Palworld is what happens when Pokemon fans get fed up with the swill that Pokemon puts out every few years.
While the primary goal of the game is to get all of the pals, most of your time is spent putting your pals to work building up your base, breeding better pals, and manufacturing the weapons needed in order to get even better pals. This is a stark contrast to Pokemon games, where you just walk around challenging gym leaders. It's an entirely different game.
So if Pocketpair reskinned a few assets sure, pay Nintendo 5% at most. But those skins had nothing to do with the success of the game and Nintendo doesn't deserve anything more than that.
I think this is kind of a bad take. There have been plenty of "monster catching game"/"pokemon with the serial numbers filed off" games that have been somewhat successful, but no smash hits. "Cassette Beasts", "Nexomon" and "Temtem" spring to mind. From larger studios there has been stuff like "Monster Hunter Stories" and "World of Final Fantasy".
Palworld is really a "survival crafting" game and is closer to a game like "Conan Exiles" which has a similar gameplay mechanic of capturing slaves to put to work in your base.
What made Palworld stand out was the shock factor elements of "Pokemon with guns", "make pokemon work as slaves in a factory" and "grind up pokemon for meat", which streamers were able to convert into clickbait thumbnails and views.
> There have been plenty of "monster catching game"/"pokemon with the serial numbers filed off" games that have been somewhat successful, but no smash hits.
Notably, the Megami Tensei series, which predates Pokemon.
I enjoy playing Palworld. I can’t stomach the thought of playing yet another Pokémon as I know it will be the same game with differently named gym leaders. Palworld is fun because it isn’t Pokémon. That YouTubers will be YouTubers has nothing to do with it in my case.
It's a good example of how IP can throttle our societal creative output. For a couple thousand years we all traded stories and art and dances about shared characters, such as various gods, heroes, legends, and monsters, and then suddenly if someone invents a new hero or monster oops now only they can make stories about it or you go to jail.
It's absurd. Pokemon has made bajillions of dollars, surely it's time to acknowledge it belongs to our common culture and we all now have a right to make up our own stories, games, music, whatever around it.
This isn't radical. It's just a question of time. We would call it madness if Disney claimed to own Greek mythology and sued the makers of the game Hades about it.
Dunno about Pokemon fans. But when I saw a Steam ad for a survival game with cute chimpanzee shooting guns I had to get it. And then the gameplay loop was nice so I spent too much time playing it.
Catching is pretty much the same, fighting, yes and now. Original Pokemon is round based with a specific battle screen, while Palworld is real-time on the overworld. Though, the latest Pokemon-Game has a mode where Pokemon can fight others in real-time in the overworld, without interaction of the player. And IIRC you can also catch Pokemon from the overworld directly or at least initiate a Player-controlled fight. So it's very similar to Palworld, but not exactly the same.
Palworld would’ve been nothing without riding off the coattails of Pokémon. I’m fed up with the modern Pokémon output too, but Palworld is just a stolen, AI-generated flash-in-the-pan.
I'm really having a problem understanding this mindset - all FPS games (especially older ones) were riding on coat-tails of Doom and other ID games. Which is great - we got a whole cultural revolution in wider gaming and spawned a massively popular genre full of experimentation on that formula. There's countless examples of this in culture through history.
How is that bad? Why is there this strong wish for a single corporation to own our culture and what we are without allowance to experiment, build upon it and allow market competition for the best evolution?
Tools like Stable Diffusion didn't even exist when Palworld and its creature designs were being shown. Unless you have evidence they were somehow AI generated, it sounds like you're just spreading falsehoods.
The accusation was insistently fielded by some malicious actors back when the early access version launched. It was debunked multiple times but it seems like it stuck to some anyway.
AI image generation wasn't good enough in early 2022 to generate game assets. Yeah you could probably generate pokemon-like looking stuff, but it wouldn't be usable as-is in a game.
Edit: and even today. Generate textures for blocky assets? Sure. But full pokémon models that wouldn't need a ton of rework? Nope.
> But full pokémon models that wouldn't need a ton of rework? Nope.
Well, that is the core benefit of using AI - you can save a lot of the groundwork, especially in concept art. Making 20, 30 versions of "fat rat in yellow with lightning bolt symbols in their fur" is cheap with AI, but prohibitively expensive if you're using humans. You're starting running already.
How do you know Palworld wouldn’t be successful without Pokemon? I would think it would be even more successful since they would be the first with the monster collecting system.
> For most if not all "pals" I could instantly name their Pokemon counterpart
That's not surprising, because for ever Pokemon it's also fairly easy to name their real-world counterpart. There's a finite amount of recognizable real world animals, so you quickly get there even if you've never seen a Pokemon before.
This is inconsistent. If you don’t want to protect big IP then why are you against using that IP? Especially when everything you just complained about is protected, hence why PocketPair didn’t get sued for copyright infringement.
While the primary goal of the game is to get all of the pals, most of your time is spent putting your pals to work building up your base, breeding better pals, and manufacturing the weapons needed in order to get even better pals. This is a stark contrast to Pokemon games, where you just walk around challenging gym leaders. It's an entirely different game.
So if Pocketpair reskinned a few assets sure, pay Nintendo 5% at most. But those skins had nothing to do with the success of the game and Nintendo doesn't deserve anything more than that.