Palworld isn’t slowing down, hits 19 million players across Steam and Xbox
Palworld isn’t slowing down, hits 19 million players across Steam and Xbox
Gotta catch ‘em all. (Players, that is.)
Awesome. Game Freak needed some competition, they've been coasting for at least a decade.
I mean, it's more competition for ARK than Pokemon. I doubt Game Freak learns anything from all this unfortunately.
Game Freak will learn absolutely nothing from this, except "People like Pokemon, lets crank out one every 6 months instead of yearly and make them even shittier!"
Maybe. Maybe not. Pokémon isn't successful because it's good. It's successful because people want to play Pokémon. If they can have the same experience of capturing and training Pokémon in a different format and name, it may compete with them. Admittedly, PalWorld is missing a lot of the higher level Pokémon things, but I don't think that matters to the vast majority of players, and hunting for perfect traits may make up for it.
I don't think it's a particularly great game, but I also don't think Pokémon is.
I like Pokemon games for the adventure, turn based combat, and polished stable of monsters. Does palworld have those things?
no pal world is not at all a pokémon-like game. the adventure aspect is idk what to call it, the only adventure really is finding new pals for the first time. it's kind of like ark with some inspirations from BOTW mechanics but you throw some pokemon in there
it does have a good variety of pals but honestly the only thing that feels unique is the appearances/sizes and sometimes the modifiers they have. the actual movesets don't feel very emphasized
in my opinion the actual pal vs pal combat is pretty lackluster, it's definitely not the focus of the game (although using slave labour is a focus of the game)
Nah, this has nothing to do with Pokemon. The whole survival & building aspect isn’t Pokemon at all, and was never what was missing from Pokemon.
Palworld is more like Ark, or even Minecraft, than it is Pokemon. The only thing that’s Pokemon about it is the blatant ripoff monsters.
It's silly fun. No idea if it'll last, but I'm enjoying it.
Happiness is a dead lamball rolling down a cliff
All this time and I still feel horrid farming Lamballs. Why on earth is the fodder creature so damn cute?
I still avoid killing them. :(
Their little death squeals fuel me
Have you seen the most recent Let's Game It Out?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
All the people blaming "clickbait youtubers" or "AI bots" for this game blowing up are idiots. Its actually fun, it delivers a satisfying game loop that no pokemon game ever has, and it has support for multiplayer. It's big enough to explore a lot, has a deep tech tree to unlock, some pretty interesting base automation mechanics, and over 100 pokemon to discover and catch, and a surprisingly robust breeding system to unlock new pokemon instead of evolving. It's just FUN, and lots of games lately lack that. Despite it being buggy and early access, its very playable. I hosted a dedicated server and my friends and I can play together and explore and adventure and find bosses, and work on our base together. Haven't had a game that lets me do that in a long time.
The one thing I don't care much for in PalWorld is building structures (walled structures), it feels kinda janky and restrictive at the moment. Which it hasn't been a major part of the game so far, but it's one of the few things that's bothered me about it. Otherwise, it's been a breath of fresh air compared to Pokemon's recent outings.
You don't want to build much anyway, because you need every inch of your base ring for pal stations, but yeah. We have a 1x1 lean-to with 2 beds in it, the rest is the massive fucking breeding operation we've set up
I've got a dedicated server I play with a few friends, and I got really stoned on the first day and just kept building a building for our base. Next thing I know I've spent six hours on 5 floors (not including an attic space and WiP rooftop garden.. need to unlock more building stuff).
Is this some kinda joke I'm not in on? It's just a shitty ark knockoff
It did what ark failed to do for years and polished the shit off
Ark never has been a good game
It's really not though
It's a good Arc knockoff.
Neat. Hopefully it doesn’t corrupt Pokemon into being a survival/builder game.
Wouldn't want Gamefreak to deviate from the same formulas they've had for decades and have never bothered to change, while putting out worse and worse quality games every year.
Yeah could you imagine the horrors of Pokemon changing their core gameplay loop after decades of stagnation? Horrible. Just look at how it ruined Zelda!
Pokémon can't even shake up enough to figure out what to do with an open world. They took away puzzles and mazes and replaced them with... nothing. Never seen a more boring open world than Scarlet/Violet. No events or minigames, nothing to discover along the way, only bland scenery and low draw distance creatures.
BOTW ruined Zelda for people like me who enjoyed the dungeons, unique items and narrative progression of older games even if it was a great game for open world fans. Pokemon is even further removed from that action-survival gameplay so it's not hard to see why people would want new games to be similar even if the current formula is stale.
Yeah, basically. Breath of the Wild is the worst Zelda game, mainly because it’s not a Zelda game. I know lots of people like it, but it’s not a Zelda game. Same with Palworld. It’s not a Pokemon game.