I searched and was surprised there wasn’t already a topic on the game Palworld, available on PC and XBox.
The game has set sales records, selling on Steam at a rate of about a million a day. At most recent count, from three days ago, it is over 8 million sold just on Steam, not counting XBox/Gamepass.
I am the least-informed person in the world on Pokemon, but even I can see this is really, really derivative of the Pokemon look and basic mechanics (i.e. throw a ball to “capture” one). But lots of games are derivative; how many Banished clones are there? Stranded Alien Dawn is mechanically an exact copy of Rimworld, but if feels so much different.
I bought the game despite (valid, probably) criticisms, because ultimately for me the jaded player, I care about the feel of the progression and gather-build-explore-advance feedback loop.
I’m about 3 hours in, and I’m happy with my purchase. It lets me build pretty much anywhere I want, and I’m not limited to a grid - I can micro-adjust the placement of building pieces and equipment. And building is not onerous, like Ark: I can chop 1 tree, and that gives me enough wood to lay down a few pieces of ~4x6 foot flooring foundation. I am barely scratching the surface so far, but it seems the game will let me play it the way I want to play it, which means a lot to me.
I love everything about the game except the look. It’s unfortunate, because I think it would be perfect for me, but the most cartoony look I can take nowadays is Grounded.
I’m not into Pokemon at all but a number of friends bought this and are enjoying it and one set up a server so I’m tempted to buy in just to run with the crowd. Thank heavens they’re not all jumping off a bridge. One thing the game has going for it is the $30 price tag which is much more accessible for an impulse buy than $60+
Most of the criticisms seem to boil down to:
(a) People mad on Nintendo’s behalf, because Pokemon
(b) People mad because apparently you can capture people and something something slavery?
(c) People mad because the devs used AI and that makes them creatively & morally bankrupt
Really, I suspect most (b) complaints are people mainly mad about (a) or (c) and trying to bolster their argument with “Plus playing this games means that you love slavery”.
I’m surprised that Nintendo let it get this far since I’d heard about this well before it released so it’s not like it got snuck onto Steam in the dark of night. Maybe they just didn’t think it was going to amount to anything and I’m wondering now if it’s not too large to effectively kill. Sending takedown notices to mod designers and ROM sites is one thing and obviously Nintendo is a big dog but $140,000,000+ (7mil x $30 less 33%*) can still buy you some decent legal defense.
*Technically Steam’s cut is smaller once you hit a certain point so the total is higher but I don’t feel like looking up the math
I downloaded it today since it was made available via Game Pass on Xbox. It manages to be surprisingly deep but with a gentle learning curve. I’ve been able to figure things out very well on my own but every time I turn a corner there’s some new thing to build and learn about.
I’m making mistakes along the way but so far nothing seems to be that much of a setback. For example, if you build the wrong thing or in the wrong place, you can deconstruct it and get back all of the materials you used to build it, all you’ve lost is whatever time it took to build it.
If you get in over your head and die you respawn naked but you can run back to loot your stuff like Minecraft (except it’s all in one neat little bag and there’s a waypoint so you can’t miss it).
It’s a weird combination of Conan Exiles (minus the swinging genitalia) and Pokemon that somehow works extremely well.
You probably already know this, but one of the things I appreciate is that you can customize the difficulty settings (yes, even after you’ve already created the game); besides the Easy-Medium-Hard setting, you can choose Custom and tweak a very wide variety of settings (including what is dropped on death). XP gain, food drain, and so forth.
Personally, it’s a less-buggy Pokemon skin of Ark. Given that I definitely have dealt with Ark addiction, and like the world of Pokemon, if not the gameplay, it’s perfect. When it goes live and is stable, my family will almost certainly have a server set up. Until then, it’s fun to play with the family.
As I was playing this game I thought, I better enjoy it while it lasts. This is way too close to Pokemon to not get its pants sued off. Some of the “pals” I saw were so close to specific Pokemon characters I had to look twice to make sure they weren’t straight up copies.
Maybe, and I don’t really have a dog in the fight, but usually I see stuff like “Someone just released a fan-made Pokemon Zirconium game!” and six hours later it’s “Well, hope you downloaded it because it got nuked”.
To see something like this remain up for over a week and that’s after it was well known about is pretty remarkable in my (however limited) experience. Granted, a fan-made game full of actual Pikachus and Squirtles is probably more open & shut than a game full of collectible monsters that are sort of Pokemon with the serial numbers filed off but the slow response feels weird. And also feels like it might be harder TO respond to the longer it goes on, the more copies are sold, etc. If nothing else, if Palworld got nuked, you have 7-8 million gamers who just had their toys taken away by Nintendo.
Someone made a Palworld mod that just changed the Pals to their Pokemon counterparts. Nintendo shut that down within a day. They might have some room around the edges with some of the more questionable counterparts, but Nintendo doesn’t have a monopoly on creature capture games.
I suspect that Palworld’s critter implementation is “different enough” from their Nintendo inspiration that the legal eagles have to split hairs very carefully to find a cause of action.
But the mod with a complete ripoff of Pokemon’s designs was an easy slam dunk.
Competition is good. I look at companies that are perhaps too dominant in their given niche (Creative Assembly and Total War, Paradox and Grand Strategy, Firaxis and historical 4x games, Frontier and park building games) and I see a lack of innovation.
Frontier wrapped up Planet Coaster without ever adding water rides, and is about to wrap up Planet Zoo without ever going for aquatic or flying animals. We also haven’t seen things like object scaling or universal flexicolor props.
The Civ series tends to push out one big change with each generation of games, but the formula is quite stagnant outside of this.
The Total War series hasn’t really innovated much in years, and has instead stripped many old features, like naval combat.
And then you get an indie developer adding a bunch of the features missing from Planet Zoo in Prehistoric Kingdom.
Or you see a new company come out of left field with a Civ clone that’s got a bunch of fresh mechanics. We’ve had a few of these, and there are some more upcoming ones. Some are hits, some are misses, but all took more creative risk than the latest Civ series entires.
So my point is that more games in the Pokemon genre can only be a good thing.
The game has been setting records like crazy. We stopped getting info on sales but my guess is that it’s probably over 10 million by now. And it also reached the 2nd most concurrently played game on Steam ever, right behind Pubg with 2.1 million concurrent users.
Crazy. I’ve been playing it on and off, but Enshrouded is got it’s hooks on me. It’s like a more polished version of Valheim.
I have been playing the hell out of Palworld. It definitely needs polish (the most frustrating thing is trying and failing to pick up pals, or trying and failing to assign them to tasks), but it’s a ton of fun. My brother and I and some friends have a multiplayer server, and fighting a boss as part of a team is a completely different experience from fighting one solo.
That and pal pathing are my biggest issues. It’s frustrating to watch a miner stand around because they can’t get to the one node they want to mine, while they stand in front of another node of the exact same thing. Or wandering off cliffs, or up stairs, or stuck on stairs. The developer has already noted it and stated it’s one of their biggest priorities to fix.
That said, I’m starting a breeding program this evening on the family server. A lucky egg has made it possible to breed ten rare Pals from a bunch of more common ones. The breeding system is interesting - you can breed any two Pals, as long as it’s a heterosexual mix, but there’s a very good chance the result isn’t close to either of them, instead being roughly the middle of their power/rarity.
With enough time/patience/research, you can eventually breed all the way up to the original rare Pal in most cases.
Multiplayer (like most open-world survival games, IMO) is where it truly shines. Everyone in my family enjoys doing different things, and it makes things simpler for everyone else. One brother likes exploring and gathering resources, another is just here for the blood, my SIL is the queen of base building and management, and I just like making new things and Pals. So there’s always food made up, but SIL doesn’t have to gather the resources for it. I can breed Pals without having to hunt around for ingredients for cake, or the resources for an incubator, or Pals to breed. Brother#1 can just wander around enjoying the views, and Brother#2 has everything he needs for murder rampages.
Some of the world settings seem wonky, too. For instance, we turned down the time for hatching huge eggs, and everything else hatches instantly. We’re still trying to find the sweet spot for experience, as capturing/killing Pals yields significantly more experience than buildings and the like.
I’m debating whether or not to find a big flat space, dismantle my whole base, and move it there. I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle but it might be.
