam.
Or play a pirate version, that’s as incognito as you can get regarding gaming
I watched the trailer and read the steam description. I don’t like how it treats and lets you treat the pals. My 8yo was very excited to see a pokemon clone game, and asked me to stop the trailer 30 seconds in because of them beating up the pals and using them as slaves.
Not for nothing but Pokemon have always been slaves
Not just slaves, but slaves people force to fight. This concept of palworld being worse is just silly.
I mean palworld has that too.
Palworld is honest about it.
and if understand the game right one of the “bad guy” groups you fight thinks this is fucked up and wants to kill you because you make pals fight
you’re kind of explicitly playing as the bad guy, and considering the stuff the game has you do you’re basically a cartoon villain in a massive lair filled with grunts who are just sort of there and go on lunch breaks between shifts of building death rays
…and sometimes food.
Yeah because taking your pets to an arena-style fight to “fainting” is also a great model for the kids lmao
Pokémon’s dog fighting aside, Palworld has a certain cynicism that imo takes it out of the realm of a kids game. The game allows you to capture humans and then has a little blurb about how it’s “inhumane” to do so. There’s a niche for an “adult” monster capture game that Palworld is filling. I’m curious about how the game will continue to develop in early access. They have a lot of funding & hype, let’s see if they can see it through to a full release (or wallow in development like so many other Early Access survival games).
The concept itself is different from the execution though. She watches pokemon, and they regularly talk about respecting the pokemon and treating them with respect. Anybody who treats pokemon as an object without love is shown in a bad light; even team rocket is shown to have great love for their Meowth that they are willing to walk away from Meowth when they think Meowth would have a better life elsewhere. On palworld steam description, they literally say pals can be treated any way you want because they thankfully don’t have any human rights issues. Kids don’t think of the bigger picture, deeper meaning beyond what they actually see. The game is not a kids game, and that is fine. However, the game looks cute and charming, and very like pokemon, which makes me concerned for any kid who likes playing this game.
They talk about treating them with respect… then trap them in poke balls and let them out to fight each other for bragging rights and entertainment. The people of the Pokémon world are the highest of hypocrites and that’s one of the main lessons that should be taken from that show
I think you’re a great parent who interrogates the media that your child is consuming!
The aesthetic of Palworld feeds that cynicism; it’s charming and colorful and awfully brutal. Parents should be aware of the game’s content and the game should probably get a Teen rating (at least in the US; not sure how PEGI does their rating).
This seems like biblical levels of silly. Treating a slave creature well before you hawk it into the arena to fight for you feels a little morally nebulous.
It’s a fun game, and laughing about the pals is totally part of it. The penguins special move is getting blasted out of a bazooka, and immediately passing out. It’s hilarious, but if you think about it, it’s really not much different from Ash Catchem tossing his pokemon into cage fighting rings. Palworld is honest about it, and injects humor that clearly makes you feel uncomfortable.
Yeah my Pikachu has severe concussion, broken bones an lung damage, but I give him little hugs and tell him I love him and it’s all good.
But at the same time, the human enemies are ones locking pals in literal cages who you can free. And none of the pals actually die when you are out fighting them in the world, they just pass out with Xs over their eyes. (Just don’t unlock the butcher knife)
Really the game lets you treat pals however you want, from never using them for work and doing everything yourself, to full on brutal working conditions. Choice is yours.
Not even Xs, they get spirals. That’s how you know they’re just unconscious lmao
most of them even keep moving
Pals out in the world definitely get killed. You get meat, leather, and organs from them.
You also get meat, leather, organs when you capture them
Other people reply by how Pokemons are being in captive is a bad thing, and even though it’s logical, I know what the Pokemon anime is. Like most anime, it teaches children kind and nice stuff, and the captive thing is ignored likely because it can’t be applied in real world. No need to doubt - Pokemon is not bad for your child.
Palworld just allows too much freedom when compared to that. You either have to be an established person to understand what you’re doing or play with your parents so they explain what your actions mean.
Then don’t play it. Also, your last sentence literally describes Pokemon. Wild animals beating the crap out of each other and enslaved by post war child army.
I said this in another comment, but the concept itself is different from the execution though. She watches pokemon, and they regularly talk about respecting the pokemon and treating them with respect. Anybody who treats pokemon as an object without love is shown in a bad light; even team rocket is shown to have great love for their Meowth that they are willing to walk away from Meowth when they think Meowth would have a better life elsewhere. On palworld steam description, they literally say pals can be treated any way you want because they thankfully don’t have any human rights issues. Kids don’t think of the bigger picture, or the deeper meaning beyond what they actually see. I’m not saying the game is bad. I’m just saying I don’t like the game for how it is, and it’s definitely not a kids game where as pokemon can be.
I mean if they really respected the pokemon they’d leave them in the wild instead of beating the shit out of them and then grooming them to do their bidding. Oh yeah, cool this guy treats his slaves better than that guy. Lol!
Brother every pokemon is a slave. You force them into a ball by beating them and then force them to fight other pokemons until they pass out.
So the dog-fighting ring of Pokémon battles is fine but making the Pokémon manufacture pants is too far?
I don’t use mine as slaves. I just force them to hang out with me at my camp and they just happen to do chores for me… cause they like it
That’s the way I see it. Show me a slave owner who just kinda let their slaves wander around without any kind of restraints, and let them do whatever they want
the default setting is literally called humane, too, where the pals will just stop working if they feel cranky
if’s effectively a commune with extremely suspect recruting methods
Prisoners with jobs? Lady, you’re not making it any better. “Entrepreneurs and collaborators with restricted rights”, that’s what they are!
It’s definitely not a kid game. The descriptions of the pals tells how some of them are used for torture, sex, drugs, religion all sorts of wild shit. I really hope they keep that up to because imo the game is better for it.
Pokemon always was a dog fighting economy. Growing up with it never thought about how dark it was but we old now.
Fun seeing an absurd matured version of monster catching dog fighting economy.
Idk if it’ll be living up to hype a year from now, but for now pretty fun. Also love seeing game freak miss out on all this money. You dummies have known people wanted something like this for decades!
It was about beetle fighting. One of the core sources of inspiration is based on how groups of kids(in Japan) go into the woods to find the biggest beetle they could, bring them back and have them fight.
The electric Pokemon were forced to work at the power plant in the first season of the anime. Pokemon have always been slaves. I totally get not liking the presentation, though. It’s far more grotesque and not abstracted away.
Considering how the steam page reads, it’s like a full blown parody by simply pointing out what Pokemon’s world must be like through the eyes of an adult.
Pals can be used to fight, or they can be made to work on farms or factories. You can even sell them or eat them!
Put an army of Pals on the job. Don’t worry; there are no labor laws for Pals.
Letting Pals do the work is the key to automation. 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.
Endangered Pals live in wildlife sanctuaries. Sneak in and capture rare Pals to get rich quick! It’s not a crime if you don’t get caught, after all.
Okay, then I suppose the game is not suitable for eight year olds. That’s fine, I play a lot of games that are not suitable for eight year olds.
Yeah like I said in another comment, the game is not a kids game, and that is fine. However, the game looks cute and charming, and very like pokemon, which makes it very attractive for kids, and makes me concerned for any kid who likes playing this game.
The concern over children liking Palworld is akin to all those unfounded concerns about shooter games “causing” violence.
Humans, even small children, are VERY capable to separate fiction from reality. There’s no problem at all about a kid wanting to play a game about catching animals and using them to build your base.
That might actually be true up to a certain age. She was really into Powerpuff girls when she was 5, and I had to switch it to something else because she was aggressive a lot. It was like a switch turned off a week after I stopped ppg. Anecdotal, but yeah some things are not suitable for some ages.
Not entirely a dismissable concern, admittedly, but also not relevant for me for deciding whether or not I should give that game a try.
Obvious bait is obvious
That’s what pokemon is though. It’s cock fighting and animal slavery. I knew that as a teen when I played the original games and watched the original show. And pokemon Manga is even more violent.
It definitely takes the “Pokémon are slaves” thing and runs with it. You can kill and eat the pals. Some of them are very “human”. You basically stop short of actually whipping them, though I’m sure they’d add that in.
Edit: maybe I’ll clarify, the Syndicate is a group against the mistreatment of pals. You can capture them and force them to work for you. The player is very much the bad guy here.
The Syndicate isn’t against the mistreatment of pals. It’s the team rocket here. They keep pals in metal cages, which you release.
The pal liberation front is what you’re describing instead.
Oh sorry. My bad. I guess I don’t feel bad about enslaving those guys.
Well, yes I do, but they’re darn handy.
The player is the bad guy because of a mechanic that exists but isn’t encouraged? There are plenty of games that allow the player character to commit awful crimes. You only play as the bad guy if you’re playing as the bad guy.
Wtf?! I guess that’s part of the charm.
Stop parroting media lines. Its not a fucking slavery sim, nor has any game that uses the mechanic of Help ever been.
The game is still in early access and has plans to officially support mods. Either the devs will make a “PG” setting or someone will mod it to be more child friendly.
I haven’t played the game yet. Not sure if I will. But I’ve seen some gameplay, and, honestly, it bothers me too, and not just because beating up Pokemon feels bad. My main problem is that it could have been done in a better way that would make me feel less bad lol
The pals should be dangerous! Even the basic starter ones!
I play a Pokemon TTRPG where you can beat up Pokemon with your bare hands if you want. The difference is, they’re not helpless. A trainer without any investment in their personal combat skills is roughly a suitable match for a low level Ratata. Even in the video games, there’s a reason Professor Birch got cornered by a couple Zigzagoon. It’s the same reason you’re not allowed in the long grass without a Pokemon.
Pokemon are magical monsters that can just straight up kill you. There’s a big difference between fighting something like that, on basically equal footing, and punching a helpless stuffed animal.
After seeing a few videos about it, it’s a pass for me. Pretty plainly a soulless legally distinct mishmash of random design elements with nothing to bring to the table creatively
If this was a soulless cash grab, it wouldn’t be half as optimized as it is now. I climbed a peak, and could see the other side of the map without any frame drops. AAA titles still struggle to do that.
It is bootleg Pokemon, but it’s also a well made game.
Good graphics isn’t good games though?
Like yeah someone with relatively okay skill could duplicate a famous painting, but we wouldn’t make them famous for it. Art is about making interesting choices.
I said nothing about graphics.
The game mechanics are interwoven pretty well, the performance is great, and the pal fights are unique and full of personality.
The people who made this game busted their asses. That’s the opposite of soulless.
I’m having terrible seeing it, but if you’re happy that’s great. I barely have time for the games I’m excited about from three years ago, so who am I to criticise?
the optimization is weird because yeah you can see far as hell and it looks good enough, but at the same time my entirely decent GPU can’t run it in 1080p on lowest settings
i just wish they’d implemented the resolution setting to only apply to the game world, it’s kind of idiotic to have it affect the UI as well…
Nah. It’s the Vampire Survivors of the “catch em all” genre. I thought it looked like ass in the videos - and it does! - but when you have your own hands on the controller it’s a different experience. Again, like VS, it lands in a sweet spot re: progression, expansion, new interactions, etc.
I tell people “it’s the least polished game I’ve ever played for 20+ hours”.
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They only took legal action against a mod author, yeah?
Correct, Palworld is legally fine
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