my husband has been playing it and is having fun.
my take on it as i watched him is that its more of a game like ARK or valheim with pokemon like creatures, rather than a pokemon like game.
my husband played both ark and valheim, so its not farfetched that he likes palworld as well.
so if you like these kind of games, you might like it as well.
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Thats exactly my feeling too, kinda feel like ark but with "pals" instead of dinos
the survival part of it though isn't good, especialyl since there is no mass pvp like in ark, and monster ain't as violent everywhere.
the crafting part is ok i suppose, but not very well made for anything that isn't a flat surface
And for the "story" it's like ark with notes to find, and too easely overlookable since you collect them and it doesn't ask you if you want to read them or not.
as for the fight, it's kinda clonky, many attacks hits when they shouldn't (your ans the ennemy) the AI is often dumb and don't fight correctly (like it just stares blankly and get hit for a few seconds)
based on that i would say it's meh, but i have to admit, they do a VERY GOOD job on character design ! AND also in animation !
since you use your monster not only to fight, but also to work in your base, they have a lot of different animation, but they looks well made fluid, cute, i was actually impressed, and can't resist giving a cuddle to a pal from times to times
Personnally i do enjoy it because i play with friends, but i would probably find it boring (but cute though) if i played solo
I am eager to see how they will implant new content and what we will get out of it !
Here is their road map
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Haven't noticed such game comming until like week after release. It went directly to my ignore list. So hype went completely over me... considering I acknowledged existence of Cyberpunk about month before release, I am terrible target for hype.
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I literally haven't even watched a gameplay of it or anything
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buRSN13jH3E - same as xxxka, flew over my head and didn't even know it came out and is a thing. From the video though it does seem a bit grindy and outright weird. Personally I like crafting type of games, so I might try it out, but it doesnt look like anything super special
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Pretty simple - I don't think about Palworld at all.
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The game has sold over 8 million copies in 5 days. It's also on Gamepass. The game peaked at over 2 million players on Steam and there's currently 1.96 million people on Steam playing it. https://steamcharts.com/top
I've watched a ton of streams and thought it looked like a lot of fun and I just recently got it. I'm only about an hour into it and I'm enjoying it so far. It's by no means perfect, but I have to say it's surprisingly good for a beta. They just deployed a patch this morning which fixed some bugs and text as well as added countermeasures vs some cheats and exploits. The anticheat hasn't been added yet, but I believe it's going to be Easy Anti Cheat when it is.
The game runs great for me. I'm playing in 4K and I'm getting 95 to 120 FPS on Epic settings(max) plus field of view is all the way up(limited to 90). I'm using liquid cooling and the GPU temp is 66-68°C and CPU temp is 50-52°C
OS: Windows 11 Home
CPU: i7-12700K
GPU: 4070
RAM: 16GB
1TB SSD
The devs posted the roadmap yesterday on X.
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https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1750363801780617274
We will see how far they come with their roadmap...
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So far they haven't done anything to let Nintendo ruin the party.
Imo if Temtem and Cassette Beasts got away, then Palworld should to. Unless Nintendo goes guns blazing after it considering the success of this game over the others.
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8 million units sold in 5 days is crazy when you look at how little marketing went into the game by comparison. Also, the concurrent numbers are insane! It's now the second game ever to reach 2 million on steam. It also has a 93% positive rating at this moment. It really blew up.
I'm also quite enjoying it. I've had the minor stutter on occasion and the Pal AI is really wonky, but for an early access release it's surprisingly smooth sailing from a personal standpoint. I think a lot of folks expected the game to be a meme, "Pokemon with guns" and what was delivered was a game with its own unique merits.
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The controversies they got into, with the 'pokemon controversy' and the 'AI controversy' did get a lot of eyes on the game. So that probably helped, and kind of worked as advertising.
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Very likely! I think the likeness of certain pals certainly managed to ruffle some feathers in that regard and probably dredged up some extra attention. Pretty hard to miss the uncanny resemblance of a few of them. I wasn't aware of any AI related issues though. From what I was able to dig up with a quick google search, the devs were accused of using AI to generate their assets and refuted it by releasing their blender model designs?
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I personally haven't looked into it too too much myself. But as far as I understand the CEO of the company is known for posting a lot of AI-generated content, and is quite into generative AI art. So people are speculating that they used AI to generate the creature designs (not the 3D models as far as I understand), which may explain some of the uncanny resemblance to existing pokemon as the generative model may have been trained on real pokemon art. I'm sure their 3D models were still modelled by artists though.
Overall my personal opinion about the game is indifferent, and fairly positive, if anything. It does look quite unique to all of the games it 'borrows' from, and if anything the closest comparison seems to be ARK: survival evolved. I have not yet tried it myself, as I just don't have to time to get stuck into an 'ARK-like' survival game right now, but all we can do is wait and see if any real legal action comes from any of the controversy.
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That is super interesting. I'm not up to speed on AI usage in general, outside of what makes it to the front page of news aggregators, but that would make more sense about the specifics of said controversy then. Seems like a fine line that has to be straddled between using a tool to improve workflow for instance or using it in a way that may violate intellectual property.
I'm having a blast with the game, but I won't begrudge anyone who doesn't like the genre or takes issue with the development practices, etc. I'm far from technical enough to develop much more than a rudimentary opinion on that lol! I just play the games.
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That is definitely a huge grey area at the moment, and is quite an interesting thought exercise as well.
On the one hand, I think getting inspiration or putting out your ideas into the real world through AI is not necessarily a bad thing, and could infact be a useful tool as part of a greater workflow. You could use it if you have some great ideas, but don't have the skillset to draw or illustrate it yourself. It could also speed up you workflow, allowing you to quickly try or preview different arrangements or perspectives, or generate a variety of ideas quickly. I would imagine it to be useful in a 'pre-vis' phase, where, ideally a model that has been trained on your works or content (or the works or content of the company it is being used in), and you can quickly generate concept art, of sorts to play around with different ideas.
On the other hand, AI needs a lot of training data, with a large number of models to date trained on content without the necessary approvals or permission from the original creators of said content. So by using such a tool, you are inadvertantly using possibly copyrighted works without permission. Personally my gripe with generative AI is that it needs a lot of existing content to train on, so if we begin using AI tools more and more, we essentially give away our creative freedom to AI. Since if we use more and more AI tools, more of the 'content' new models are trained on will be AI-generated to begin with. Likewise, we as a species may become less creative, as it is easy to go down the thought process of 'why should I figure this out/ do this, if I can just get AI to do it for me'. So we essentially use our creativity (and our brains) less, and as with anything, if you use something less and less it will start to 'atrophy'.
Apologies, I may have gone off on a little tangent , but my main point is generative AI in general is a very 'grey area' at the moment. Going back to palworld though, if the final result is a fun game that people enjoy, and if it does have its own unique footprint, and doesn't infringe on any pre-existing copyrighted IP, that is really all that matters (emphasis on the enjoy the game part!).
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From what I've seen of it so far, I feel like Cassette Beasts is probably better.
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Since "Pal" (technically, "pau") means "dick" (the penis kind, not the detective kind) in Portuguese, here in Brazil PalWorld has been a huge source of memes.
I mean, the game has an achievement for holding your first Pal, gates for large Pals, "Pal Fluid"...
Oh, you wanted to know if playing the game is fun... sorry, no idea. :D
Cheers!
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I thought it was a hentai game and filtered off... then I found it is the game everyone was talking...
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I had absolutely no interest in this game when I saw it. Pokemon with guns? Not for me...
Then I watched some of my favorite streamers playing it... and then I was watching 4+ streams at a time.
I finally caved this morning and bought it. It's incredibly addictive, even to watch!
Legends of Arceus meets ARK with a splash of Breath of the Wild is how friends are describing it.
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I didn't play it cuz I didn't got the hype... I mean, most people said it was "Pokemon with guns", but after watching 1-2 gameplays I realized it's not that at all. It's another open world survival, but this time with animals that you can tame. Most of the things it implements was already somewhere else, but because those creature look so much like Pokemons, everyone lost their shit.
So to sum up - another open world survival. Not for me
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Just to give my opinion on the matter.
1) I enjoy survival based games,7DaysToDie, Valheim and The Forest and it's sequel were all a lot of fun for me
2) I could NOT get into ARK, the resource gathering and building just felt off to me, even though I REALLY love dinosaurs I wasn't able to get more than 1 hour into the game
3) I really like Monster Taming games
So those are the backstory points. I went into Palworld day 1 simply because it's a monster taming game, I played 2 2 hour sessions, and decided I enjoyed the game so much I need to pull more people into it. Got a copy for my husband, and a friend bought their own copy. We've been playing everyday since. Even after a long tiring work day we get home and NEED to play more Palworld haha.
There's something that just clicks with a LOT of people with the game.
Also note when it comes to the survival and crafting element you basically do most of it yourself the first 1-4 hours, and then you should have a nice base setup and have your Pals do everything like that for you. Then you can just go out and explore, and come back once in a while to drop your stuff off, and build some new things with what they've harvested.
Some Pals can be used as mounts, others have combat abilities, and others can literally be used as weapons (chuck a electric hedgehog as a explosive, or use a fire breathing fox as a flamethrower). The Pals also automatically fight other agro'd Pals if you have them out of their ball or in your base. They learn new attacks when they level up, and you can set what attacks you want them to use.
There's bigger stronger Pals, as well as boss towers where you fight against an especially strong Pal with a trainer of its own alongside it.
Sorry, I gushed about it long enough now haha. Point is it's a lot more than just a basic survival game, the leveling system is full on a copy paste of how ARK does it though haha. But the gameplay loop is a LOT more addictive and rewarding than what little bit I played of ARK.
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I'm all for creature collectors but I don't get the hype over open world survival craft genre. Also "Pokemon with guns" is a very weird combination to me.
I have no idea how people knew about this and it got over 1M players in a couple days.
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I'm not the target demographic, never got into pokemon or survival-crafting, and it looks really weird for me how you murder the cutesy ...things.
I'm more interested about Enshrouded, even if the whole survival-crafting-basebuilding stuff is new for me.
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tried the game, it ran good, it was interesting so i bought it and i had 12h of fun
i caught a 15 higher level pokemon (it was like a boss fight in dark souls) and then watched him obliterate anything in my way
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It's not my type of game. All of those "survival-crafting" games look like exactly the same painfully boring grind to me.
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To be honest I only know the name from a few posts on here. I have too much to play already so probably pass.
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It visually looks weird to me, pokémon-styled creatures against realistic assets and environment, like two unrelated things mashed together in an unserious way.
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At the core it's very much a creature collector that heavily incorporates crafting. If you're not a fan of crafters you're not likely to enjoy Palworld. The game encourages automating much of the process with pal labor, but you're still going to be required to gather resources and lend a hand. It's a pretty lengthy process but for the genre it's about standard.
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Looks fun, but they also copped out by blatantly splicing pokemon for a bunch of their designs (didn't care to look further into the game once I saw just how blatant it was), which just makes me give it a pass. If you have a good thing going, why ruin it by making yourself the shadow of another franchise? They can obviously spin an interesting game, whether that is just novelty factor or with enough staying power to be more than a one shot wonder, they still got peoples attention and subsequent praise after people got their hands on it, so why? Did they just want "check out what you can do with these (totally not) pokemon!" to use as an attention grab prior to selling?
And no, before people roll through the usual tired kneejerk responses, pokemon does not own the monster genre, no, the gameplay isn't really similar to pokemon, no, pure 100% originality is extremely hard to do, but none of that addresses my distaste. You can be inspired by, you can pay homage to, hell you can even build an audio/visual design style mimicing it, but when you play Mr. Potatohead with other peoples work and then say "OC do not steal" then it just cheapens your work, no matter how good your finished product is.
Shame really, but I'll just shrug and remember I have a backlog I can nibble on instead of giving their stats another +1. Mockbusters can have their charm and even be surprisingly good, but that's not anything I want to feed into. I'm sure it'll do well but I can't get past that bad taste. Nothing they can't fix by just owning up to it and hitting some original designs. We have an internet FULL of aspiring 'fakemon' designers. Now they're rolling in major sales figures, maybe they should like, hire a single actual character concept designer instead of going the Dall-E route for their concept bases. :P
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This is essentially my take as well, just expressed much more clearly and fully than I could have done. I had no awareness of this game until I started coming across the allegations of plagiarism in the last few days. At first, I kind of figured that with all of the monster hunting/catching/collecting games out there, there was bound to be similarities occasionally. But after looking at a ton of in-game screen captures and promotional images - WOW. You're right, Uroboros, "blatant" is absolutely the right word for this. While chatting about it with someone the other day, I looked at one particular image they showed me, and my comment was pretty much "that's just Leafeon with differently-colored eyes and a gem on it's forehead!" I almost couldn't believe it.
Like you said, the gameplay itself seems like it could be fun, and is different enough from most other games in the genre. But this kind of obvious and lazy character "design" has put me right off. I won't be buying or playing this game.
Thanks for writing this. It put into words many of the thoughts I was having, but couldn't properly articulate.
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Does it live up to the hype, with it's millions of players?
Is it any fun still if do like pokemon kind of games but not much into crafting games?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623730/Palworld/
https://www.ign.com/articles/the-pokemon-company-makes-an-official-statement-on-palworld-we-intend-to-investigate
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