Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 212
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Not sure if people here play vidya, but I've seen scattered mentions so why not, this is now a vidya subthread. Have you played anything recently?
I've recently sunk an embarrassing amount of hours into Palworld, the "Pokemon at home" game that continues to break all-time records on Steam (second only to PUBG atm) and make Twitter seethe ever since it released into (very) early access a week ago. It's very janky and barebones, but the
PokemonPal designs are imo solid and the core idea is incredibly fun. I wanted a more mature take on Pokemon and/or a proper open-world game in the franchise for decades - and judging by the absolute fecal tornadoes all over Twitter, Steam forums, 4chan etc. I'm far from the only one - and this game, while obviously being a parody, very much delivers both in one package.Despite the obvious, obvious Pokemon parallels, the core gameplay is more reminiscent of ARK and other survival basebuilding games, with the key distinctions being 1) real-time combat, 2) the player being an entity on their own with weapons and shit instead of just a walking roster of pokemon, 3) base management revolving around putting your
pokemonpals to work: some can chop or mine, Fire-types kindle ore furnaces, crops are planted by Grass-types and watered by Water-types, humanoid ones craft or harvest with their hands, etc. etc.There are human NPCs in the game too, and if decades ago you've ever wondered what would happen if you threw a pokeball at a human, Palworld's answer is pretty decisive. Call me a rube but this pleases me greatly. American Pokemon, indeed.
The (Japanese, ironically) devs are a proper Ragtag Bunch of Misfits if 4chan translations of their JP TV interviews are to be believed. Bonus points for their (similarly unverified) justifications for guns and the typical current-year "Type 1/Type 2" character creator.
Of course I cannot fail to mention that the #69 entry of the
PokedexPaldeck is, I shit you not, a giant pink sex lizard complete with a heart-shaped crotch plate, whose ingame description explicitly mentions its taste for humans. My first encounter was having my base raided by a bunch of them and it was hysterical, I dislike furries/scalies but I cannot bring myself to disrespect such a mind-bogglingly based approach. Salazzle ain't shit.The fact of how shameless the game is about itself probably says a lot about our gaming society in the current year, but personally I enjoy both the game itself and the controversy it generates. It's already been accused of everything under the sun, from the obvious animal abuse/slavery complaints, to blatantly ripping off Pokemon, to using AI for its models (I mean, take one look at Lovander above and tell me that is AI generated). Be warned - it is extremely janky and definitely not for everyone, it's in dire need of fixes ASAP, but the core gameplay feels incredibly fresh and I pray devs (having become millionaires overnight) will keep their collective nose to the grindstone. Game Freak urgently needs competition like 15 years ago.
Can someone steelman the shitstorm for me? My brain keeps boiling it down to "these losers have no right to be this successful" and "brand loyalty gone too far", am I missing something?
The steelman is that it looks and feels a lot like shovelware, and both Minecraft-likes and the basebuilding genres are filled with them, to the genres' detriment.
Rayon bring up ARK, and that gets pretty bad at times -- the game is notoriously buggy (and so prone to subtle save-breaking glitches that most servers will run up days or up to a week of save backups, at 100+mb per), depended on user mods for basic QoL functionality for the better part of a decade, is hilariously (500GB install!) badly optimized, and throws out increasingly unbalanced expansion- or map-specific content into a heavily PvP-focused game -- but the worst part is that it's a success story, despite the flirtations with bankruptcy. It made it to a mostly-working final release, it has a fandom today, you can (and imo should) run your own servers, the story completed with the third expansion (and then got two fillers to bridge to the sequel, releasing in
2022 2024SoonTM). Similarly, Eco is still getting updates five years in, and always been as much as political statement as an actual game, but it's also mostly been lipstick on a pig.By contrast, Windborne died a pretty awful death, and TUG was taken down to await a v2.0 that will never come. Planet Explorers is at least free to play (with story DLC), which I absolutely can't recommend. Skysaga] actually got a small fandom together before falling over. And those are the memorable ones.
Even where it's not that overt of a failure, there's just a lot of stuff that gets made with asset flips, feted at length, given a long and shiny roadmap, and then completely ignored. There's nothing that inherently prevents this stuff from having tons of polish, or unique or clever mechanics or story, but there's a lot of reasons to be suspicious, not least of all that the previous game from the same dev has a lot of mechanical overlap... and are still in early access.
Palworld seems like it has more work put toward it, and it looks more competent, but no small amount of that reflects the Unity sphere have better cheap assets available. And especially if Nintendo decides to leave a
RapidashRooby's head in the developer's bed, there's more reasons than normal to expect that this game might not get out of eternal early access. Which gets to the more common complaint.The more common complaint is that it's incredibly overt in its cloning, even by the standards of satire. Now, that satire is genuinely present, if sometimes crossing the line from 'biting and clever' to 'Rick and Morty would think it a little too low', but even if this (might -- Japan doesn't really have a fair use exception for parody) make it legal as a matter of law, it makes a lot of things feel particularly shallow at first glance, and lazy more often. I don't know that this would have been as big an issue five years ago, but AI-gen and Palworld dev's takes on AI don't help, even if I'm skeptical that any AI-gen was used here -- I think that's a lot of what started things off.
((And it doesn't just borrow the mons, which tbf are only sometimes that bad. The tech tree's UI layout is very reminiscent of Ark's, for example, which... why? It's famously bad there, why not at least steal something that doesn't suck?))
The... less charitable take is that the line between condone and criticize has almost completely dissolved for at least some of the political field. The game features firearms, animal cruelty, slave labor,
pokepal-cannibalism and -shields (and whatever the 'pal essence' gimmick is), so on, all as things the players can do, and some that you're pretty strongly incentivized to do. And whatever charity that some people might have been willing to extend (or overextend) if they liked the stuff, they're absolutely going to hate on it if they already didn't want to like the game's concept.A valid concern, but surely, at this point everybody buying early access knows what they're signing up for?
Now this is the bit I feel I need explained - so what? I understand why Nintendo would be crying for blood, but so far they seem to be the most reasonable people of all involved, how is this a problem for players? Cheap knock-offs have been a thing since forever, normally buying one would mark you as low-status, so my first question is, if it's really that bad, how did this thing take off at all? Why is everybody trying to get in on some of the action, rather than pointing and laughing at all the losers playing discount-pokemon? Perhaps naively, the first explanation that comes to mind is that they must be scratching some kind of an itch people can't get scratched anywhere else, and so my brain ends up rounding it off to jealousy. Am I missing something obvious about cloning being bad?
Well if you want to say the UI sucks, that's fair enough, but I cannot take the complaint of "stealing UI" seriously.
Imagine Lego veering off into self-referential and obscure new themes, or concentrating too much on third-party themes with lots of custom parts and no real rebuildability. Then one of the Chinese toy makers, like Mould King, releases a Lego-compatible city or space or pirate line-up of sets. The designs are clearly Lego-inspired, but they are original and full of clever interactive stuff, the pieces fit together well enough that you don't really notice it's not Lego, and when they release a new locomotive they damn well make sure it can be motorized.
So you get vocal Lego purists that say they will never touch these sets, and a lot of people who go, "wow, I can't believe it's this good, it's like Lego, but fun again!"
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link