Palworld

[Tweed]

Is Nintendo still secretly running love hotels?

[maidenhaver]

They transcend the mob, they're the Disney of the World.

[Vergil]

Nintendo investigating **** fighting rings for infringement

[rockheart13]

It's a pretty engaging game, particularly if you're into open-world games. I enjoy the crafting and building aspects, which let you really make your mark on the game's world.
I fully jumped into the experience by getting my own Palworld server hosting set up. It allows me to customize the gameplay with friends, avoiding downtime and server issues, which has greatly improved the overall fun. So, I totally recommend it to other players.

[SoLong]

It seems intriguing even though the realistic guns in the hands of cute critters just... don't mesh. If the guns at least used the same anime aesthetic or the critters were more realistic it wouldn't cause such a weird sense of dissonance.

Also there's apparently zero story. I do need some reason to engage with the game though. Otherwise it's just a giant sandbox like Fallout 76.

[Lich]

It looks like a meme game but it has enough engaging stuff to remain popular.

[Magick]

Yeah I think the guns could have done with being "in universe", like the alien Half-life / Opposing Force weapons. Using realistic guns is just silly.

Just another Ark Survival Evolved type thing. As soon as it's done with being flavour of the month, it will fade out.

[Orvas Dren]

It seems intriguing even though the realistic guns in the hands of cute critters just... don't mesh. If the guns at least used the same anime aesthetic or the critters were more realistic it wouldn't cause such a weird sense of dissonance.

Also there's apparently zero story. I do need some reason to engage with the game though. Otherwise it's just a giant sandbox like Fallout 76.

Beyond optimization issues, this was my biggest thing. The game is basically just a meme. Can a meme game be fun? I guess, but I'm not paying $30 for a meme. It's just a dumbed-down version of Ark's island except even more jarring and for only 4 players.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I haven't played a survival game since the Minecraft alpha on a web browser in 2010. Is this game fundamentally different? Seems like you mine resources and build, and... ??? What makes this different than playing Minecraft with a Pokemon mod? Besides the hillarity of putting furballs into sweat shops?

[Orvas Dren]

An openworld pokemon game where you just freely explore and catch pokemon in an idyllic worldspace would be a gazillion times better than this slop, not sure how any actual pokemon fan can say this is the pokemon game "they've always wanted".

[Oyster Sauce]

An openworld pokemon game where you just freely explore and catch pokemon in an idyllic worldspace would be a gazillion times better than this slop, not sure how any actual pokemon fan can say this is the pokemon game "they've always wanted".

That already exists and it's terrible because Game Freak is the absolute worst game developer in the world on a profit:quality basis

[Orvas Dren]

An openworld pokemon game where you just freely explore and catch pokemon in an idyllic worldspace would be a gazillion times better than this slop, not sure how any actual pokemon fan can say this is the pokemon game "they've always wanted".

That already exists and it's terrible because Game Freak is the absolute worst game developer in the world on a profit:quality basis

lol not sure how you eff up the formula they already have but I believe it.

[rusty_shackleford]

An openworld pokemon game where you just freely explore and catch pokemon in an idyllic worldspace would be a gazillion times better than this slop, not sure how any actual pokemon fan can say this is the pokemon game "they've always wanted".

That already exists and it's terrible because Game Freak is the absolute worst game developer in the world on a profit:quality basis

lol not sure how you eff up the formula they already have but I believe it.

Because they have a cultlike fanbase willing to shell out money for any product and will go to any length to defend them.
See: legions of nintentroon fans mass reporting palworld to nintendo trying to get nintendo to sue them.

[Segata]

[ArcaneLurker]

"Everyone who supports this game just told every other company that trying hard is futile"

God... I hope all the ****** stop trying to make games...
I have a feeling this is ******** though. I don't know what about the new Pokemon games says "hard work" rather than "taking the ****."

"I'm shaking every night" peak libtard fragility

Of course they support microtransactions.

[rusty_shackleford]

the irony is that the game copies far more from ark and similar than pokemans
nintendo fans are just cultists

[ArcaneLurker]

Ark copies from Survival Kids

[rusty_shackleford]

my favorite iteration of the creature collector has to be conan exiles, where you're collecting slaves

eenie meenie miny moe
catch a ****** by the toe


genuinely no idea how this game got past the culture censors, and yes, that's my slave I caught being dragged under me on my lift up to my fort

[maidenhaver]

An openworld pokemon game where you just freely explore and catch pokemon in an idyllic worldspace would be a gazillion times better than this slop, not sure how any actual pokemon fan can say this is the pokemon game "they've always wanted".

Many popular pokemon romhacks try to be edgy and fail, because the autists making them are locked into what "true" pokemon should be, instead of starting over from gen1's ambiguity.

[rusty_shackleford]

pokemon fans are the reason pokemon games aren't as popular anymore
literally nobody except ****** on tumblr care about pokemons after the first game, and that's a fact

[ArcaneLurker]

[anonusername]

the irony is that the game copies far more from ark and similar than pokemans
nintendo fans are just cultists

It isn't just the nintendo fans being ******* about this. There are a ton of lefty midwit devs who felate themselves over their "creativity" and want to feel unique by making an "innovative" game. This is why they hate studios that just make fun entertainment without pretensions and outsell their crap. Ironically many of the people now siding with the Nintendo fanboys like to attack Nintendo games for being "behind the times" or "recycling the same gameplay".

[LemonDemonGirl]

Pokemon can be played on pc if you use an emulator tho

[Vergil]

the irony is that the game copies far more from ark and similar than pokemans
nintendo fans are just cultists

It isn't just the nintendo fans being ******* about this. There are a ton of lefty midwit devs who felate themselves over their "creativity" and want to feel unique by making an "innovative" game. This is why they hate studios that just make fun entertainment without pretensions and outsell their crap. Ironically many of the people now siding with the Nintendo fanboys like to attack Nintendo games for being "behind the times" or "recycling the same gameplay".

Just like with BG3 it's mostly seethe from incompetent ******* that everything they've worked on has been a flop that will never earn them any respect or recognition.

[Magick]

My eyes are tired so I cba to read the entire thread, but has it been mentioned that the ****** who alleged that they "stole pokemon assets 1 for 1" (with the meshes lining up exactly), literally fabricated it all because "Palworld glorifies animal abuse"?

[Vergil]

My eyes are tired so I cba to read the entire thread, but has it been mentioned that the ****** who alleged that they "stole pokemon assets 1 for 1" (with the meshes lining up exactly), literally fabricated it all because "Palworld glorifies animal abuse"?

Elongated should have destroyed that ****** *** website when he had the chance.

[maidenhaver]

I want all the mississippi river states and gulf to pretty much genocide everyone else.

[anonusername]

the irony is that the game copies far more from ark and similar than pokemans
nintendo fans are just cultists

It isn't just the nintendo fans being ******* about this. There are a ton of lefty midwit devs who felate themselves over their "creativity" and want to feel unique by making an "innovative" game. This is why they hate studios that just make fun entertainment without pretensions and outsell their crap. Ironically many of the people now siding with the Nintendo fanboys like to attack Nintendo games for being "behind the times" or "recycling the same gameplay".

Just like with BG3 it's mostly seethe from incompetent ******* that everything they've worked on has been a flop that will never earn them any respect or recognition.

And anything they worked on that *wasn't* a flop succeeded because other people made it fun, not because of their "creative" additions.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have begun playing Palworld.




It plays like Minecraft survival mode where you start naked and have a hunger bar ticking down, and have to pick up wood to craft an axe to chop down trees to get more wood so you can build a campfire or a wooden shack, cook berries and eat them, etc. Unlike Minecraft, the terrain is not destructible, and you have even less granular control over the huge walls you put up. So you can't make the beautiful buildings you want to, just ugly blocky wooden shacks. After games that have come out a decade ago like Everquest Next began tinkering around with voxels which allow terrain destruction and for really granular control over your creations, I thought that would have become a standard of Minecraft clones by now, but I guess not.

The only other somewhat notable thing about the game is that you have "creatures" called Pals that you can fight, capture, and make them work for you. But they do not feel like real creatures at all. The wild Pals don't look for streams or lakes to drink from, or sniff for scents and go hunting, or forage for berries in bushes or fish in a river or overturn rocks to eat the bugs underneath, or migrate across the map, or mate, etc. They just slow walk in circles doing nothing, and then maybe sleep at night. Some Pals I have seen never sleep and just wander around in their area forever.

When you do beat up and capture a Pal, it becomes automatically 100% loyal to you. They feel robotic. They never refuse an order and have to be trained or coaxed. They never become curious and run off to investigate something like in Hey You Pikachu or the horse Agro in Shadow of the Colossus. And the Pals assigned to your base operate like automatons doing the work you assign them to do. They never interact with each other. I saw a Pal walk into my campfire and light on fire, and my water pal did nothing about it. Cattiva's lore says that it plays tricks on other Pals, but I never saw my Cattivas do that. And like with the Pokemon franchise, your Pals feel interchangeable given that you can just acquire a new, better Pal and stash your old one into storage and continue on. Or bring out an old Pal you abandoned in inventory long ago and it will serve you with smiles or sore muscles no problem.

The moment to moment gameplay is not very enjoyable. When you are at base, you are tediously running between your materials farms and chests moving stacks of materials around to build a few items at the workstations. While out in the world, you slowly "gallop" across the bland environment on your steed. While riding, nothing is really a threat to you as hostile mobs have short and narrow fields of vision, don't notice you until you have already ridden by, and can't catch up to you or reach you with their ranged attacks. You have a glider but take no fall damage, so you can just leap off of a 500 foot tall cliff on your giant cat and hit the ground and keep going no problem. So navigation is overall boring. The only difficulty is when you are trying to climb up, which strangely is done with your human character slowly climbing the cliff with their barehands rather than involving the use of a Pal to climb up. Missed opportunity there.




Also, another issue is that while out in the world, you need to be using a rideable Pal to get around, but once you enter combat it takes too much time to dismount, recall the mount Pal back into its ball, switch to the other Pal's ball that you really wanted to use for combat, and throw that out. And then do the process in reverse once combat is over and you want to mount up and ride away. So most of the roster of Pals becomes unused for combat as you exclusively rely on the mount Pals.




It is also strange and irritating that you can't just acquire a mounted Pal and then ride it. You have to first be of a certain level to be able to craft that Pal's saddle, and then you can ride it. So I have hatched a large flying boss bird Pal, and it has lore saying that trainers can fly on it, but I can't ride it right now, because apparently I am not high enough level or something.




There are some other miscellaneous issues. Pals can't navigate your interior base, so stuff inside you set up to be constructed like chests or beds never gets finished, and Pals can't navigate to their beds or to the hot springs up on the roof. So Pals are constantly either working in place far away from the object they are supposed to be working on, or are being teleported.




It is immersion breaking and a little frustrating how I or my Pals chop down trees, only for those exact trees to respawn the next day. Land never remains cleared.




So far, Depresso is the only Pal that feels like it has a personality, with it slow mining or dragging items across the ground, but there is no reason to use it when you have limited worker slots in your base, and alternative better Pals are so plentiful and easily accessible.




The world feels very artificial. The game starts off with you apparently having been shipwrecked on some island. There are lots of random bandit factions and hideouts all over the island, and it is not clear how these hundreds of people got onto this island, why they are all bandits, how they are different from each other, etc. There are also towers dotted across the island that when you enter, has you get into a boss battle with another human trainer and their boss Pal, and again there no explanation for who this person is or why they are at this tower or why they fighting you. There is an oil rig with bandits on it, but no freighters going to and fro the oil rig, so it just seems like a randomly placed oil rig on an unsettled island. And so on.




It is also not clear why I am crafting traditional Japanese/Ainu looking clothes, while everyone else is wearing modern American corporate/globohomo clothing. Feels like two different time periods.




The game has your usual bland Western AAA game UI, which is surprising because my understanding is that this is made by Japanese devs, who tend to have higher aesthetic standards.

Combat is boring. You just circle strafe around a mob while holding down the left mouse button to jab it with your spear. Your Pal deals most of the damage and sometimes serve as as a distraction, pulling the mobs' aggro.

I accidentally killed the first boss pal before I could successfully capture it, and apparently it does not respawn. Flashbacks to when I was a kid playing Pokemon Sapphire and accidentally KOed Kyogre and saved my game, and became really upset when my dad looked up online and told me that he's gone forever in that playthrough. Fortunately there were duplicates of the same species wandering around on the snowy mountain, though trying to get one of the same size would probably require a lot of time spent breeding.

There is no music playing during regular gameplay. Some forgettable synthy music starts playing during combat, and that's it.

Overall a 5/10 game. The game was novel to play for an afternoon, but I don't see what all the hype is about. Probably going to drop it.

[buttfucker 3000]

So is it true that you can change the gender of your "pal" by throwing them on top of a surgey table and mutilating their genitals?

I **** you not, someone I was in voice chat with was playing this, and said something like "hey can you swap the gender of your pal, I can throw down a surgery table for you." I've never played this game, so hearing this was quite something.

I might add that they said this in a completely deadpan and nonchalant tone, as if that's not some demonic ****.