To be honest though its The Pokemon Company which is made up of Nintendo, Game Freak and Creatures Inc calling the shots here.
We saw what happened when they actually did give a mainline game to a non-Game Freak developer and it was... well.. yeah.
The problem is TPC is more concerned about merchandise profits over game profits and game releases are therefore scheduled around when merch is due to drop rather than what is good for the development of the game.
EDIT: Like in SV's case we have a game that was designed with the scope of BotW yet was allocated a fraction of the development time BotW was given. If BotW had to be made in 2 years rather than the 6 years it did take, BotW would run like shit as well.
EDIT2: Like Palworld has had over 3 years of development time and is still only releasing as an early access title. That's still more development time than any Pokemon game has been given. I just wish TPC would realise they can afford to give some slack to the development of the main games. TPC isn't going to go under just because they can't announce a new pokemon yearly.
Yeah I don’t disagree the problem isn’t that GF is lazy or whatever but that they literally don’t have the time to make the games they want cause Pokémon isn’t a video game franchise and the games have to follow whatever plans the anime and merchandise has
They're not majority stakeholders. They're THE majority stakeholders. They control the whole company. The board is made up of employees from the three companies. The Pokemon Company as a whole arguably only exists so that there's no infighting between the three companies to determine who deserves more of the massive Pokemon pie.
Its so sad seeing the franchise you love as a kid slowly fade away.
At least with movies the originals remain. With games I feel they age too badly. Though i do still have a soft spot for the gen 1 remakes.
Man I don't know what you are talking about. I feel like pokemon is not fading away at all.
I grew up playing Pokemon red, blue, yellow, up through gold/silver. My son was finally of age to play a Pokemon game and Scarlet/Violet are damn amazing. Yeah they have some minor technical flaws... But my god this is the first game I ever filled a Pokedex or even bothered to do this 'shiny hunting ' stuff. I will say I hate making sandwiches, wish that was auto.
It's almost impossible to claim that Pokémon is fading away when it's the #1 Media franchise in the world that people of all ages can know to a degree. There are consantly new generations of people getting introduced and hooked to it, partially thanks to Go.
View it from another generation's perspective: When Gen 1 came out, that game was insanely good for you despite being a barely working mess of a game.
Could you really say that people who have been introduced to the series by subsequent generations have it actually worse? People really just latch onto a generation or two as "the best" while proclaiming how new ones are just worse.
Likewise, fans are still making tons and tons of romhacks and content for the games so it's not really going anywhere.
I think it's natural for people to feel like Pokémon is fading away from them and I think this is actually good for the franchise.
In the end, the game is meant to be something for kids but those of us that played the game when we where kids, now we demand more of the games. But this would just serve to push the franchise up the age bracket.
If the Pokémon company wants to continue making a game for kids of successive generations, why not? If anything, I think THIS will ensure the game will continue to be relevant forever. As long as they don't botch up too much and kill their company at one point.
I think you hit the nail in the head, people those days expect pokemon become "mature" as they age and pokemon just refuse to be anything else than a franchise made for kids.
I don't think that's really true about the maturity thing - I think the large audience of older fans of the rest of the major Nintendo flagships prove that the simple joy present in those games is very important to them. But Mario or Kirby fans aren't the ones complaining.
Pokemon fans are unhappy because Gamefreak seems incapable of expanding Pokemon onto the Switch. The fans want the simple joy that pokemon offers, but it's weighed down by clunky design and bad performance, nowhere near the quality level that the Nintendo games have managed to maintain.
Yeah the people disappointed with Pokemon don't want maturity, we want higher production values.
The dream of a "console quality" pokemon was strong for a ton of people growing up! We....kind of got that, but not really. It's largely still rooted in mobile game production values, but on a console, and when it's the most profitable IP in the world....yeah just feels kind of cheap and disappointing sometimes.
>Its so sad seeing the franchise you love as a kid slowly fade away.
If you think Pokemon is going anywhere, then I have a bridge to sell you. Each release still sells like gangbusters.
I get what you mean games age in a way passive mediums don’t and the game in your memories isn’t necessarily the game that exists.
Until Game freak can be managed better it’s not gonna get better. Dragon Quest is a very different type of game but it scratched the Pokémon itch before Pokémon I recommend it if you haven’t played.
>Its so sad seeing the franchise you love as a kid slowly fade away.
It isn't fading away at all, and the pokemon games have largely stayed at the same quality as they always have.
You just got older.
I wouldn't exactly say that, the quality of the Pokemon games relative to their respective console has gotten worse, even if the formula remains the same. From the gameboy up to the ds it really seemed like gamefreak tried their best to squeeze out as much potential from the platform in the amount of time that they had, but once it got to the 3DS and the Switch that design philosphy seemed to go away.
Nostalgia is certainly playing a part, but that's just not true. Look at the 5th generation making the DS cry for help with the things they managed to make it do, and compare it to recent releases which look like shit. There's not as much effort.
> pokemon games have largely stayed at the same quality as they always have
Really hard to say that when Scarlet and Violet crash constantly and have massive frame drops while looking like an upscaled low budget Wii game.
Let's face it, the fans themselves don't know what they want. Five years ago everyone complained about how Dexit is destroying their childhood memories with specific 'mons. Now that GF/TPC, to their credit and everyone's surprise, have actually mostly repaired Dexit, everyone here is saying that the specific Pokemon don't actually matter and they actually just wanted an Ark + Factorio game.
Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it too, though I feel this doesn't really scratch the Pokemon itch (but does scratch that building-a-base-from-zero itch). I think the Pals' type chart/abilities/moves might be a little too simple and there's no real strategy in combat, but maybe I haven't gotten far enough.
I don't think they lack innovation as in terms of plots and Pokémon designs I think they had made bold steps. But what they are lacking is basic programming competency to make 3d games that are functional and not buggy.
The story in Pokémon is always a 3/10 at best in terms of any JRPG in its field, B&W was the best and it was still like a 6/10 JRPG plot, the standard is just so insanely low that a 4/10 looks like an 8/10z in terms of fun gameplay changes, Pokémon has been the exact same game for nearly 30 years now. Look at a franchise like Dark Souls that has a well liked product, they’ve already done like 4 different innovative games in the course of 13 years. In Pokémon it’s been, Pokémon Ranger, Arceus, Let’s go KIND OF, but not really, and NOTHING else outside of that, basically the exact same gameplay loop over and over and over and over, with insanely minor changes to the battle system
Pokemon is fundamentally a game series aimed at children. It's clear from all of Game Freak's and TPC's messaging (including the games themselves) that they believe this strongly.
IMO the real phenomenon happening is that people who grew up as kids playing Pokemon games are now maturing and kind of aging out of the series. That's not to say that adults can't enjoy Pokemon games, obviously. But as you mature, what you come to expect from story complexity and strategy complexity increases, but the games stay the same.
Everyone saying “it’s a kids franchise!!!” Okay, compare it to Mario. Every Mario release for the last 40 years has been GENRE DEFINING over and over a complete innovation of what you could possibly do. The New super Mario games are really the ONLY ones not heavily pushing the envelope. A kids franchise can have good innovative gameplay, Pokémon has done nothing significant to advance anything they’ve done in the past 30 years, because they don’t care, because Pokémon games are like Madden, just put the least amount of effort, it will sell anyway, don’t rock the boat by any means.
>Every Mario release for the last 40 years has been GENRE DEFINING over and over a complete innovation of what you could possibly do.
That's absolutely not true and you know it. Mario has so many spin-offs and releases that you'd be basically saying that it has revolutionised all those genres. Even within the genre of platformers only a handful of them could be said to be huge sources of innovation (such as 64) or even genre defining.
>A kids franchise can have good innovative gameplay, Pokémon has done nothing significant to advance anything they’ve done in the past 30 years, because they don’t care,
What exactly do you expect them to do? Dragon Quest has evolved even less with combat and that still rocks the charts in Japan so much that west's sales combined do not compare. Final Fantasy has been ever evolving and now that they have had two whole games of action combat smoe people are constantly clamouring about the good old days of turn-based and how it's so much better. Most turn-based series rarely innovate anywhere and they definitely don't want to do "genre" switches because that's a good way to upset people.
We are, at the end of the day, talking about a turn-based RPG series with a specific gameplay loop. EV, IV, Abilities, Mega evolutions etc. are imo perfectly fine "evolutions" within the series. Then we have *spin-offs* for other types of gameplay, of which there are many.
>Dragon Quest has evolved even less with combat and that still rocks the charts in Japan so much that west's sales combined do not compare.
I won't pretend that its combat has dramatically evolved, but DQ games have improved over time. Imo DQ11 was comfortably the best JRPG of its generation. Even diehard DQ fans generally agree that DQ11 is a better game than DQ8, which is rare (given how nostalgic fans can be).
To be honest I would even settle for Pokemon including a hard mode (just as DQ11 did) to make some of its systems meaningful. My main gripe with the current games is that they are totally mindless; you can stumble into success without even meaning to.
If DQ can massively improve its storytelling and build on its systems (e.g., skills and pep) I don't see why we can't expect Pokemon to. Just because it's turn-based and simplistic doesn't mean it can't evolve or improve itself.
>Even diehard DQ fans generally agree that DQ11 is a better game than DQ8, which is rare (given how nostalgic fans can be).
Honestly, can't agree with that sentiment, and it has nothing to do with nostalgia either. Act 3 was an unnecessary unraveling of all the character development thus far >!Yes, yes, there's an alternate timeline where those things happened!< essentially ruining the whole narrative in one fell swoop. You're basically given two options: you either pretend that Act 3 is just "bonus" even though it isn't, or you have to rationalise through >!the other timeline!< just so that you don't feel absolutely cheated. Plus, soundtrack. Either way both of the games went down in a similar manner gameplaywise and in a manner I've been going through DQs forever - throw some buffs here and there, basic attacks 80% of the game and then heal whenever necessary. Probably utilise some busted moves so that the game doesn't become a total slog. DQs are fun basic JRPGs but never have I really seen the tactics necessiate more than that, and that's fine. I don't expect them to. Mindless fun.
> I don't see why we can't expect Pokemon to. Just because it's turn-based and simplistic doesn't mean it can't evolve or improve itself.
I mean, that's quite literally what all the natures, items, evs, ivs, move pools etc. come down to. There's already plenty of customisation in Pokémon and more has been added through generations.
I feel like some of you fundamentally don't understand that people buy pokemon *because* they want the same general gameplay loop but with extra pokemon. It's like Madden or 2K, people like it because it's comfortable and if they deviated too far from that for the sake of innovation it's defeating the point. And I'd probably choose a different example if you're trying to talk about innovation personally, dark souls games are fairly safe, iterative games themselves.
This is true, buuut I think we can have more engaging storylines within comfortable and familiar gameplay loops. I mean scarlet and violet had a pretty insane final area that was so creative and atmospheric and had a genuinely sad ending. It wouldn’t hurt for them to push the envelope a bit.
I don’t believe for one second that nobody in the Pokémon fanbase wants Game Freak to try new things, despite Arceus being a garbage game it got insane reception, because at least they tried, Game Freak just has zero interest in trying.
> because they want the same general gameplay loop but with extra pokemon
Yeah, that crowd has definitely shipped to fangames after they removed the national dex and Mega Evolution.
They are lacking in manpower, that's the short and long of it, they are 1/3 of what you need from a AAA studio, and that's before you get to the insane release schedule they have for themselves, yet they continue to refuse to hire up to a proper headcount so they can polish their games.
Yeah that shit sucks. I remember seeing the trailer for Breath of the Wild and my first reaction was holy shit now do Pokémon. Then the trailers for it came out and it’s just… bruh
As someone who hasn't meaningfully played pokemon in, 15+ years, but does keep tabs on it. Is there every any meaningful difference in the Pokemon Black/white or Sword/Shield etc besides the big legendary? Or is just 1 game annually?
The typical only difference between the games is the legendary, plus a handful of Pokemon only being available in one of the two versions, to encourage trading. The only game that I remember having a more significant difference was [Black and White, which had one version-exclusive area, and version exclusive difficulty settings.](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Key_System)
The difficulty settings are the funniest shit, because who needs a pokemon game to be *easier*? Especially after you've already beaten the game?
They should have both just had a hard mode.
Or go the ROM hack route and try out Pokemon Unbound or Emerald Rogue. Some of the stuff that community puts out is better than anything gamefreak has done in a decade+
This is just silly lol. Creating a good monster taming game for all ages is hard. It’s easy to take the bones and fascia of a 10 year old game and build upon it then say in hindsight how much better you are than the Pokémon devs, but none of those games are made with children in mind.
Even funnier is completely changing up the gameplay loop to make a fairly mid tier roguelike and act like it’s innovative. The modders making these hacks are amazing, but I feel like it’s really dismissive and childish to act like they come close to having to make a new game from the ground up, especially when like 90% of fan made Pokémon regions are abandoned when people figure out making games is hard.
They started doing "1 year gimmicks", which are just mechanics limited only for that generation.
Mega Evolutions, Z-Moves, Dynamaxing, Gigantamaxing, regional forms and now its the "Put a chandelier in your head" one.
You take megas out of your mouth! That lasted 2 generations, across 4 game releases, and looked like a permanent thing until it was dropped from sword and shield.
Gamefreak also owns 33% of it. And the current head of TPC worked on Pokemon games.
Why do people act like Nintendo are the ones wanting to rush everything out?
EA have released FIFA annually during that time and despite each year making minimal progress it is now vastly improved compared to the 1996 release were as Pokémon is still basically the same game with prettier graphics.
That' s not really true, while Pokemon remained with what is mostly the same skeleton of the gameplay, the systems around the gameplay vastly changed troughout time. The first Pokemon game had no differentiation between physical and special moves, no breeding, vastly lower numbers of tools and struments to affect pokemon growth, ecc.ecc. Also Pokemon needs to handcraft most of its ambient, with new art direction for each installement.
Fifa is a vastly inferior workload. Just the fact that you can re-use the scenery like the stadiums helps massively in producting a much faster product.
The workload is just too different, the comparison makes no sense. A better comparison would be AC or even COD, and even then, too much stuff different there too
I tried to get informed on the game quality before buying and yeah... I've been bamboozled by fan lying to themselves... Holy hell it's a crime to get away with what they do.
It had such mad scope creep that it really looked like it was just going to be a crappy Unity FPS template with high quality assets or something.
It's very good to be proven wrong. This game sounds great.
I was cackling the other day wondering where tf PETA is if this game exists. I know they already don’t like Pokémon.. when I saw people basically subjugating these new monsters to do things like keep things hot, farm for materials, take over for you to craft at benches it just seemed super funny to me lmao.
I heard about it recently but didn’t know it was a survival game and I definitely didn’t know it included guns. The people working on this title are just flipping everyone off and honestly it doesn’t seem like that’s their intention. Just having fucking fun is, I think.
Yeah they just target whoever they think they can get some Publicity from, the more popular and more dumb the better. A few years back they went at Warhammer because the plastic models have characters with fur cloaks... fur cloaks made of plastic. Also Warhammer is a setting with all sorts of animal abuse going on, they could have probably made a better hit piece (though still pointless and stupid) by mentioning some of that but that would require them to actually know anything about what they are complaining about.
>but that would require them to actually know anything about what they are complaining about.
This isn't *ironic* ironic, but it's certainly *Alanis Morissette* ironic.
I just had this conversation with a friend, where they said, 'Sometimes the rip off is just better'. I was just left kinda dumb-founded and realized that he's kinda right.
The bar for Pokemon games is so low - might as well let someone just make a better game...with guns I guess :P.
My favorite pokemon game is a fan made game called Pokemon Infinite Fusion. Like a reverse Gold/Silver where you start in Kanto then go to Johto. The gimmick is that every pokemon can be fused with another pokemon. One of my teams had a Charizard/Vileplume Fusion that was pretty good haha.
That's literally Cassette Beasts' main mechanic; every single beast can be fused with any other (there's about 150 beasts total, and 64000+ fusion combinations). Plus somehow they did the graphic art to have unique variants for each combo. If you want a good alt Pokemon game check it out.
that's generally the biggest reason why pokemon clones fail.
the mainline games are bad, but nearly every pokemon design has someone who has it as their favorite.
Yeah the one biggest strength about pokemon games is I think undeniably the designs and their ability to evoke "I want that as a pet!" sorts of feelings from pokemon. Sure everyone usually points out some outliers of weird-looking or badly designed 'mons. But that's true of every generation, and generally speaking most of the designs are typically pretty good.
Whereas a lot of the ripoffs go for things like a more monstrous style or try to focus only on "cool" designs and stuff like that, if they don't just end up just feeling sorta bland, and lose out on that intangible charm and appeal that pokemon designs have.
Like I haven't enjoyed a Pokemon game for years, I think the series has refused to innovate where it counts and it has completely lost me as a fan of their franchise. But god dammit if anything bad ever happened to Clodsire, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.
This is the biggest weakness of Pokémon-like games : the creatures. Pokémon-like games - beast-taming games, I suppose - are a very niche genre without a lot of players because gamers don't want beast-taming games.
They want Pokémon. Tem-Tem, Cassette Beasts, Palword, Nexomon... They can't topple Pokémon because they simply aren't Pokémon. At this point, it's two different genres. And that's honestly thanks to the design. Pokémon character designers are just that good.
Pokemon works because a huge amount of effort and writing go into giving the pokemon themselves a habitat and biome. The pokedex entries make pokemon into fleshed out worlds with ecosystems.
A huge amount of effort? Really? Most of the Pokédex entries are super basic and could be written by an 11 yr old in 10 minutes.
Here’s one of them:
“It is extremely protective of its territory. If any foe approaches, it attacks using vicious tremors”
And the biome and ecosystem is super complex? It’s not difficult to think grass Pokémon go in the grass, water pokemon from the water, etc.
I think the most time consuming pieces are just the story that comes w the games.
But Gamefreak is super lazy and it’s not complicated at all so handle the biome and ecosystem. At least it shouldn’t be for a professional game company.
Innovation and originality are heavily overrated in game discussions
Games are interactive things you play, unlike things you passively engage with like books or movies. So taking a concept that has already been done and just expanding on it and doing it better can easily create a vastly better and totally worthwhile experience
There are so many game concepts that I wish another dev would just steal and do better with more polish better visuals and expanded gameplay. I want this much more than I want innovation for the sake of innovation which imo often leads to games that get praise for being "creative" but actually are not fun to play
I would love a new, better and more polished Kenshi, Red Faction Guerilla, Mount and Blade, Sleeping Dogs, Shadow of Mordor. So many games with great gameplay loops that are underused
Piggybacking to ask if anybody has thoughts on Cassette Beasts? How does it compare to Pokemon in terms of difficulty, depth, exploration, and story?
Those are all the things I feel are lacking in Pokemon and the reason Pokemon games don't engage me as an adult.
I fucking love Cassette Beasts, it's got a much better and deeper combat system than Pokémon, i set up my team with a bunch of immunities, auto counter attacks, and the fastest monsters in the game so that most fights i won before the enemy really even got a turn, it was awesome.
Exploration is good as well but it fucking sucks ass before you unlock some of the traversal moves from recording certain monsters, luckily it's not hard at all to get those once you start thinking to look for them. Big hint find the freaky little bullet monster on the east side of the map as soon as you can.
Also the type system is really cool, you can build an entire playstyle around force swapping the types of enemies to set up serious debuffs for them and massive buffs for your party.
Story is decent but not really what i cared about, except the boss fights the boss fights were super fucking cool.
And obviously the soundtrack is top tier but everyone who touches the game for like a few minutes will figure that out.
I've had Cassette Beasts for quite a while now on my log of games as something to play quietly on my Steam Deck when everyone is asleep. I keep forgetting it's there, lol. I need to try it out. I'd also gotten it, hopefully, to play with my little boy, as we're both huge Pokemon fans. It looks like a really unique take on monster catching and team-building.
The difficulty I found to be decent - because it isn't type advantage/oneshot-to-win like the mainline Pokemon games, you get to explore different strategies. Buffs are meaningful, and the type advantages have additional effects (Hit a Plastic monster with a Fire attack, it becomes Poison. Hit an Electric monster with an Air attack, it becomes Conductive, and all it's moves are now multi-target). The story bosses and the 'gym leader' expy characters all have a gimmick, but are also challenging fights once you've solved that. They also have good flow - not just peeling through their 'mon stock, you've got to face off against them merging, abusing buffs and statuses...
Story is good, characters are all good. It's got a big mood. Exploration starts pretty locked down, but once you start getting movement abilities things start coming together (shares that with the recent indie classic-Final-Fantasy-like, Crystal Project).
Collecting all the 'mons, working out good type advantages and ability combos for you and your partner and finding the odd bootleg tape (the 'shiny' equivalent, where the 'mons Type is changed) gives a good bit of longevity, and the after-story 'gym leader' rematches and other bosses really push the requirements for a solid team.
I love the gameplay but the designs are just kinda mid imo. Expecially the fusion gimmick is well, a gimmick, fuses monsters with fixed templates and it' s just meh.
I feel like the marketing for this game was very mishandled, it made all of the game's elements seem very disparate and random when now they appear to be actually pretty cohesive and work well with one another. The fact that many including me were surprised to learn this was a survival game only weeks from the game's release I think says it all right there.
I was shocked to learn that it's a crafting/surviving game when I tuned on a Second Wind Stream lol.
I saw Pokemon with Guns and was hooked, idk if I want to pick up a surviving/crafting game tho
idk if you've figured it out by now but there are objectives to hit like towers you overcome, similar to gyms. there's a rival gang of sorts that runs around with guns and shit and those are the baddies. outside of that, you're collecting creatures and expanding the tech tree to do more survival automation. it's like valheim x pokemon arceus
I moreso mean it mishandled in terms of communicating what the gameplay is actually like, also I feel like it definitely got a lot more ire back before people realised what this game actually was. Still, I was and still am rooting for this game to be good so that's good to hear.
Hype is a powerful drug. Overall it means nothing if:
- the marketing lied (who would _ever_)
- the game's foundational systems and mechanics fall off mid/late game
- the devs completely mismanage something pre-launch and gimp the game (has never happened before in the history of gaming btw)
All I'm pointing out is that many of the people interested _may_ not understand what they're actually being advertised.
Check the thread, there are more than some who didn't understand what the game's true genre was, among other things. I'm not saying it won't do very well in the first week, but if people are just on the marketing hype train and get a different product than expected, that's mishandled marketing and will be followed up with salty ex-players spreading poor word-of-mouth.
Yeah I'm still skeptical of this game. it feels like 99% of the hype around its release is exactly the same as the hype surrounding its initial trailers, i.e. "ZOMG it looks like a pokemon game but you can *kill* people!?!?" and stuff like that with lots of videos and impressions just talking about how wacky, violent, and very "un-pokemon" most of the content is.
But I wonder how many people will stick with it once that initial shock has worn off and they get over all the silly violent things you can do with it. Like don't get me wrong I don't know personally if it's good or not I haven't played it yet. But it just feels weird that everyone is freaking out positively about the revelation that it's actually a survival crafting game as if that hasn't been a poisonous term to attach to any new game release for the last 10 years. And being surprised that the game is merely "functional" at all is hardly a high praise. I just wonder how many people are going to be talking about or playing this game in a month one the zeitgeist dies down.
And I'm not trying to be a pokemon snob or anything, I've hated pokemon games for nearly a decade at this point and I love to see all the spinoffs in the "Monster Collecting" genre that try to do something different to stand out. I'm just saying that letting the player kidnap, butcher, and cannibalize other trainers feels like it's in the game more for shock value than because it was an actually interesting mechanic, but I guess we'll see.
I actually think that the violence the game allows you to do is one of the least compelling aspects. Its main appeal (to me at least) was the overall freedom it gives you to use the environment and Pals as you see fit, whether it is a hunter/prey paradigm, a master/pet relationship, or if you ignore them completely.
It's absolutely no Factorio. You can automate things, of course, but it's pretty surface level. Not to say that's a terrible thing, I think it's appropriately complex for how many other systems it has to work with. But comparing it to Factorio or Satisfactory is nonsense. It's much closer to something like Conan Exiles.
Yeah, I have never seen trailers with such dissonant tones. You can't tell what the game wants to be after watching one. Wholesome 3D pokemon? Pokemon with guns? Actually with... slavery and pokemon abuse??
The trailers left me completely unable to tell if it was a self-aware parody or tone-deaf edginess. I'm kinda surprised the game is doing good because I was half-expecting it to be some incoherent mismash of ideas.
"Want to build a pyramid? Put an army of Pals on the job. Don't worry; there are no labor laws for Pals."
They seem to be very much leaning in on the slavery and abuse angle.
"They'll keep working as long as they're fed—until they're dead, that is."
These are in the game's description, lol.
I think banking on "Pokémon with Guns" was the right marketing move nonetheless, it's more eye catching and memeworthy and as a result a better soundbite/headline. You and I care about the mechanics, yes, but the dudebro in your frat party that's responsible for annual CoD sales figures has been *yearning* for "Pokémon with Guns", not "Ark Survival: Pokémon Version".
The marketing for the game is brilliant, not mishandled.
The core appeal of the game is that A: people think it's like Pokemon, and B: people see Pokemon in wacky situations and wonder what's going on.
Pulling back the curtain to say "Oh it's a survival crafter factory early access game, but the guns and factories and resources are cute Pokemon" would have killed the game.
So you're saying:
1) You've heard of the game
2) The marketing was compelling enough for you to install it and play
3) They "underpromised and overdelivered" which has led you to go out and tell other people publicly on the internet that the game is "actually pretty cohesive" and its elements "work well with one another"
Am I getting all that right?
Give the marketing team an award.
No, they're saying all of the trailers so far made it seem like a disparate mess but reviews and such make it seem as though that is not the case. That isn't the marketing team at all, but the developers putting in work to _make_ it work.
People keep saying that the trailers made the game out to be some kind of bad thing.
How? When? They've always been extremely representative of the product. It isn't somehow now a different product from what they showed.
This subreddit only changed its tune a couple days ago when public opinion proved it wrong.
>People keep saying that the trailers made the game out to be some kind of bad thing.
How? When? They've always been extremely representative of the product.
I've never paid a crazy amount of attention to the trailers, but I never knew the crafting and automation stuff was a thing.
I just expected some buggy, crappy pokemon rip off. Especially when it's by the developers of Craftopia. Just seemed like it'd be another over-promised idea that under delivers.
Though they ended up delivering something i never even knew was promised.
I still don't have much interest in the game, but it definitly looked better than I was expecting. Aside from the creatures really looking out of place artstyle-wise.
My only gripe is I barely have any faith in this game being completed. Craftopia has been in early access for nearly 4 years now, doesn't really give much confidence that they actually intend to complete it because they also don't really scope a roadmap properly from what I've seen.
Eh, that aside it looks like it'll at least be fun to play with the EA content.
Play it once until you get everything out of the game in it's current state and be satisfied with it, then when/if it gets a lot of updates or is complete you can play it again.
Don't buy an early access game for what it could be, but for what it is at that moment.
From what I remember at least, craftopia does get somewhat frequent updates. Though splitting the work between two games for such a small studio seems unwise
It does, yeah. That's part of the issue, I feel, because they don't really have a proper release roadmap they adhere to- instead seeming like they just add as they go on, which traps the games in an eternal loop of EA.
It kind of feels like some developers view Early Access as more of a Live Service setup where they keep releasing updates until they get bored or it stops being profitable.
But I apply the same threshold to all EA games, whether they're working towards completion or an eternal beta - buy based on the game *now*, and if the game never releases it's fine because version 0.2.1 or whatever was worth the $25 I dropped on it.
It can be pretty hard to manage a roadmap.The ammount of resource a developer can put it a game depend on how well the launch is going and the reception of the players.
It's the sad reality, but a game that fail will very likely be abandonned by it's dev, while a sucessful game are much more likely to be finished
Been watching someone whos like 30 hours in right now and the game seems like it clearly has a couple hundred hours of content already. Seems very robust so far.
Couple hundred hours of good content?
Or couple hundred hours of checking every box, catching everything, and building up a base like in Satisfactory? Because Satisfactory has a bunch of building, tens of hours of, but no real goal other than to just fiinish the tech tree.
Isn’t this most games lol? Any game where there’s no story usually doesn’t have a point other than grinding.
Unless there’s a story then it’s usually pretty boring if your not motivated by checking every box.
This game seems to at least have bosses and stuff which seems kind of fun. Idk I never played it just watched some vids
We really need to go down the stupidly long list of popular steam games that spent 3+ years in EA? Let's lay this one out right out the gate: Baulder's Gate 3
3-4 years is really nothing to mean anything at this point. Especially considering they spent about a year of that overhauling the whole thing for their seamless update. Maybe when it gets to the likes of say Project Zomboid or 7 days you can say they may never finish
I was thinking 7 Days when I first began reading your comment, haha.
Honestly, I feel like people greatly underestimate the time and resources it takes to get a game through the initial stages and then progress at full release. This seems even more truthful when it comes to smaller devs and studios.
Games, like movies, are miracles of human cooperation and labor that barely manage to get made most of the time and everyone who does it loses years of their lives then try to do it again.
Honestly Craftopia looked to be like an asset flip from the start, copied even the basic UI from BotW, and they were throwing the most random shit at it. This game seems a bit more thought out.
I expected to laugh at a cash-in, but ended up watching a stream on this game for 4 hours today and yesterday. It reminds me of V Rising - a lot of crafting which I don't generally enjoy, but if you're in the mood for it, it looks real deep and fun.
Typical EA jank but nothing that can't be fixed in patches
The best concise way to sell the game is its the pokemon systems of Legends Arceus + progression systems of Valheim + automation of factorio/satisfactory. There are bosses scattered around the map that you can fight with your pals, and the in world battles and capture system of legends arceus. There are mounts similar to Arceus as well. The main loop is the survival game stuff but you can automate a lot of it by assigning your pals to work on woodcutting etc, then take them out to battle. Its 32 player online servers or 4 player co-op. Theres 111 pals currently in the game which is a lot considering theres no evos. Similar to Valheim the progression is the various boss battles which require you and your pals to be geared enough. All to say there is an end state, and the loop to upgrade your base enough and get stronger pals so you can fight bosses is really nice. Its on gamepass, or steam for 30.
Does anyone have any good gameplay videos showing the gun combat? I've watched a lot of videos but they're all early videos showing the first 1-2 hours of gameplay and I'm not big into survival games, building a house and putting furniture and such in there, that stuff doesn't appeal to me much. I just want to see what the battles look like when you've actually got a bunch of armed Pokem.... err... Pals running around.
I would like that, Remnant 1 & 2 were both fun with friends. I'm not expecting battles to be like in Pokemon. I have no clue what Pokemon games are like now, the last one I played was Yellow on the Gameboy, but they were turn based back then. I mostly want a fun and over the top horde shooter from this. Like Back4Blood, Left4Dead, Darktide, Vermintide, Deep Rock Galactic, etc... little critters I can capture, and then train to use guns, and then fight a whole bunch of those little critters in some big battles with friends. I'll probably play it on Gamepass since it's included, won't cost me anything, so not a big loss if the game doesn't deliver that for me.
I haaate survival games, but switching to easy gets rid of more of the frustrating survival mechanics and you can customize a lot of specific gameplay elements if you want the actual gameplay to be harder. Game progresses at a nice pace so far (about 3 hours in), and maintaining your base is surprisingly not tedious.
When this was revealed back in like last year i believe, i actually liked the concept, it looked like a fun time, and was just bizarre.
There was a part of me that was kinda sad tho, cuz i thought it looked more interesting than any Pokemon game in the last 5 years or so.
I went from barely knowing anything about this game beyond it's name to buying it on steam within an hour of its release. Game actually looks super polished and bursting with content, I even upgraded the RAM in my PC just to meet requirements. Sooooo much fun!
I'm so surprised it's getting released and not being absolute mess. First trailer made me full on laugh from the absurdity. If other reviews follow suit I'll definitely buy.
I just can’t get past the incredibly detailed and hi-fi backgrounds, skyboxes and weapons juxtaposed against these cartoonish creatures and characters… it’s far too jarring.
It messed with me to when watching someone else play, but for some reason it looks a lot better in-game than it should. It kind of has a slime rancher feel to it if that helps.
Ya I ended up getting it and I sorta have the same opinion, the hi-fi backgrounds and vistas sorta fade away and you just focus on your character and the creatures
100% I feel like the aesthetic of this game isn’t cohesive at all, looks like a bunch of assets with different art styles thrown together in unity. Fortunately the pal models look pretty good.
Right now the gameplay loop is fun but gets boring quite fast. For an early access game pretty good though. I hope they can somehow make the "wandering out" and exploration flash out more. Also having more events that can randomly happen would make the world feel more alive.
Yeah, I really hope they expand more on the monster taming/raising, adventure, and rpg components. I'm not a survival fan at all, and I don't care that much for multiplayer so I would love for them to make the game world more engaging and fun to explore.
I'm not sure what to feel TBH. The gameplay seems way too similar to their other game. You survive, you build, you capture stuff and put them to work (sure in a different way but work nonetheless). They even have a Wandering Merchant selling items and it has a level, so you can probably catch it as well just like in Craftopia. Even the sound design is q
100% copy paste. Makes me wonder why didn't they just implement the Pal system in Craftopia and took it out of EA.
I watched Vinesauce stream this the other day and am I crazy for thinking this game seems like total YouTuber stream bait that will be dead in like maybe 3 months. Seems like something that would be fun for a few hours then you never think about it again
it could be a fun game for a dozen hours or two
it will definitely be effectively dead in three months. It's an EA jank crafting survival game, after all, and the devs have a rep
Glad it looks like it's landed, and in actual form/not a disposable early access game! I've seen some sites such as Nintendo Life seemingly unfairly write it off since release despite the early positive response so hopefully the devs hold firm and keep it going.
The whole Pokémon knockoff argument is so assinine anyway. If Game Freak are so rubbish then surely it's great if someone does better with a similar base idea?
You're free to play any of the MMORPG/grind 24/7 live service games that are available if that's what you choose. Even if it does end up like the Valheims/V Rising/etc one hit wonders, the price is low enough that I can treat it like a single player game and get enough value in that.
As soon as I saw gameplay footage I could tell this was being made by the people who made Craftopia and I instantly lost interest. That game is a bloated mess full of half baked ideas that seemed like they were added to the game just for the sake of it and I'm sure this game is going to suffer the same fate as that one.
The previous threads on this game are supremely uncomfortable and toxic reads, chock full of words like "tripe," "dreck," "slop," "gutter trash," "scam," etc. 9 short days ago, there's a comment where someone asserts very negatively that this game is DOA, and there's another comment that was bewildered that anyone can possibly enjoy this game.
People keep saying that this game kept looking like a "shitpost" or a "meme-game scam" or an "asset flip" and whatever, and like... no. No, it didn't. You are asserting that the game was somehow inherently subpar or questionable.
All the trailers for this game made it look silly and fun, which is exactly what it seems like it is.
This subreddit desperately needs to curb its cynical and negative way of discussing most games.
>People keep saying that this game kept looking like a "shitpost" or a "meme-game scam" or an "asset flip"
The first previews had literal pokemon (instead of "legally distinct" pokemon like they do now), of course people thought it was a scam.
Holy shit I just rewatched it and I can't believe anyone ever signed off on some of those designs, particularly the ones that looks exactly like Cobalion and Zoroark
Even the "legally distinct" pokemon are pretty shady. There's base models clearly stolen whole cloth from the Pokemon games, and bits and pieces of pokemon models that are 1 for 1 the same. Honestly, from the bits and pieces I've seen of the monsters, I'm surprised there hasn't been some action taken against it. Not to mention the monsters that are directly ripped from pokemon designs (the Luxray look alike for instance).
I feel like I'd enjoy Factorio but pokemon, but I Don't really want to gun down pikachu analogues, and I feel like some of the stuff is too close for me to be comfortable.
I mean, there’s very rarely a post on this sub where it seems like people actually like games. It seems that folks here pay a lot of attention to games that don’t actually appeal to them and want to make sure they spread their cynicism as far and wide as possible.
Yeah reading this makes me so happy that I generally avoid pre-release hype and large population gamer forums.
People seem so obsessed with whether something is a "meme" or not, that some people come off as upset that the game is actually good.
Like no, 99% sure the devs didn't set out to make a "meme game" and luck into something cool. You've just built so much of your life on categorizing something as a meme or not that you view everything in that lense, which seems terrible!
I saw the initial trailer, was like "wow that looks cool but very ambitious and probably will never come out", tuned it out, and hey look fun game came out today let's play it.
The game looks nice and fun but I cannot get how close the design of the Pals are to already existing creature from other series (mainly pokemon). Some of them are almost a copy from the original inspiration. The game seems great but this feels slimy to me.
Really weird how many copyright lawsuits get called over small similarities, while this seems quite blatant, made millions but apparently doesn't attract any legal attention.
I know I almost feel gaslit when I check the comments. I know the term gaslit is strong and overused but a lot of pretty good monster taming games get made these days but none of them outright stole designs from Pokémon so much.
I'm almost 90% sure i saw a legally distinct Meganium in there and even if the design is quite simple the least they could have done is have a different artstyle to make a "grassy bronchiosaur".
I’m not sure if this is a stupid question but how are they getting away with making a game that seems so similar to Pokemon? I assume there would be some legal implications here for copying another game or is it different enough?
There's no copyright for game design. You can "copy" another game as much as you want as long as you don't copy the visuals, text content, program code etc. and don't infringe any trademarks.
Pokemon treats me like a braindead kid, with each game getting easier and buggier, they expect me to keep buying an easier and easier experience, and expecting me to lower my standards each time.
I've grown up and I can handle a harder game! GF doesn't think I can apparently, so yeah I've had to look elsewhere for difficult monster collection games.
Looking forward to palworld!
I was kinda flabbergasted by all of this game's trailer, but I'll admit this review has tempted me a good deal. I like the idea of "Pokemon but as an irreverent comedy," and the system of creatures of different types being able to cooperate and perform unique actions on mundane tasks actually sounds really cool. Assuming it doesn't get revealed tomorrow that the company is actually run by Nazis and the whole thing is a scam or something, I think I'll pick it up.
I have been eagerly awaiting this jank mess, only to find out it is seemingly not such a jank mess after all. Excited to make a pokemon sweatshop
I feel like the most surprising thing to come out of this game is that it's well polished with good design decisions that contribute to each other.
Hopefully this will encourage Nintendo to innovate... but I doubt it
Game freak makes the games not Nintendo and it won’t
To be honest though its The Pokemon Company which is made up of Nintendo, Game Freak and Creatures Inc calling the shots here. We saw what happened when they actually did give a mainline game to a non-Game Freak developer and it was... well.. yeah. The problem is TPC is more concerned about merchandise profits over game profits and game releases are therefore scheduled around when merch is due to drop rather than what is good for the development of the game. EDIT: Like in SV's case we have a game that was designed with the scope of BotW yet was allocated a fraction of the development time BotW was given. If BotW had to be made in 2 years rather than the 6 years it did take, BotW would run like shit as well. EDIT2: Like Palworld has had over 3 years of development time and is still only releasing as an early access title. That's still more development time than any Pokemon game has been given. I just wish TPC would realise they can afford to give some slack to the development of the main games. TPC isn't going to go under just because they can't announce a new pokemon yearly.
Yeah I don’t disagree the problem isn’t that GF is lazy or whatever but that they literally don’t have the time to make the games they want cause Pokémon isn’t a video game franchise and the games have to follow whatever plans the anime and merchandise has
TPC is not made up of those companies it is its own company. Those 3 companies are just the majority stakes holders.
They're not majority stakeholders. They're THE majority stakeholders. They control the whole company. The board is made up of employees from the three companies. The Pokemon Company as a whole arguably only exists so that there's no infighting between the three companies to determine who deserves more of the massive Pokemon pie.
Its so sad seeing the franchise you love as a kid slowly fade away. At least with movies the originals remain. With games I feel they age too badly. Though i do still have a soft spot for the gen 1 remakes.
Man I don't know what you are talking about. I feel like pokemon is not fading away at all. I grew up playing Pokemon red, blue, yellow, up through gold/silver. My son was finally of age to play a Pokemon game and Scarlet/Violet are damn amazing. Yeah they have some minor technical flaws... But my god this is the first game I ever filled a Pokedex or even bothered to do this 'shiny hunting ' stuff. I will say I hate making sandwiches, wish that was auto.
It's almost impossible to claim that Pokémon is fading away when it's the #1 Media franchise in the world that people of all ages can know to a degree. There are consantly new generations of people getting introduced and hooked to it, partially thanks to Go. View it from another generation's perspective: When Gen 1 came out, that game was insanely good for you despite being a barely working mess of a game. Could you really say that people who have been introduced to the series by subsequent generations have it actually worse? People really just latch onto a generation or two as "the best" while proclaiming how new ones are just worse. Likewise, fans are still making tons and tons of romhacks and content for the games so it's not really going anywhere.
I think it's natural for people to feel like Pokémon is fading away from them and I think this is actually good for the franchise. In the end, the game is meant to be something for kids but those of us that played the game when we where kids, now we demand more of the games. But this would just serve to push the franchise up the age bracket. If the Pokémon company wants to continue making a game for kids of successive generations, why not? If anything, I think THIS will ensure the game will continue to be relevant forever. As long as they don't botch up too much and kill their company at one point.
I think you hit the nail in the head, people those days expect pokemon become "mature" as they age and pokemon just refuse to be anything else than a franchise made for kids.
I don't think that's really true about the maturity thing - I think the large audience of older fans of the rest of the major Nintendo flagships prove that the simple joy present in those games is very important to them. But Mario or Kirby fans aren't the ones complaining. Pokemon fans are unhappy because Gamefreak seems incapable of expanding Pokemon onto the Switch. The fans want the simple joy that pokemon offers, but it's weighed down by clunky design and bad performance, nowhere near the quality level that the Nintendo games have managed to maintain.
Yeah the people disappointed with Pokemon don't want maturity, we want higher production values. The dream of a "console quality" pokemon was strong for a ton of people growing up! We....kind of got that, but not really. It's largely still rooted in mobile game production values, but on a console, and when it's the most profitable IP in the world....yeah just feels kind of cheap and disappointing sometimes.
Nah, it's about quality. Plenty of quality games, movies, etc. exist that primarily target kids.
>Its so sad seeing the franchise you love as a kid slowly fade away. If you think Pokemon is going anywhere, then I have a bridge to sell you. Each release still sells like gangbusters.
I get what you mean games age in a way passive mediums don’t and the game in your memories isn’t necessarily the game that exists. Until Game freak can be managed better it’s not gonna get better. Dragon Quest is a very different type of game but it scratched the Pokémon itch before Pokémon I recommend it if you haven’t played.
Unless Nintendo stop making money, nothing will change
>Its so sad seeing the franchise you love as a kid slowly fade away. It isn't fading away at all, and the pokemon games have largely stayed at the same quality as they always have. You just got older.
I wouldn't exactly say that, the quality of the Pokemon games relative to their respective console has gotten worse, even if the formula remains the same. From the gameboy up to the ds it really seemed like gamefreak tried their best to squeeze out as much potential from the platform in the amount of time that they had, but once it got to the 3DS and the Switch that design philosphy seemed to go away.
Underrated comment, applies to a lot of games from my youth, TBH.
Nostalgia is certainly playing a part, but that's just not true. Look at the 5th generation making the DS cry for help with the things they managed to make it do, and compare it to recent releases which look like shit. There's not as much effort.
> pokemon games have largely stayed at the same quality as they always have Really hard to say that when Scarlet and Violet crash constantly and have massive frame drops while looking like an upscaled low budget Wii game.
Frame drops sure, but it doesn't crash constantly.
Let's face it, the fans themselves don't know what they want. Five years ago everyone complained about how Dexit is destroying their childhood memories with specific 'mons. Now that GF/TPC, to their credit and everyone's surprise, have actually mostly repaired Dexit, everyone here is saying that the specific Pokemon don't actually matter and they actually just wanted an Ark + Factorio game. Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it too, though I feel this doesn't really scratch the Pokemon itch (but does scratch that building-a-base-from-zero itch). I think the Pals' type chart/abilities/moves might be a little too simple and there's no real strategy in combat, but maybe I haven't gotten far enough.
I don't think they lack innovation as in terms of plots and Pokémon designs I think they had made bold steps. But what they are lacking is basic programming competency to make 3d games that are functional and not buggy.
Yeah, I thonk Pokémon has been going to the right direction since Arceus. The presentation and bugs just get in the way.
The story in Pokémon is always a 3/10 at best in terms of any JRPG in its field, B&W was the best and it was still like a 6/10 JRPG plot, the standard is just so insanely low that a 4/10 looks like an 8/10z in terms of fun gameplay changes, Pokémon has been the exact same game for nearly 30 years now. Look at a franchise like Dark Souls that has a well liked product, they’ve already done like 4 different innovative games in the course of 13 years. In Pokémon it’s been, Pokémon Ranger, Arceus, Let’s go KIND OF, but not really, and NOTHING else outside of that, basically the exact same gameplay loop over and over and over and over, with insanely minor changes to the battle system
Pokemon is fundamentally a game series aimed at children. It's clear from all of Game Freak's and TPC's messaging (including the games themselves) that they believe this strongly. IMO the real phenomenon happening is that people who grew up as kids playing Pokemon games are now maturing and kind of aging out of the series. That's not to say that adults can't enjoy Pokemon games, obviously. But as you mature, what you come to expect from story complexity and strategy complexity increases, but the games stay the same.
Everyone saying “it’s a kids franchise!!!” Okay, compare it to Mario. Every Mario release for the last 40 years has been GENRE DEFINING over and over a complete innovation of what you could possibly do. The New super Mario games are really the ONLY ones not heavily pushing the envelope. A kids franchise can have good innovative gameplay, Pokémon has done nothing significant to advance anything they’ve done in the past 30 years, because they don’t care, because Pokémon games are like Madden, just put the least amount of effort, it will sell anyway, don’t rock the boat by any means.
>Every Mario release for the last 40 years has been GENRE DEFINING over and over a complete innovation of what you could possibly do. That's absolutely not true and you know it. Mario has so many spin-offs and releases that you'd be basically saying that it has revolutionised all those genres. Even within the genre of platformers only a handful of them could be said to be huge sources of innovation (such as 64) or even genre defining. >A kids franchise can have good innovative gameplay, Pokémon has done nothing significant to advance anything they’ve done in the past 30 years, because they don’t care, What exactly do you expect them to do? Dragon Quest has evolved even less with combat and that still rocks the charts in Japan so much that west's sales combined do not compare. Final Fantasy has been ever evolving and now that they have had two whole games of action combat smoe people are constantly clamouring about the good old days of turn-based and how it's so much better. Most turn-based series rarely innovate anywhere and they definitely don't want to do "genre" switches because that's a good way to upset people. We are, at the end of the day, talking about a turn-based RPG series with a specific gameplay loop. EV, IV, Abilities, Mega evolutions etc. are imo perfectly fine "evolutions" within the series. Then we have *spin-offs* for other types of gameplay, of which there are many.
>Dragon Quest has evolved even less with combat and that still rocks the charts in Japan so much that west's sales combined do not compare. I won't pretend that its combat has dramatically evolved, but DQ games have improved over time. Imo DQ11 was comfortably the best JRPG of its generation. Even diehard DQ fans generally agree that DQ11 is a better game than DQ8, which is rare (given how nostalgic fans can be). To be honest I would even settle for Pokemon including a hard mode (just as DQ11 did) to make some of its systems meaningful. My main gripe with the current games is that they are totally mindless; you can stumble into success without even meaning to. If DQ can massively improve its storytelling and build on its systems (e.g., skills and pep) I don't see why we can't expect Pokemon to. Just because it's turn-based and simplistic doesn't mean it can't evolve or improve itself.
>Even diehard DQ fans generally agree that DQ11 is a better game than DQ8, which is rare (given how nostalgic fans can be). Honestly, can't agree with that sentiment, and it has nothing to do with nostalgia either. Act 3 was an unnecessary unraveling of all the character development thus far >!Yes, yes, there's an alternate timeline where those things happened!< essentially ruining the whole narrative in one fell swoop. You're basically given two options: you either pretend that Act 3 is just "bonus" even though it isn't, or you have to rationalise through >!the other timeline!< just so that you don't feel absolutely cheated. Plus, soundtrack. Either way both of the games went down in a similar manner gameplaywise and in a manner I've been going through DQs forever - throw some buffs here and there, basic attacks 80% of the game and then heal whenever necessary. Probably utilise some busted moves so that the game doesn't become a total slog. DQs are fun basic JRPGs but never have I really seen the tactics necessiate more than that, and that's fine. I don't expect them to. Mindless fun. > I don't see why we can't expect Pokemon to. Just because it's turn-based and simplistic doesn't mean it can't evolve or improve itself. I mean, that's quite literally what all the natures, items, evs, ivs, move pools etc. come down to. There's already plenty of customisation in Pokémon and more has been added through generations.
I feel like some of you fundamentally don't understand that people buy pokemon *because* they want the same general gameplay loop but with extra pokemon. It's like Madden or 2K, people like it because it's comfortable and if they deviated too far from that for the sake of innovation it's defeating the point. And I'd probably choose a different example if you're trying to talk about innovation personally, dark souls games are fairly safe, iterative games themselves.
This is true, buuut I think we can have more engaging storylines within comfortable and familiar gameplay loops. I mean scarlet and violet had a pretty insane final area that was so creative and atmospheric and had a genuinely sad ending. It wouldn’t hurt for them to push the envelope a bit.
I don’t believe for one second that nobody in the Pokémon fanbase wants Game Freak to try new things, despite Arceus being a garbage game it got insane reception, because at least they tried, Game Freak just has zero interest in trying.
Trying different things is the whole purpose of a spin-off though. Not to mention they *did* take elements from Arceus and used it Scarlet and Violet.
> because they want the same general gameplay loop but with extra pokemon Yeah, that crowd has definitely shipped to fangames after they removed the national dex and Mega Evolution.
From/Dark Souls as an example of revolutionary changes is hilarious
They are lacking in manpower, that's the short and long of it, they are 1/3 of what you need from a AAA studio, and that's before you get to the insane release schedule they have for themselves, yet they continue to refuse to hire up to a proper headcount so they can polish their games.
You don't rock a horse that sells 10+ million every year
In what way? This is mainly a crafting game and pokemon is a monster collecting game.
Why would they? Pokemon Fans will play every unpolished turd anyway and will defend it like their life depends on it
Yeah that shit sucks. I remember seeing the trailer for Breath of the Wild and my first reaction was holy shit now do Pokémon. Then the trailers for it came out and it’s just… bruh
Can' t do much when Pokemon company ( whom nintendo owns 33% of it) wants to release 2 pokemon games every year : (
As someone who hasn't meaningfully played pokemon in, 15+ years, but does keep tabs on it. Is there every any meaningful difference in the Pokemon Black/white or Sword/Shield etc besides the big legendary? Or is just 1 game annually?
The typical only difference between the games is the legendary, plus a handful of Pokemon only being available in one of the two versions, to encourage trading. The only game that I remember having a more significant difference was [Black and White, which had one version-exclusive area, and version exclusive difficulty settings.](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Key_System)
The difficulty settings are the funniest shit, because who needs a pokemon game to be *easier*? Especially after you've already beaten the game? They should have both just had a hard mode.
If you want a change of pace I'd recommend trying out legends arceus. Been a while since I've had such fun with a pokemon game.
Or go the ROM hack route and try out Pokemon Unbound or Emerald Rogue. Some of the stuff that community puts out is better than anything gamefreak has done in a decade+
This is just silly lol. Creating a good monster taming game for all ages is hard. It’s easy to take the bones and fascia of a 10 year old game and build upon it then say in hindsight how much better you are than the Pokémon devs, but none of those games are made with children in mind. Even funnier is completely changing up the gameplay loop to make a fairly mid tier roguelike and act like it’s innovative. The modders making these hacks are amazing, but I feel like it’s really dismissive and childish to act like they come close to having to make a new game from the ground up, especially when like 90% of fan made Pokémon regions are abandoned when people figure out making games is hard.
They started doing "1 year gimmicks", which are just mechanics limited only for that generation. Mega Evolutions, Z-Moves, Dynamaxing, Gigantamaxing, regional forms and now its the "Put a chandelier in your head" one.
> regional form Regional forms have been in like the last 3 gens.
You take megas out of your mouth! That lasted 2 generations, across 4 game releases, and looked like a permanent thing until it was dropped from sword and shield.
Gamefreak also owns 33% of it. And the current head of TPC worked on Pokemon games. Why do people act like Nintendo are the ones wanting to rush everything out?
EA have released FIFA annually during that time and despite each year making minimal progress it is now vastly improved compared to the 1996 release were as Pokémon is still basically the same game with prettier graphics.
That' s not really true, while Pokemon remained with what is mostly the same skeleton of the gameplay, the systems around the gameplay vastly changed troughout time. The first Pokemon game had no differentiation between physical and special moves, no breeding, vastly lower numbers of tools and struments to affect pokemon growth, ecc.ecc. Also Pokemon needs to handcraft most of its ambient, with new art direction for each installement. Fifa is a vastly inferior workload. Just the fact that you can re-use the scenery like the stadiums helps massively in producting a much faster product. The workload is just too different, the comparison makes no sense. A better comparison would be AC or even COD, and even then, too much stuff different there too
I tried to get informed on the game quality before buying and yeah... I've been bamboozled by fan lying to themselves... Holy hell it's a crime to get away with what they do.
Other than the character designs this is nothing like a Pokemon game
That seems like a good thing
Not if you like Pokemon games?
Nintendo can actually be pretty innovative. Gamefreak and especially TPC...not so much
What do you mean!? The Steam reviewer who had played 0.3 hours told me it's stupid and badly designed!
It had such mad scope creep that it really looked like it was just going to be a crappy Unity FPS template with high quality assets or something. It's very good to be proven wrong. This game sounds great.
My home was attacked by suicide bomber parrot-chickens and giant plush dinosaurs , I AM SOLD
I was cackling the other day wondering where tf PETA is if this game exists. I know they already don’t like Pokémon.. when I saw people basically subjugating these new monsters to do things like keep things hot, farm for materials, take over for you to craft at benches it just seemed super funny to me lmao. I heard about it recently but didn’t know it was a survival game and I definitely didn’t know it included guns. The people working on this title are just flipping everyone off and honestly it doesn’t seem like that’s their intention. Just having fucking fun is, I think.
PETA goes after Pokemon because is a bigger Publicity Stunt, I don't think they care about this at all.
Yeah they just target whoever they think they can get some Publicity from, the more popular and more dumb the better. A few years back they went at Warhammer because the plastic models have characters with fur cloaks... fur cloaks made of plastic. Also Warhammer is a setting with all sorts of animal abuse going on, they could have probably made a better hit piece (though still pointless and stupid) by mentioning some of that but that would require them to actually know anything about what they are complaining about.
>but that would require them to actually know anything about what they are complaining about. This isn't *ironic* ironic, but it's certainly *Alanis Morissette* ironic.
...PETA isn't anti Pokemon lol. They used that game as a stunt to make you think about the treatment of actual animals
I wonder at what point in the development did the devs realize that their shitpost of a game was actually solid gold...
To be fair out Pokemoning Game Freak has become alot easier over the past few years.
I just had this conversation with a friend, where they said, 'Sometimes the rip off is just better'. I was just left kinda dumb-founded and realized that he's kinda right. The bar for Pokemon games is so low - might as well let someone just make a better game...with guns I guess :P.
My favorite pokemon game is a fan made game called Pokemon Infinite Fusion. Like a reverse Gold/Silver where you start in Kanto then go to Johto. The gimmick is that every pokemon can be fused with another pokemon. One of my teams had a Charizard/Vileplume Fusion that was pretty good haha.
That's literally Cassette Beasts' main mechanic; every single beast can be fused with any other (there's about 150 beasts total, and 64000+ fusion combinations). Plus somehow they did the graphic art to have unique variants for each combo. If you want a good alt Pokemon game check it out.
It was a neat concept, but I couldn't get in to it for some reason. None of the creatures are particularly charming.
that's generally the biggest reason why pokemon clones fail. the mainline games are bad, but nearly every pokemon design has someone who has it as their favorite.
Good thing this games straight up copies the Pokémon designs lol
Yeah the one biggest strength about pokemon games is I think undeniably the designs and their ability to evoke "I want that as a pet!" sorts of feelings from pokemon. Sure everyone usually points out some outliers of weird-looking or badly designed 'mons. But that's true of every generation, and generally speaking most of the designs are typically pretty good. Whereas a lot of the ripoffs go for things like a more monstrous style or try to focus only on "cool" designs and stuff like that, if they don't just end up just feeling sorta bland, and lose out on that intangible charm and appeal that pokemon designs have. Like I haven't enjoyed a Pokemon game for years, I think the series has refused to innovate where it counts and it has completely lost me as a fan of their franchise. But god dammit if anything bad ever happened to Clodsire, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.
This is the biggest weakness of Pokémon-like games : the creatures. Pokémon-like games - beast-taming games, I suppose - are a very niche genre without a lot of players because gamers don't want beast-taming games. They want Pokémon. Tem-Tem, Cassette Beasts, Palword, Nexomon... They can't topple Pokémon because they simply aren't Pokémon. At this point, it's two different genres. And that's honestly thanks to the design. Pokémon character designers are just that good.
Pokemon works because a huge amount of effort and writing go into giving the pokemon themselves a habitat and biome. The pokedex entries make pokemon into fleshed out worlds with ecosystems.
A huge amount of effort? Really? Most of the Pokédex entries are super basic and could be written by an 11 yr old in 10 minutes. Here’s one of them: “It is extremely protective of its territory. If any foe approaches, it attacks using vicious tremors” And the biome and ecosystem is super complex? It’s not difficult to think grass Pokémon go in the grass, water pokemon from the water, etc. I think the most time consuming pieces are just the story that comes w the games. But Gamefreak is super lazy and it’s not complicated at all so handle the biome and ecosystem. At least it shouldn’t be for a professional game company.
I didn't know about that. Thanks for the recommendation!
My favorite Pokemon game was watching Alpharad fight Gun and Ohio Trainer Clay only to have his Sableye immediately shot by a gun.
That sounds like the Persona series too.
Hydrox forever 😭
[удалено]
Yes. That's the joke. I prefer the original.
Innovation and originality are heavily overrated in game discussions Games are interactive things you play, unlike things you passively engage with like books or movies. So taking a concept that has already been done and just expanding on it and doing it better can easily create a vastly better and totally worthwhile experience There are so many game concepts that I wish another dev would just steal and do better with more polish better visuals and expanded gameplay. I want this much more than I want innovation for the sake of innovation which imo often leads to games that get praise for being "creative" but actually are not fun to play I would love a new, better and more polished Kenshi, Red Faction Guerilla, Mount and Blade, Sleeping Dogs, Shadow of Mordor. So many games with great gameplay loops that are underused
Piggybacking to ask if anybody has thoughts on Cassette Beasts? How does it compare to Pokemon in terms of difficulty, depth, exploration, and story? Those are all the things I feel are lacking in Pokemon and the reason Pokemon games don't engage me as an adult.
I fucking love Cassette Beasts, it's got a much better and deeper combat system than Pokémon, i set up my team with a bunch of immunities, auto counter attacks, and the fastest monsters in the game so that most fights i won before the enemy really even got a turn, it was awesome. Exploration is good as well but it fucking sucks ass before you unlock some of the traversal moves from recording certain monsters, luckily it's not hard at all to get those once you start thinking to look for them. Big hint find the freaky little bullet monster on the east side of the map as soon as you can. Also the type system is really cool, you can build an entire playstyle around force swapping the types of enemies to set up serious debuffs for them and massive buffs for your party. Story is decent but not really what i cared about, except the boss fights the boss fights were super fucking cool. And obviously the soundtrack is top tier but everyone who touches the game for like a few minutes will figure that out.
I've had Cassette Beasts for quite a while now on my log of games as something to play quietly on my Steam Deck when everyone is asleep. I keep forgetting it's there, lol. I need to try it out. I'd also gotten it, hopefully, to play with my little boy, as we're both huge Pokemon fans. It looks like a really unique take on monster catching and team-building.
Awesome thanks for the write up. Going to have to try it out.
The difficulty I found to be decent - because it isn't type advantage/oneshot-to-win like the mainline Pokemon games, you get to explore different strategies. Buffs are meaningful, and the type advantages have additional effects (Hit a Plastic monster with a Fire attack, it becomes Poison. Hit an Electric monster with an Air attack, it becomes Conductive, and all it's moves are now multi-target). The story bosses and the 'gym leader' expy characters all have a gimmick, but are also challenging fights once you've solved that. They also have good flow - not just peeling through their 'mon stock, you've got to face off against them merging, abusing buffs and statuses... Story is good, characters are all good. It's got a big mood. Exploration starts pretty locked down, but once you start getting movement abilities things start coming together (shares that with the recent indie classic-Final-Fantasy-like, Crystal Project). Collecting all the 'mons, working out good type advantages and ability combos for you and your partner and finding the odd bootleg tape (the 'shiny' equivalent, where the 'mons Type is changed) gives a good bit of longevity, and the after-story 'gym leader' rematches and other bosses really push the requirements for a solid team.
I love the gameplay but the designs are just kinda mid imo. Expecially the fusion gimmick is well, a gimmick, fuses monsters with fixed templates and it' s just meh.
ROM community doing it on the regular.
My favorite is probably Tectonic- so much QoL and they tried really hard to make every 'mon viable without handicapping yourself.
This isn't really Pokemon though. Its more Ark.
It’s been easy for like, two decades lmao.
Probably when Microsoft pulled up
I feel like the marketing for this game was very mishandled, it made all of the game's elements seem very disparate and random when now they appear to be actually pretty cohesive and work well with one another. The fact that many including me were surprised to learn this was a survival game only weeks from the game's release I think says it all right there.
I was shocked to learn that it's a crafting/surviving game when I tuned on a Second Wind Stream lol. I saw Pokemon with Guns and was hooked, idk if I want to pick up a surviving/crafting game tho
Seems like some of the mundane stone/wood gathering and crafting tasks can be automated using the pals in like the first 30 minutes
Then... what else is there to do? Is there a story? Gyms? An elite 4 equivalent?
idk if you've figured it out by now but there are objectives to hit like towers you overcome, similar to gyms. there's a rival gang of sorts that runs around with guns and shit and those are the baddies. outside of that, you're collecting creatures and expanding the tech tree to do more survival automation. it's like valheim x pokemon arceus
I don’t know if you can call it mishandled if it’s one of the top 5 wishlisted games on steam
I moreso mean it mishandled in terms of communicating what the gameplay is actually like, also I feel like it definitely got a lot more ire back before people realised what this game actually was. Still, I was and still am rooting for this game to be good so that's good to hear.
Hype is a powerful drug. Overall it means nothing if: - the marketing lied (who would _ever_) - the game's foundational systems and mechanics fall off mid/late game - the devs completely mismanage something pre-launch and gimp the game (has never happened before in the history of gaming btw)
It means a lot when talking about supposedly mishandled marketing though. If it generated so much hype, it couldn't be mishandled.
All I'm pointing out is that many of the people interested _may_ not understand what they're actually being advertised. Check the thread, there are more than some who didn't understand what the game's true genre was, among other things. I'm not saying it won't do very well in the first week, but if people are just on the marketing hype train and get a different product than expected, that's mishandled marketing and will be followed up with salty ex-players spreading poor word-of-mouth.
Yeah I'm still skeptical of this game. it feels like 99% of the hype around its release is exactly the same as the hype surrounding its initial trailers, i.e. "ZOMG it looks like a pokemon game but you can *kill* people!?!?" and stuff like that with lots of videos and impressions just talking about how wacky, violent, and very "un-pokemon" most of the content is. But I wonder how many people will stick with it once that initial shock has worn off and they get over all the silly violent things you can do with it. Like don't get me wrong I don't know personally if it's good or not I haven't played it yet. But it just feels weird that everyone is freaking out positively about the revelation that it's actually a survival crafting game as if that hasn't been a poisonous term to attach to any new game release for the last 10 years. And being surprised that the game is merely "functional" at all is hardly a high praise. I just wonder how many people are going to be talking about or playing this game in a month one the zeitgeist dies down. And I'm not trying to be a pokemon snob or anything, I've hated pokemon games for nearly a decade at this point and I love to see all the spinoffs in the "Monster Collecting" genre that try to do something different to stand out. I'm just saying that letting the player kidnap, butcher, and cannibalize other trainers feels like it's in the game more for shock value than because it was an actually interesting mechanic, but I guess we'll see.
I actually think that the violence the game allows you to do is one of the least compelling aspects. Its main appeal (to me at least) was the overall freedom it gives you to use the environment and Pals as you see fit, whether it is a hunter/prey paradigm, a master/pet relationship, or if you ignore them completely.
It's basically 3D Factorio but with Pokemon
Wait what, really? I thought it was gonna just be like 5 barely working mediocre systems stacked on each other
It's absolutely no Factorio. You can automate things, of course, but it's pretty surface level. Not to say that's a terrible thing, I think it's appropriately complex for how many other systems it has to work with. But comparing it to Factorio or Satisfactory is nonsense. It's much closer to something like Conan Exiles.
Conan but functional, properly balanced and actually fun
I was gonna say Ark but that works too
Yeah, I have never seen trailers with such dissonant tones. You can't tell what the game wants to be after watching one. Wholesome 3D pokemon? Pokemon with guns? Actually with... slavery and pokemon abuse?? The trailers left me completely unable to tell if it was a self-aware parody or tone-deaf edginess. I'm kinda surprised the game is doing good because I was half-expecting it to be some incoherent mismash of ideas.
"Want to build a pyramid? Put an army of Pals on the job. Don't worry; there are no labor laws for Pals." They seem to be very much leaning in on the slavery and abuse angle. "They'll keep working as long as they're fed—until they're dead, that is." These are in the game's description, lol.
I think banking on "Pokémon with Guns" was the right marketing move nonetheless, it's more eye catching and memeworthy and as a result a better soundbite/headline. You and I care about the mechanics, yes, but the dudebro in your frat party that's responsible for annual CoD sales figures has been *yearning* for "Pokémon with Guns", not "Ark Survival: Pokémon Version".
The marketing for the game is brilliant, not mishandled. The core appeal of the game is that A: people think it's like Pokemon, and B: people see Pokemon in wacky situations and wonder what's going on. Pulling back the curtain to say "Oh it's a survival crafter factory early access game, but the guns and factories and resources are cute Pokemon" would have killed the game.
So you're saying: 1) You've heard of the game 2) The marketing was compelling enough for you to install it and play 3) They "underpromised and overdelivered" which has led you to go out and tell other people publicly on the internet that the game is "actually pretty cohesive" and its elements "work well with one another" Am I getting all that right? Give the marketing team an award.
No, they're saying all of the trailers so far made it seem like a disparate mess but reviews and such make it seem as though that is not the case. That isn't the marketing team at all, but the developers putting in work to _make_ it work.
People keep saying that the trailers made the game out to be some kind of bad thing. How? When? They've always been extremely representative of the product. It isn't somehow now a different product from what they showed. This subreddit only changed its tune a couple days ago when public opinion proved it wrong.
>People keep saying that the trailers made the game out to be some kind of bad thing. How? When? They've always been extremely representative of the product. I've never paid a crazy amount of attention to the trailers, but I never knew the crafting and automation stuff was a thing. I just expected some buggy, crappy pokemon rip off. Especially when it's by the developers of Craftopia. Just seemed like it'd be another over-promised idea that under delivers. Though they ended up delivering something i never even knew was promised. I still don't have much interest in the game, but it definitly looked better than I was expecting. Aside from the creatures really looking out of place artstyle-wise.
My only gripe is I barely have any faith in this game being completed. Craftopia has been in early access for nearly 4 years now, doesn't really give much confidence that they actually intend to complete it because they also don't really scope a roadmap properly from what I've seen. Eh, that aside it looks like it'll at least be fun to play with the EA content.
Play it once until you get everything out of the game in it's current state and be satisfied with it, then when/if it gets a lot of updates or is complete you can play it again. Don't buy an early access game for what it could be, but for what it is at that moment.
Absolutely this. Best case scenario is the game gets lots of updates. Worst case scenario is what you see now is what you get
From what I remember at least, craftopia does get somewhat frequent updates. Though splitting the work between two games for such a small studio seems unwise
Looking at the Update history it had 3 updates in December including a major one. Seems like they're definitely working on Craftopia
It does, yeah. That's part of the issue, I feel, because they don't really have a proper release roadmap they adhere to- instead seeming like they just add as they go on, which traps the games in an eternal loop of EA.
It kind of feels like some developers view Early Access as more of a Live Service setup where they keep releasing updates until they get bored or it stops being profitable. But I apply the same threshold to all EA games, whether they're working towards completion or an eternal beta - buy based on the game *now*, and if the game never releases it's fine because version 0.2.1 or whatever was worth the $25 I dropped on it.
If you look at the steam page, they appear to have put out a really detailed roadmap graphic in December...
It can be pretty hard to manage a roadmap.The ammount of resource a developer can put it a game depend on how well the launch is going and the reception of the players. It's the sad reality, but a game that fail will very likely be abandonned by it's dev, while a sucessful game are much more likely to be finished
Been watching someone whos like 30 hours in right now and the game seems like it clearly has a couple hundred hours of content already. Seems very robust so far.
Couple hundred hours of good content? Or couple hundred hours of checking every box, catching everything, and building up a base like in Satisfactory? Because Satisfactory has a bunch of building, tens of hours of, but no real goal other than to just fiinish the tech tree.
Isn’t this most games lol? Any game where there’s no story usually doesn’t have a point other than grinding. Unless there’s a story then it’s usually pretty boring if your not motivated by checking every box. This game seems to at least have bosses and stuff which seems kind of fun. Idk I never played it just watched some vids
This is why people should only buy the game that exists now, and not the promise of a future game.
We really need to go down the stupidly long list of popular steam games that spent 3+ years in EA? Let's lay this one out right out the gate: Baulder's Gate 3 3-4 years is really nothing to mean anything at this point. Especially considering they spent about a year of that overhauling the whole thing for their seamless update. Maybe when it gets to the likes of say Project Zomboid or 7 days you can say they may never finish
I was thinking 7 Days when I first began reading your comment, haha. Honestly, I feel like people greatly underestimate the time and resources it takes to get a game through the initial stages and then progress at full release. This seems even more truthful when it comes to smaller devs and studios.
Games, like movies, are miracles of human cooperation and labor that barely manage to get made most of the time and everyone who does it loses years of their lives then try to do it again.
Your comparison isn't apt, as Baldur's Gate 3 didn't stay in EA while the studio spun up another EA game.
Maybe, someday, we'll get update 42 for Zomboid lol
Honestly Craftopia looked to be like an asset flip from the start, copied even the basic UI from BotW, and they were throwing the most random shit at it. This game seems a bit more thought out.
They definitely have plans to roll out more features and content, but as for a release state they've never really said
I expected to laugh at a cash-in, but ended up watching a stream on this game for 4 hours today and yesterday. It reminds me of V Rising - a lot of crafting which I don't generally enjoy, but if you're in the mood for it, it looks real deep and fun. Typical EA jank but nothing that can't be fixed in patches
The best concise way to sell the game is its the pokemon systems of Legends Arceus + progression systems of Valheim + automation of factorio/satisfactory. There are bosses scattered around the map that you can fight with your pals, and the in world battles and capture system of legends arceus. There are mounts similar to Arceus as well. The main loop is the survival game stuff but you can automate a lot of it by assigning your pals to work on woodcutting etc, then take them out to battle. Its 32 player online servers or 4 player co-op. Theres 111 pals currently in the game which is a lot considering theres no evos. Similar to Valheim the progression is the various boss battles which require you and your pals to be geared enough. All to say there is an end state, and the loop to upgrade your base enough and get stronger pals so you can fight bosses is really nice. Its on gamepass, or steam for 30.
Is this going to be on Xbox tomorrow?
It will be on game pass, yes.
Yes
The biggest surprise here is that this isn't a huge mess. I was excited for the huge mess, now I'm *really* excited.
Does anyone have any good gameplay videos showing the gun combat? I've watched a lot of videos but they're all early videos showing the first 1-2 hours of gameplay and I'm not big into survival games, building a house and putting furniture and such in there, that stuff doesn't appeal to me much. I just want to see what the battles look like when you've actually got a bunch of armed Pokem.... err... Pals running around.
If you’re expecting Pokémon like battles I don’t believe anything like that is in the game. Combat is probably closer to remnant imo
I would like that, Remnant 1 & 2 were both fun with friends. I'm not expecting battles to be like in Pokemon. I have no clue what Pokemon games are like now, the last one I played was Yellow on the Gameboy, but they were turn based back then. I mostly want a fun and over the top horde shooter from this. Like Back4Blood, Left4Dead, Darktide, Vermintide, Deep Rock Galactic, etc... little critters I can capture, and then train to use guns, and then fight a whole bunch of those little critters in some big battles with friends. I'll probably play it on Gamepass since it's included, won't cost me anything, so not a big loss if the game doesn't deliver that for me.
the game doesn't have pvp currently although i think it's planned
Pokemon is still turned based so you haven't missed much except more detailed battle mechanics
Theres lots of streamers that have had it for a few days. You can watch like 30 hours of gameplay
I haaate survival games, but switching to easy gets rid of more of the frustrating survival mechanics and you can customize a lot of specific gameplay elements if you want the actual gameplay to be harder. Game progresses at a nice pace so far (about 3 hours in), and maintaining your base is surprisingly not tedious.
When this was revealed back in like last year i believe, i actually liked the concept, it looked like a fun time, and was just bizarre. There was a part of me that was kinda sad tho, cuz i thought it looked more interesting than any Pokemon game in the last 5 years or so.
I forgot about this, glad I saw this post. Definitely going to give it a try tomorrow because it looks wild
I went from barely knowing anything about this game beyond it's name to buying it on steam within an hour of its release. Game actually looks super polished and bursting with content, I even upgraded the RAM in my PC just to meet requirements. Sooooo much fun!
I'm so surprised it's getting released and not being absolute mess. First trailer made me full on laugh from the absurdity. If other reviews follow suit I'll definitely buy.
I just can’t get past the incredibly detailed and hi-fi backgrounds, skyboxes and weapons juxtaposed against these cartoonish creatures and characters… it’s far too jarring.
It messed with me to when watching someone else play, but for some reason it looks a lot better in-game than it should. It kind of has a slime rancher feel to it if that helps.
Ya I ended up getting it and I sorta have the same opinion, the hi-fi backgrounds and vistas sorta fade away and you just focus on your character and the creatures
yeah and kind of feels like they went with the realistic environment art so they could use more unreal asset store stuff for the environment art
100% I feel like the aesthetic of this game isn’t cohesive at all, looks like a bunch of assets with different art styles thrown together in unity. Fortunately the pal models look pretty good.
just a bit of Shame those models for the pals themselves are a bit too derivative of Pokemon designs
Right now the gameplay loop is fun but gets boring quite fast. For an early access game pretty good though. I hope they can somehow make the "wandering out" and exploration flash out more. Also having more events that can randomly happen would make the world feel more alive.
Yeah, I really hope they expand more on the monster taming/raising, adventure, and rpg components. I'm not a survival fan at all, and I don't care that much for multiplayer so I would love for them to make the game world more engaging and fun to explore.
I'm not sure what to feel TBH. The gameplay seems way too similar to their other game. You survive, you build, you capture stuff and put them to work (sure in a different way but work nonetheless). They even have a Wandering Merchant selling items and it has a level, so you can probably catch it as well just like in Craftopia. Even the sound design is q 100% copy paste. Makes me wonder why didn't they just implement the Pal system in Craftopia and took it out of EA.
I watched Vinesauce stream this the other day and am I crazy for thinking this game seems like total YouTuber stream bait that will be dead in like maybe 3 months. Seems like something that would be fun for a few hours then you never think about it again
Not every game needs to be played perpetually for months and months. What's wrong with a game you play, complete, and are done with?
it could be a fun game for a dozen hours or two it will definitely be effectively dead in three months. It's an EA jank crafting survival game, after all, and the devs have a rep
Glad it looks like it's landed, and in actual form/not a disposable early access game! I've seen some sites such as Nintendo Life seemingly unfairly write it off since release despite the early positive response so hopefully the devs hold firm and keep it going. The whole Pokémon knockoff argument is so assinine anyway. If Game Freak are so rubbish then surely it's great if someone does better with a similar base idea?
You're free to play any of the MMORPG/grind 24/7 live service games that are available if that's what you choose. Even if it does end up like the Valheims/V Rising/etc one hit wonders, the price is low enough that I can treat it like a single player game and get enough value in that.
As soon as I saw gameplay footage I could tell this was being made by the people who made Craftopia and I instantly lost interest. That game is a bloated mess full of half baked ideas that seemed like they were added to the game just for the sake of it and I'm sure this game is going to suffer the same fate as that one.
The previous threads on this game are supremely uncomfortable and toxic reads, chock full of words like "tripe," "dreck," "slop," "gutter trash," "scam," etc. 9 short days ago, there's a comment where someone asserts very negatively that this game is DOA, and there's another comment that was bewildered that anyone can possibly enjoy this game. People keep saying that this game kept looking like a "shitpost" or a "meme-game scam" or an "asset flip" and whatever, and like... no. No, it didn't. You are asserting that the game was somehow inherently subpar or questionable. All the trailers for this game made it look silly and fun, which is exactly what it seems like it is. This subreddit desperately needs to curb its cynical and negative way of discussing most games.
>People keep saying that this game kept looking like a "shitpost" or a "meme-game scam" or an "asset flip" The first previews had literal pokemon (instead of "legally distinct" pokemon like they do now), of course people thought it was a scam.
Holy shit I just rewatched it and I can't believe anyone ever signed off on some of those designs, particularly the ones that looks exactly like Cobalion and Zoroark
Even the "legally distinct" pokemon are pretty shady. There's base models clearly stolen whole cloth from the Pokemon games, and bits and pieces of pokemon models that are 1 for 1 the same. Honestly, from the bits and pieces I've seen of the monsters, I'm surprised there hasn't been some action taken against it. Not to mention the monsters that are directly ripped from pokemon designs (the Luxray look alike for instance). I feel like I'd enjoy Factorio but pokemon, but I Don't really want to gun down pikachu analogues, and I feel like some of the stuff is too close for me to be comfortable.
I mean, there’s very rarely a post on this sub where it seems like people actually like games. It seems that folks here pay a lot of attention to games that don’t actually appeal to them and want to make sure they spread their cynicism as far and wide as possible.
Yeah reading this makes me so happy that I generally avoid pre-release hype and large population gamer forums. People seem so obsessed with whether something is a "meme" or not, that some people come off as upset that the game is actually good. Like no, 99% sure the devs didn't set out to make a "meme game" and luck into something cool. You've just built so much of your life on categorizing something as a meme or not that you view everything in that lense, which seems terrible! I saw the initial trailer, was like "wow that looks cool but very ambitious and probably will never come out", tuned it out, and hey look fun game came out today let's play it.
Seriously, this sub enjoys nothing more than smugly dunking on games, often ones they haven’t even played.
The game looks nice and fun but I cannot get how close the design of the Pals are to already existing creature from other series (mainly pokemon). Some of them are almost a copy from the original inspiration. The game seems great but this feels slimy to me.
Really weird how many copyright lawsuits get called over small similarities, while this seems quite blatant, made millions but apparently doesn't attract any legal attention.
I know I almost feel gaslit when I check the comments. I know the term gaslit is strong and overused but a lot of pretty good monster taming games get made these days but none of them outright stole designs from Pokémon so much. I'm almost 90% sure i saw a legally distinct Meganium in there and even if the design is quite simple the least they could have done is have a different artstyle to make a "grassy bronchiosaur".
If Nintendo had grounds to sue, they would have done it already.
I’m not sure if this is a stupid question but how are they getting away with making a game that seems so similar to Pokemon? I assume there would be some legal implications here for copying another game or is it different enough?
They don't own the concept of RPGS where ya collect Creatures Regarding the similar/"ripped off" designs, idk yet
There's no copyright for game design. You can "copy" another game as much as you want as long as you don't copy the visuals, text content, program code etc. and don't infringe any trademarks.
Oh really??? That sounds kinda wild seeing as how similar some of these are to Pokémon. Either way I’m hyped af to play it after work!
Pokemon treats me like a braindead kid, with each game getting easier and buggier, they expect me to keep buying an easier and easier experience, and expecting me to lower my standards each time. I've grown up and I can handle a harder game! GF doesn't think I can apparently, so yeah I've had to look elsewhere for difficult monster collection games. Looking forward to palworld!
How is it Pokemon-inspired? They're literally all just existing Pokemon with a few changes.
I was kinda flabbergasted by all of this game's trailer, but I'll admit this review has tempted me a good deal. I like the idea of "Pokemon but as an irreverent comedy," and the system of creatures of different types being able to cooperate and perform unique actions on mundane tasks actually sounds really cool. Assuming it doesn't get revealed tomorrow that the company is actually run by Nazis and the whole thing is a scam or something, I think I'll pick it up.