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Palworld isn’t slowing down, hits 19 million players across Steam and Xbox
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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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.
This feels like a weird take if you haven’t even played it. Like, how would you know?
The game is flawed, but genuinely super fun, and has a ton going for it outside of “Pokemon with guns”. In a lot of ways it’s what I always wished Pokemon could be, at least in the ways it makes its monsters feel unique and like actual partners instead of battle slaves, which is ironic considering Palworld is the one with actual slavery.
I doubt a no name company would be pulling all this attention out of marketing alone. If it was this easy everyone would do it.
In all fairness, this is not a great game. It's a very derivative game whose only appeal is that it combines things in a way that hasn't been done much. Like many other hype trains of questionable quality, it just happened to scratch the right itch for the right people at the right time.
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
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 😅
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.
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.