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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.
To be fair, one man's early access is another man's complete package, in my opinion Early Access titles vastly vary in quality and can be as good as complete games even when still in "beta" (though I do agree open-world survival crafting games have a higher risk factor, it's a meme for a reason). The trick is mostly in sniffing out gems from the piles and piles of shit. The most egregious example is probably 7 Days to Die, it's in "alpha" for over 10 years at this point but it's a complete game for all intents and purposes and I've gotten a lot of hours out of it. Backpack Battles isn't even technically out yet, there's only a demo, but it's deceptively addictive and has surprisingly deep mechanics, which you can put to the test against other players in ranked matches. Chrono Ark keeps delaying its final update but everything else is basically complete, it's extremely impressive mechanics-wise and I genuinely consider it one of the best roguelike deckbuilders out there, above even Slay the Spire. My personal recommendation.
Palworld is... eeeh, 50/50 in this regard I'd say, the core is already incredibly solid and the base building is surprisingly fleshed out, but the AI and especially pathfinding is dreadful and needs immediate fixes, and the midgame onwards needs to be more fleshed out. Copper ore is absolutely central to your progression but you can never get enough of it, it's way too heavy to mine and carry home, and it cannot be reliably automated - ore nodes respawn, but even if you build a base on top of them, your pals will somehow only mine when you are there with them (I once left a base for an hour and came back to 12 pieces of ore, a single node is worth at least 20). Chalk it up to general pathfinding jank, my base pals regularly end up stuck on top of trees, rocks, whatever the fuck and simply give up until I throw them off or they pass out from starvation.
"It was revealed to me in a dream"
Seconding gattsuru below in that Palworld absolutely does scratch an itch that nothing else scratches, for me it was the long-awaited open-world Pokemon game, with real-time combat and a good system of
pokemonpal interactions to boot. I emulated Legends: Arceus before and thought it was pretty decent, but it wasn't until a week ago that it really sank in just how barebones Arceus is, it's arguably even jankier than Palworld, interactions are nonexistent (your ride/glider mons are all fixed unlike Palworld too) and the boss fights are just hilarity, it's basically a normal pokemon battle but occasionally you run around the boss and throw tranqs at it for half a minute so it goes into a battle phase again.Palworld's boss fights, even basic as they are, are so far above in comparison it's not even funny - almost purely by virtue of you the player actively dodging and participating. Even things as simple as the trick of recalling your pal to avoid hard-hitting attacks aimed at it add so much to the perception of yourself as a trainer working in tandem with your team. In my opinion this is exactly what is missing from Pokemon.
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