i might give it a try, how about you guys?

  • grazing7264 [they/them, comrade/them]
    hexbear
    28
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    It's good, like Ark with more automation and you can give the Pokemons lots of cute decorations for their houses, it is very slightly like the Sims when it comes to keeping them happy

    So far I made a chicken commune with a spa, they all grow their own food and have their own jobs, the animals have their own unique roles and talents, planting seeds (plant types), watering (water type), and harvesting+construction+general (general, helpers, cats)

  • DoiDoi [comrade/them, he/him]
    hexbear
    27
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    I love how we have one of these online marketing blitz games every few months now. Like it just has to be all seeded marketing with how these games blow up instantly and are then forgotten after getting a few mil in sales.

    Not even commenting on if it's good or bad. I don't care. Just amazing how these games completely blow up instantly, and even if you don't seek out gaming news you'll still hear about it 100 times this week if you use the internet at all.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      hexbear
      14
      5 months ago

      Afaik it's mostly on the strength of how much fun it is to watch on Twitch. Lethal Company blew up because people with good comedy skills were having a blast doing silly shit with it. Like it's some combination of genuinely looking fun when the streamers do it, and then the algo grabs it and puts it in front of everyone, and then some weird barely playable indy thing is out-selling CoD.

      • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
        hexbear
        9
        5 months ago

        Palworld had masses of attention well before release, it didn't need twitch views to drive sales - the original trailer really connected with people by promising the open world pokemon game they've been fantasising about for 30 years.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          hexbear
          3
          5 months ago

          Ahh. I didn't know htat.

          "What I really wanted ever since Pokemon Red was legally distinctish pokemans with guns and slavery"

          People are very strange.

          • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
            hexbear
            7
            5 months ago

            Pokémon already had that stuff. The anime features lots of guns pretty early on. The slavery is implicit to the capturing idea, they're just not hiding it. Hell, even the sexual assault pal is preferable to Drowzee and Hypno's implications.
            Being able to interact with those things is what people wanted - Mons in the open world that interact with each other, that have predator/prey dynamics, that you can hunt for food or just catch. Mons that you can use for things other than fighting people, that you can actually ride around, that you can put to work building or making things for you.
            They're all things we got to see NPC's doing in the games, the game just lets you do them too.

      • @IvarK@lemmygrad.ml
        hexbear
        6
        5 months ago

        Lethal Company is genuinely a great game too. Theres a lot of attention to detail in many aspects of the design, insanely impressive for a solo project

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          hexbear
          1
          5 months ago

          Legit, legit. I haven't played it enough to figure it out and I'm afraid my group has already moved past it on to Palworld.

    • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
      hexbear
      11
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      It really feels insanely inauthentic. The devs were like "uwu we never expected palworld to blow up like this" but it had a huge "PALWORLD OUT NOW" banner at the top of the Steam storefront which is usually reserved for AAA titles like the newest CoD or the announcement of the Steam summer sale.

      Every streamer and their moms played it, it clearly had a massive marketing budget.

  • Infamousblt [any]
    hexbear
    26
    5 months ago

    Someone call me if it's still fun in 3 years when it's on EA version 5.3.2.5.x.3 with no release date and 2 released early access DLCs

  • @GarfGirl
    hexbear
    17
    5 months ago

    I saw this about it so now I'm palworlds biggest fan

    Show

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    hexbear
    15
    5 months ago

    people are saying

    Sounds like a bunch of sales and marketing bots to me. I'm not in a rush to jump on this bandwagon, given the current state of gaming.

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    hexbear
    13
    5 months ago

    people say all kinds of things. but i mean come on, i can see the gameplay videos. there is nothing there. i can see that there's nothing there.

    idk, i feel like i've been playing games long enough that i've figured out what kind of experiences can be insanely popular despite containing zero appeal to me personally. Genshin Impact, for example, seems so self-evidently dogshit that calling it generic is still giving it too much credit. most uses of crafting elements, every MMO, i know these things do nothing for me.

  • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]
    hexbear
    13
    5 months ago

    I haven’t checked it out yet myself, but I honestly feel like it’s half people with an axe to grind about ai gaslighting themselves into liking it just to run Superficial defense for that shit a la the Harry Potter game last year and half disgruntled Pokémon fans who are just happy for anything that isn’t the game freak formula and hope this will spur some more creativity for the next game (it won’t)

    From what I’ve seen it looks … fine.. like virtually ever other ark/rust kind of game out there but idk maybe it’s kinda fun? I’ll get around to it eventually maybe

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      hexbear
      10
      5 months ago

      disgruntled Pokémon fans who are just happy for anything that isn’t the game freak formula

      I gotta say, some of the most fun I've had with Pokemon has been with the Romhacks that Nintendo is constantly trying to quash and sue out of existence. Everything outside of that has been trash, practically since Red/Blue.

      like virtually ever other ark/rust kind of game out there but idk maybe it’s kinda fun?

      Its more cutesy, which I guess counts for something in a landscape full of "naked guy runs down a squirrel and guts it with his teeth for +1 food points" terminally gritty survival horror games.

      • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]
        hexbear
        5
        5 months ago

        Yeah the only remotely fun experience I’ve had was for a few hours of legends before even that got a little stale, the hacks always seem cool I just haven’t set time aside to check them out

        Its more cutesy, which I guess counts for something in a landscape full of "naked guy runs down a squirrel and guts it with his teeth for +1 food points" terminally gritty survival horror games.

        Yeah one of the main reasons I never got into rust lol. But even checking out valheim and other stuff, something about that genre doesn’t appeal to me too much personally. Maybe this will tho

    • grazing7264 [they/them, comrade/them]
      hexbear
      7
      5 months ago

      It's like Ark with a lot of quality of life features and a bit of factor.io with your group assigning themselves individual roles like watering, seeding and growing food. I think there's a deathless option for the animals

      You can also get by without hunting I think because the animals will generate their unique drops on their own at the ranch structure

  • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
    hexbear
    12
    5 months ago

    I'm going to wait a bit to see how the developers handle early access. I got into Valheim early access after their hugely successful launch and absolutely loved the game, but after three years of painfully slow and meagre updates the game still isn't properly optimized and is missing about a third of the content that should clearly be there. Those decisions are wholly on the developers, and, while I think the game is great and I got my money's worth, I get the sense that the devs are being precious about doing the work themselves instead of bringing in the resources to deliver what they promised. As a result, it's an unfinished product that I probably won't revisit.

    If Palworld has good bones and the developers show they're committed to delivering then I don't see why I wouldn't give it an honest go, but I'm done buying unfinished products that have no guarantee of being delivered on time or in an acceptable state.

  • @AlkaliMarxist
    hexbear
    11
    5 months ago

    I always found rusts and arks very boring, so no.

  • Rojo27 [he/him]
    hexbear
    10
    5 months ago

    I might try it out since I have a friend who is playing it, but I don't think I would have otherwise.

  • @Yurt_Owl
    hexbear
    9
    5 months ago

    The CEO is one of those AI obssessed freaks I'd say no. There's much better games to spend money on tbh.

  • Kras Mazov@lemmygrad.ml
    hexbear
    6
    5 months ago

    I don't get this game, can someone explain what the hype is about? The very little I saw of it looked like just another mediocre survival game, but with a twist.

    The discussions I saw on twitter were a mixed bag too. On one side fuck them for using AI, on the other I couldn't care less for the plagiarising claims when it's plagiarizing Nintendo, lol.

    The devs seem to be a bunch of chuds tho. Their other games in development are literally a BOTW and Hollow Knight copies, which just smells like cheap uninspired crash grabs.

    • riseuppikmin [he/him]
      hexbear
      7
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      I don't get this game, can someone explain what the hype is about? The very little I saw of it looked like just another mediocre survival game, but with a twist.

      For reasons I don't exactly understand among survival players this is basically enough to make it in the survival genre so long as the twist is novel enough, and I guess ark's dinosaur capturing and Palworld's creature capturing is enough to propel them forward.

      I personally think the game just feels bad/janky to play and is a worse mashup of other games it's taking inspiration from (notably: pokemon, satisfactory/factorio, botw/totk, Valheim).

      Their previous game Craftopia also struck me as a "what if all these other games' mechanics but worse than any of them individually" as well.

      The branding of the game (the edginess) is what made it go viral and the pokemon aesthetics is what got people to try an ark-like game who wouldn't have otherwise is my best analysis of why it blew up so quickly.

      • Kras Mazov@lemmygrad.ml
        hexbear
        3
        5 months ago

        Yeah you're most likely right. I also don't get why people go crazy over survival games, my brother loves it somehow.

        I tried playing a bunch of survival games but I just find it the most boring shit imaginable. The only survival games I like are Minecraft, Terraria and Valheim, and of these three, as much as I love Minecraft it is also boring as hell most of the time.

        Still, it's a mistery to me how Palworld is apparently breaking Steam record after Steam record. I could see it getting really popular, but not this much.

        • riseuppikmin [he/him]
          hexbear
          3
          edit-2
          5 months ago

          Outside of quest-driven modded minecraft I agree with you. When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).

          I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."

          I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience. If I had to guess the recent popularity of Lego Fortnite introducing younger gamers to the survival genre was probably also instrumental in prepping them for a game like this mechanically- now it's just got the aesthetics of another franchise that younger players have current interest in (pokemon) and older players have nostalgia for.

          • Kras Mazov@lemmygrad.ml
            hexbear
            3
            5 months ago

            When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).

            I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."

            Oh, preach comrade, I completely agree!

            I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience.

            I wouldn't say this genre is not mainstream. These types of survival games always explode in popularity, gets featured incessantly on twitch and afterwards it usually retains quite a chunky commited playerbase. But I completely agree with the rest of what you wrote.

            • riseuppikmin [he/him]
              hexbear
              3
              5 months ago

              I guess I should have said mainstream appeal in the Minecraft sort of way.

              Valheim/Terraria are large, but Palworld is looking at its current trajectory to be fighting with the giants.

  • Melonius [he/him]
    hexbear
    5
    5 months ago

    Combat is super clunky, Pokemon aspect is kinda fun. I liked valheim and V rising significantly more.

    I don't think it's worth playing.