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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.
I got recruited and then quit one of the Ark official pvp megatribes last month.
The game runs like shit atm, it's never going to not suck for that type of gameplay, and if that tribe is any indication, over time (2015-2023) the average IQ of megatribe players went down by cca 10 pts. That they added pokéballs and made everything simpler didn't help. I mean to write a detailed review of the online pvp play given the hours I've spent on it. It was an interesting social experiment.
Palworld sounds intriguing conceptwise but is violently disgusting me aesthetically, and seeing how much Ark sucked to me because of bad programming, and how much it still sucks - bases spend minutes to fully load even now, the idea of playing something like Ark but written by even bigger amateurs is out of the question.
Programming wise I'd be leery to invest any time in it even if it had impeccable aesthetics and instead of using pokéballs to catch monsters the logistic gameplay loop involved firing nets to catch impossibly attractive waifus and putting them to work on the ammo production lines.
No experience with MP, I mostly play solo because I
have no friendsburned out completely on PVP, I lasted about 300hrs in Apex before uninstalling and haven't played a FPS since. For the same reasons I haven't tried Palworld MP, the game is a week old and the jank is all over the place, on release your guildmates could literally corrupt your MP savefile even if you were offline.According to the roadmap PVP is a priority for devs once they squash all the major bugs, which, uh, doesn't fill me with confidence. I understand this is vital for the game's longevity but this (unreleased) thing sounds like a recipe for disaster and I dread to imagine the soulless metafaggotry which will immediately infest the Pokemon aspect of the game, I confidently predict the most meta pal will be Pengullet because it can be found very early on and its innate skill, available closer to midgame, launches him as a fuck-off nuke that obliterates everything in the blast radius (including the Pengullet). Not to mention the standard PVP survcrafting woes where the sole marker of your success in multiplayer is how little you sleep to amass resources 24/7 and sabotage opponents while they're offline. Here's hoping the game doesn't go the way of Fortnite StW and I can still enjoy an occasional update not aimed at PVP.
Besides, jank is good in moderation, so what if you can capture bosses via a glitch and their mons have like 10x the HP of a normal one? Look, it still has Zoe on its back! I can
fix herput her to work!You jest(?) but I legitimately hope this "genre" becomes a fad and takes off, there's definitely a lot of (evidently untapped) potential here.
The boss capture glitch should really become a legit feature, beat a giant lightning Totoro and get the girl as a bonus. The game already lets you capture humans so what's the holdup, worst case you can always sell her off to a shady smuggler or something.
The trick there of course is to befriend people around the globe with the same problem so there's always someone online.
That's how people solved the problem in Ark. Once you were in a crew of ~30 and allied to a couple hundred group, you could rest easy knowing nobody but the biggest guys would invade you. And even if they logged into the server in mass and hogged all the slots, you could always crash the server to get in your own guys to even things out.
Devolved into days long siege battles. Not great, not terrible tbh.
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