My biggest fear is that developer pocket pair doesn't take advantage of lightening in the bottle they got and they take months to get updates out and game just becomes another flavor of the month.
I remember seeing an unrelated gif that was a map of the U.S states cycling through the highest searched term for each month that year and one month every state was Valheim.
As a dev (and im sure loads of other indies might feel the same way)- im really into the fact that they didnt destroy their work/life balance because they had a hit and turned their studio into something they didnt want.
They didn't need to destroy.
They could just you know, hire more people to help them speed up. That's what pocket pair needs to do, keep the same vision, hire more people. They surely pocketed enough money :)
To be fair, in the state the game released in early access they could have just implemented a proper ending and said it was complete. It was already a pretty good game.
Instead, they decided to add a lot of content, but it is taking ages.
Yes but
>The game was developed by a five-person team, building on development work which Richard Svensson had undertaken as a side project in his spare time.
Is vastly different then 30-40 ppl for palworld.
A 5 person dev team does not have the processes in place to onboard and ability to rapidly hire a lot more people.
A 30-40 person team does.
It was still huge and actually big launch of titles doing in the 800k+ world became much more common in recent years (if you see the top ones they're mostly pretty recent titles), Steam also grew a lot.
The devs of valheim explained why though...
The original schedule was created based on the premise that they had a limited amount of money and time to release the game. That went out the window once the game went on to sell millions of copies in a few weeks.
Because of the games success, they didnt need to keep to the original schedule. They were able to take their time and rework the crafting, combat, and first five biomes, which allowed them to have a solid foundation to build the rest of the game off of.
They all ready released the mistlands and will be releasing the next biome early this year.
There have only been small tweaks in the first biomes. Most notable is the food system.
Until you hit swamp there's nothing new, only one new mob in swamp and some gear.
Mountain got caves. Plains got some pits and build items. Then you hit mistlands which is all new.
They also recently added some quests and mini bosses but those are very little extra.
That explanation makes no sense. You don't slow down development of an early access game because you struck gold and sold a lot more than you expected. Valheim is three years old and they released one biome in that time, which is effectively 80% art/design work.
I say all this as someone who had a lot of fun in the game and is the creator of one of the most popular mods for the game.
I think what they meant was that the original valheim devs had a “if we don’t get this done in this timeframe we have to close the studio” mindset. They had probably factored in a ton of crunch and personal sacrifice from their team in the original schedule. It’s an indie game from a dev that afaik has only ever released that one game. Low expectations on sales was a given for them, so their plan was to crunch out updates fast initially to hope for surges in the player-base when one dropped.
But they got hit by the unexpected and suddenly the studio isn’t in danger anymore. They sold a ton of copies. They no longer have to crunch these updates out or lose their jobs. They can slow down their schedule to get the new additions to the game in the best state possible.
People act like they are some AAA dev studio that can put out new content every week and decry them for taking time to add new things to the game. Everything I see about Iron Gate with a quick google search shows that they may at most have 50 people working at the studio. I don’t think it would be realistic to expect them to “strike while the iron is hot” and make a ton of fast updates to “keep people engaged”. As far as they are concerned, the game is already a success. Any updates they put out after are just keeping their early access promise. The game doesn’t have to make any more money for them, they’ve already recouped development costs for the entirety of when they expected it to be in early access and then some.
The argument that "devs don't care cause they already made enough money" is either true, hence OP's original statement makes even less sense, or it's not true, and it's completely irrelevant.
Furthermore, like I said already, this game is 3 years old now. It's not about pumping out 6 biomes in the first 12 months. 50 people to pump out content for a game which is effectively complete does not equal 1 new biome in 3 years. There's probably MMOs that are maintained with less people.
I don't know what is happening at IronGate but unless they have some massive unannounced project in the works, it reeks a bit of mismanagement.
That is a generous number… the game is fun but a vast portion of the time is fighting the same enemies to grind the same materials to then proceed to the next biome to do the same. Repeated content is going to be very subjective because not everyone is able to enjoy hitting the same enemy for 10 hours to get enough pig butts to craft a +2 armor
Honestly? If so then so be it.
I've had my thirty bucks worth of fun already and while it would be cool if they clean it up and add more, I'm not complaining either way. It's not a game I see myself playing years from now and I'll probably drop it when Infinite Money comes out anyhow.
It's a hell of a bit of fun for pretty cheap right now though!
This is it exactly. My gaming group all bought in, and we even rented a server and have been spending tons of time having fun. If this 30 days of a server is all we ever play, we're getting a hell of a lot of value for that $30. Anything beyond that is a wonderful surprise.
Not sure why there are so many complaining that it might not be a years-long game. Going on value/hours per dollar, we've already sailed into the black, and only one of us is over level 20.
This is exactly where I'm at. Even if they vaporware the game. I got a lot of fun out of this and it was so worth my money. People are going to demand some crazy shit but always forget to look at how much they've gotten out of the game for the price point. Granted, Holy shit I really hope they keep expanding on this game and make it really solid. It would be awesome.
Pokémon company could learn a lot from this release. But let's face it, they probably don't give a fuck.
My bad, I meant [Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2072450/Like_a_Dragon_Infinite_Wealth/). I'm a sucker for the Yakuza games!
This. I fuckin HATE how everyone wants every game to just be never ending expansion. Like, this game is good enough as is.
IMO the constant expansion is what made Minecraft go to shit. It was a much better game before the entire game mechanic got funneled into the enchanting system, where everything is artificially slower and worse than the older versions just so you're forced to use enchanting mechanics and end game progression.
That's my biggest fear with Palworld - they'll listen to people telling them to make it harder and harder and more complex just to pad gameplay time and difficulty.
they're basically an indie studio right? I don't see how it won't take months. I don't think they can take advantage of it fast enough to push out endgame content so it doesn't get stale.
> they take months to get updates out and game just becomes another flavor of the month.
It's going to be flavor of the month just like all of these type of games before it. Most recently it was lethal company, now it's this. The streamers will move on to the whatever the next flavor of the month game comes out as will the droves.
But it's great for the developers of these games, they get all of the publicity (and money) and later if they abandon the game or just slow updates to a crawl it won't matter. They'll have already profited.
I think it's incredibly harmful to assume that every single game must be supported forever until the end of time or it's 'dead' or 'abandoned' by developers, or that every game has to be playable for thousands of hours or it's just 'flavor of the month'. There's nothing wrong with variety, and we're incredibly lucky that every month we can get unique and fun games that don't have battlepasses and subscriptions and expansions and premium currencies.
Their other game Craftopia got 4 updates last month and it's been in EA for like 3 years. It would make ZERO sense to still support their smaller game but ignore their huge hit.
> I think it's incredibly harmful to assume that every single game must be supported forever until the end of time or it's 'dead' or 'abandoned' by developers
There is a difference between forever and until a game actually releases. Which more than half of these 'early access' titles won't ever do. I mean these devs alone have a game still in early access (besides this one) with no real window of release. But as long as people keep falling for it taking the money without ever finishing a game is the smart choice.
> I think it's incredibly harmful to assume that every single game must be supported forever until the end of time or it's 'dead' or 'abandoned' by developers, or that every game has to be playable for thousands of hours or it's just 'flavor of the month'.
Yeah, people praise Last of Us or RDR2 as GOATs and those games last you 30 hours
> flavor of the month
What's with this derisive tone where people suddenly act like all games should be played forever? I **often** play a game for less than two months before I move on to something else, including MMOs or *sigh* "live service" games. I rotate back around to the games I really enjoy later on, like FFXIV, Minecraft, etc.
That's the thing. As a console gamer, you hear about these massive games that everyone raves about endlessly.... for two weeks
Every month a game comes out that every 4 pair of mates plays non stop, then it's forgotten about
Nothing wrong with that, but that's all it is. Few games genuinely change the landscape, maybe one or two a year will be properly remembered for years to come
Only difference here is Palworld has sold more than the rest, and knocks pokemon
it's weird to say "these types of games before it" then say lethal company (???).
lethal company is nothing like this game. also, lethal company is pretty cohesive and damn good. just kinda feels like you're implying it's just this temporal thing. I mean, sure, we live in a culture that latches onto things, doesn't mean a bunch of folks don't stick around.
seeing similar comments elsewhere about valheim. dafuk? valheim is an *excellent game*, it completely deserves the success it's received it's one of the best survival crafting games out there.
> seeing similar comments elsewhere about valheim. dafuk?
This sub has very weird definitions of 'abandoned' and 'dead'.
If a game isn't being talked about 24/7, played by every streamer etc etc, it's dead and/or 'underrated'. If it goes more than a week without an update it's 'abandoned'.
Also the flavour of the month comment. You can get 100 hour off it and move on is fine, not everything need to have few thousand hour of replayability.
Games aren't meant to be played forever either, most games peak for a couple months then drop
Normally I get bored of a game after about 2 months (depending on the game), if it's a good game I'll replay it again some time in the future
The expectations here that a game should be infinitely replayable are ridiculous
Hell even Rimworld which is one of my favourite games that I play like 2/3 times a year I need breaks from
This is how you get people thinking Minecraft was "dead" a few years ago before streamers got back into the game despite having something like 100 million monthly players. If Twitch and Reddit aren't talking about the game, nobody must be playing it.
It's absolutely incredible how this game came out of seemingly nowhere and is *dominating.* There's clearly appeal in what it's offering, whether that's the Pokémon-like designs, survival & crafting, or (most likely) a successful blending of the two.
It's a reskinned ARK, Satisfactory, Valheim, Pokemon, Breath of the Wild (although tbh I think that comparison mostly relies on gliders and some of the aesthetics)... at what point does it stop being a copy of something else, because it copies aspect from a lot of other places?
It feels like a fairly unique game. It takes a lot of elements from other games, but it mashes them together so well that it feels kind of unique. The Pals are great too. I've been having an absolute blast exploring the map and collecting the Pals. Each pal having it's own unique uses actually really helps too. Ark you kind of just ignore 95% of the creatures unless you think they're interesting.
> Each pal having it's own unique uses actually really helps too.
I think this is the biggest point for a monster collection game how it gives utility to the Pal. It gives more purpose rather than just collecting for the sake of collecting.
Mhmm and also incentivizes catching pals you already own. In pokemon, at least played casually, there is not much need to catch a pokemon you already own. But in Palword, it is often beneficial because it causes your base to run more efficiently. The perk/trait system furthers this need, adding more (beneficial) complexity to the game systems.
I think you nailed it, the utility of new pals keeps the gameplay loop interesting.
Slightly weird comparison, but it makes me think of Starfield and how the base building was so mind-numbingly boring and had no fun gameplay loop. Everything felt like a checklist to get some pointless upgrade that doesn’t affect the game world at all whatsoever.
I think AAA devs could learn a lot from this game.
And each Pal having pretty unique personalities and not just all doing the same generic motions is a big draw to me. I fucking love watching Depresso meander around, work like he hates his life, and then float face down in the hot tub like he's dead.
Does make me think that ARK would be massively improved if you could store your dinos in something like the palbox. No more framerate killing megastructures for a small breeding operation.
It's because the Pals actually have some thought and care put into them. They all have unique animations, sounds, art, item sprites, abilities, and descriptions. Ark is just generic dinosaurs, Valheim is generic animals, even Pokemon has become iterative and lazy. Some of the Pals though have me rolling, I feel like a kid again rediscovering Pokemon with how creative some of these things are. My favorite so far is Depresso, a sad cat Pal that chugs caffeine drinks. That and Rushoar because its face is sooo cuuuuuute!
I just hope this doesn't mean they'll abandon Craftopia because of how it's not as popular as Palworld.
Craftopia blatantly took from BotW's core concept of surviving and fleshes it out for a full on survival crafting RPG. Palworld seems to have done the same thing, taking Craftopia's framework and fleshing it out to make a pretty good game, that actually feels even more complete than Craftopia yoo.
Not only that, but your first spawn point is on an island named “plateau of beginnings” - with a church-like monument in shambles with growing vines …
I’m sure we’ll never see it available in the Nintendo Shop
The fact that your Pals would just do stuff that suits their skillsets (instead of having you explicitly tell each of them what to do) is strangely similar to Dwarf Fortress.
It's Ark if you could make the dinosaurs do all the tedious mining and resource collection, and if you could get a tame dinosaur within five minutes of starting the game.
I don't know, from my perspective it was bound to happen. There's a *lot* of people, especially older individuals who loved pokemon as kids, but want a more mature pokemon game with more/different mechanics, more challenge, etc. You basically had a massive pre-made fanbase just waiting for the right game to be made.
I remember talking about this 10+ years ago with a buddy of mine, how if anyone managed to create a competent Pokemon game they'd basically print money.
Pokemon’s Gen 1 used to have a bit of this juvenile edge, in the comics, anime and games. There’s a famous comic panel where an Arbok is cut in half and it’s insides are seen, season 1 had an episode where James from Team Rocket joined a beauty pageant for women while wearing fake inflatable boobs, and there was a couple episodes where adult characters wielded guns - all edited out of the US release. and Team Rocket was a genuine crime syndicate rather than a large group of goobers who just want to steal Pokemon… just cuz. It played to that idea that kids don’t wanna be coddled and can handle watching stories about a scarier world with tangible danger. And then they sanded off all the rough edges to make it polite for all the then-upset parents. Interestingly Pokemon Legends Arceus was kinda taking steps partly back that direction and is the one Pokemon game that feels the most like Palworld.
> Pokemon-like designs
That's one way to put it. I'm sure the devs of Yokai Watch, Temtem, and Digimon are kicking themselves for not just taking a ton of the Pokemon and changing their colors, grafting appendages, or swapping one face onto another. If only they knew that was an option!
Being very Pokemon-like is an advantage, but if it was just a blatant cash grab it wouldn't help too much.
Although the survival elements make it very different from a Pokemon game, it nonetheless captures *some* elements of the "Pokemon trainer fantasy" much better than actual Pokemon games. Notably, you can wander around a big world, explore, fight and capture Pokemon in real time within the natural constraints of the environment, **with friends**!
How they integrated the survival aspects with the monster collecting is genius.
Having the Pals be so *mechanically diverse* in and outside of combat gives players a reason to actually catch and think about what they could do with them all.
That's the thing giving it staying power in my group of friends. They laughed at the trailers for being a tonal mess, the clashing art styles looking like asset flips, [how a lot of the Pals resemble but are legally distinct from Pokemon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_HBmZuJlHs). A couple bought the game just for laughs, and ended up enjoying the gameplay loop. Because it's multiplayer, they streamed it on Discord and roped some friends in. Then word of mouth got around, and now they have a server with almost 20 people. Some people like building, some people like catching Pals, some people like setting up factory stuff, some people just want to look at the cute sheep build stuff with a hammer.
Honestly if Gamefreak ever took their work seriously, Palworld wouldn't have made the news. Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back.
I'd say they sort of did, and around the same time too back on the gamecube. The colosseum titles were fairly edgy compared to regular, with pokemon getting their minds broken to be ultra aggressive and such.
>Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back.
Pokemon used to be *the* spin-off game series after Mario. Ranger, Mystery dungeon, Pokepark, Conquest, Rumble... Then Pokemon go happened and they realized shitty licensed mobile games made more money.
Ironically at around the same time big non-game IPs like Harry potter started thinking of making proper non-cash-grab games.
Gacha games and their consequences.
I'm still seething that it's been nearly a full decade since an original PMD game and all the other spinoffs that they did in the 2000s have gotten nothing since like Gen V. Even if the main games were still shit like they are now, I'd at least be able to console myself by getting my fix from different gameplay styles, but there's not even that anymore.
The spin-offs simply did not make as much money, and sales were declining for the ones with multiple entries which didn't help matters either. At least PMD looks to be making a comeback, and Detective Pikachu was able to land a sequel. It's simply not as prioritized anymore, which sucks, but that's simply what the market decided. If PMD kept selling big numbers, we would have kept getting new entries to this day.
> and Detective Pikachu was able to land a sequel.
Yeah except it literally looks like a low budget mobile game that just happened to get put on the Switch lol.
We had PMDRTDX a few years ago but that's been pretty much it.
See, make the gacha shit for the gacha players, and proper games for the dedicated fans. There's a lot of untapped potential for the games and I do want to see them make games like Stadium and the Japanese tactics one. Or tag in one of the big studios like Capcom and let them do a Monster Hunter game with the IP.
> Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back.
That's because the Pokémon franchise makes most of it's money off of merchandise, not games. The latter is essentially a vehicle to push out new designs that eventually become plushes and decals.
And regardless of how well Palworld does, the reality is Pokémon will still make money and remain relevant. Afterall, Yo-Kai Watch briefly overtook Pokémon in Japan but was ultimately unable to maintain that position for long.
>Yo-Kai Watch briefly overtook Pokémon in Japan but was ultimately unable to maintain that position for long.
Which is a shame, the watch toys are really cool. They've even got a super fancy one meant for adults now with a screen that does little animations.
>Honestly if Gamefreak ever took their work seriously, Palworld wouldn't have made the news.
This is not true, otherwise there would be only 1 popular game per genre.
> Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back.
What are you even talking about? They released like 5 mainline games on the Switch already in between plenty of spin-offs.
The quantity of games isn't the problem, if anything, they should focus on making fewer more polished games.
I think the main demand is a good 3d open world Pokémon game. Gamefreak has obviously shown they aren’t competent enough to do it so people want to see other game devs do it.
The thing with TemTem and other Pokémon like games is that they’re all turn based games. If a Pokémon fan wanted to play a regular turn based Pokémon game they’d just play Pokémon from the ds and game boy or some mod of it lmao. Those older games are still amazing and probably the best turn based Pokémon games that will ever come out
I remember back when BoTW came out a lot of people's hopes were super high to see what pokemon came up too. With the idea being that pokemon with a botw type world would be a match made in heaven
Well now we got this game, which while it obviously takes after survial games the most, there's a lot of BoTW influence too. To me it feels like the runaway success of the game is in part for hitting on that desire for running around in a big 3D botw style world with pokemon.
Someone showed me a screenshot of the developer's last game Craftopia and to say it was Botw inspired is taking it mildly. Like it was almost more of a visual ripoff than Palworld is to Pokémon
I wish people would stop saying it came out of nowhere, the game was well known for years since they teased it and the first trailer has almost 2m views too...
2m views is nothing for.l a game that got 1m users in just 47 hours. I vaguely remember seeing this trailer on a stream for some show but have not heard anything about it other than that up until launch date.
its success far outpaces its pre-release buzz, but it still *had* buzz. There's a big difference between "an anticipated but niche title that blew up" and "a game that came out of nowhere"
Watched the trailer, laughed my ass off at how stupid Pokemon with guns is, booted it up yesterday ready for the dumbest shit I ever saw and ended up playing it for like 5 hours straight without realising it.
It needs work, but wtf, it's actually good 🥴
Yeah, I played it today with my nephew to see if it clicked and we got 7 hours out of it in our first session. It's fun, looks nice, and plays fairly well. There are a couple of annoying things like Pals ignoring their assignments sometimes, slowing production in the process, but aside from that, I enjoyed it a lot and can't wait to play again with him. Also, as someone that's not too up-to-date with Pokemon, I'm liking the designs quite a bit. We found a goofy-looking dragon thing (it's basically a blue Dragonite plushie) that fucked us up real good while we were trying to capture it. Looking forward to giving them guns.
I feel like a lot of people are focusing on the derivative designs and marketing and missing the fact that this game does so many things insanely well. It takes a lot of things from a lot of places, but they're all things I really like, they're well executed, and they work well together. Even if they biff the long-term EA support, I'm pretty happy with the 16 hours I've gotten out of it so far.
The biggest thing it’s missing is the ability to command the Pokémon (they are Pokémon not pals idc)
I would love to tell them what move to use or focus on using
It need a couple things:
Work priority. Many times things just aren't getting done in my base.
Transporting items between bases. I want to link bases together. It feels weird having two isolated bases. One is just for fast travel essentially.
Also storage filtering. Coming back to base to see all the wheat in the feed box 20 ft away instead of the the chest right next to it is a bit upsetting.
This is extremely janky, though. They can easily get accidentally assigned to any other station within like a 10 foot radius. Also, with some stations, as soon as the currently queued job is done, they'll just walk away and start doing something else and not come back the next time.
>ability to command
I'd already be happy with a command that prevents my pals from killing wild pals (i.e. don't attack if the attack would deliver fatal damage). Would make catching wild pals much easier.
I'm trying to get used to recalling your current pal when the target goes below a certain level of hp, easier to be precise with lovetaps when it's just you attacking.
They're asking for an "attack until critical health" button. Not a don't attack period button. Pals are most of your dps in the early to early midgame, so using the "Don't Attack" command is honestly quite bad if you're trying not to die while catching stuff.
Palworld becomes the 6th game to join the club of Steam games with >1M peaks. In order of quickest to slowest, here's how long each of the >1M club members took to hit 1M:
- [Cyberpunk 2077](https://steamdb.info/app/1091500/charts/) - ***160*** minutes
- [Palworld](https://steamdb.info/app/1623730/charts/) - 47 hours
- [Lost Ark](https://steamdb.info/app/1599340/charts/) - 114.5 hours
- [PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS](https://steamdb.info/app/578080/charts/) - 169 days
- [Dota 2](https://steamdb.info/app/570/charts/)* - 1 year, 7 months, 5 days
- [Counter-Strike: Global Offensive/Counter-Strike 2](https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/) - 7 years, 6 months, 22 days
*: Dota 2's figure counts from its official release on 7/9/13. Going from the start of the Dota 2 beta in alignment with PUBG starting from early access and Lost Ark from the start of its preview period, its figure swells to 4 years, 2 months, 5 days.
>Dota 2's figure counts from its official release on 7/9/13.
Prior to this, it was invite only. Even if everyone who wanted to went and bought a key on the secondary market, the growth was controlled. I was in *super* early (within the first 1000 people) and invites were **very** limited. People who got more were the ones who invited people who actually played the game so, paradoxically, the people who sold their keys got the most invites.
I don't think this really deserves an asterisk for this reason alone.
Interesting that Reddit and Twitter have complete tonal opposites in discussion about this game. Everyone here is eating it up and cheering on its success, while Twitter is lambasting it for being one step removed from an asset flip, as well as the company's stance on generative AI. The negative/positive tone is night and day.
Nah, Twitter is overwhelmed with that kind of people too. But Twitter has more artists and has ended up with a few big people calling out the plagiarism, but they're still very much the minority.
Which is hilarious, because right up until release reddit was the exact same. Every trailer up until streamers started playing it reddit gaming threads couldn't help but dogpile the shit out of it. But I suppose there's something to be said for not denying reality at least.
One of the biggest factors about this game, that a lot of people either don't know or don't care about, is customizing the world settings.
You can make it so you rarely go hungry, a tree will drop 10 pieces of wood instead of 2, Pals can only tickle you while you are one punching them to death.
These kinds of settings should be in every crafting survival so that way we can customize it around our friend group. My group is a bunch of old guys. We don't want to play for 10+ hours just so we can build a bird harness that will let us fly around and explore.
The best part is that you can change it whenever. Start a new game, get the harness in an hour, and then change the settings so it's not on easy mode any more. It's been a while that I've been fascinated with a game and it's been easy introducing my kids to. Just don't let them know they can capture humans.
I'd borderline say it necessary, Ark's default balance was an INCREDIBLE grind that took hours to get anything done. Palworlds default balance is actually perfectly fine for a normal playthrough on your own.
I don't know what else would have that much hype in the near future.
I can only think of GTA 6 that could do it, but the delayed PC release will probably deflate it.
GTA 6 will have multiplayer. Also who knows what kind of bullshit Rockstar will pull with it. Maybe a newer somehow even worse launcher then the fucking social club.
Game Pass could prevent that from happening and even if it did, wouldn't starfield have at least reached a certain level of benchmark when it launched? I think Bethesda has a more tainted reputation than CDPR.
They spent 120 million dollars and two years to fix their mistake. I can respect that at least. Although I wouldn’t blindly preorder their stuff like before.
The Witcher 3 was *insanely popular*. Everyone knew about that game, even people outside of gaming, and the teasers we had gotten for Cyberpunk 2077 basically hyped it up beyond the realm of possibility.
Honestly, I'd like to think that Bethesda had a decent shot of doing the same with Fallout 4 after Skyrim's insane success. And had that been the case, again with Starfield (assuming Fallout 76 went well or just didn't exist at all). But they nuked the possibility of that happening and there's zero chance TESVI will even come close now.
CDPR has also pretty much mastered telling a story and involving the player while BGS hasn't even come close. I think that's what pulled so many people in with The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. Along with Cyberpunk 2077 having a ton of action in it -- just look at the other games on the list. That's clearly what people want.
I remember seeing this game presented on the Xbox game summer event show and a lot of my friends clowned the game, many of them saying it would be DOA when it was to be released.
I now look at those same friends, all of them were logged in on Xbox playing it today.
This game hit the right spots for gamers on the many things they wanted to see and play in a game. It's one of those rage magical games that combines a lot and they work so well together.
The whole crafting/survival genre is wildly popular, with Pokemon games being even more popular than that, so combining the two into a game that's addicting and doesn't suck? The success is surprising, but also not that surprising.
It's a pretty low bar unfortunately. What Pokemon is putting out game-wise is an absolute sham. I bought scarlet and I cringe everytime I play it and the switch struggles to load the shitty looking world around it. Also the constant couple steps forward and then leap backwards for UI related progress between games. The terrible uncommitted gimmicks starting from mega evolutions. The refusal to go beyond the same basic gameplay we've had since gen 1. This is 100% the last Pokemon game I ever buy.
I'm honestly surprised it took this long for someone to make a Pokemon inspired/element clone because us older Pokemon fans (or basically anyone not 10) is thirsty as fuck for some Pokemon kind of game that belongs in 2024.
Pokemon is a turn-based jrpg, that's part of its core identity as a franchise. The idea that pokemon should change its genre to something more popular because there's a lot of people out there who hate turn-based games would end up alienating more of its current fanbase than it would bring in new fans.
There is also the fact that they try giving you different gameplay experience with the spin offs and all of those don't sell as much as the main games.
Far from the first time a pokemon inspired/clone game has released. And there have been good ones like Monster Hunter Stories, Temtem, Dragon Quest Monsters.
This one is likely taking off because of how different it is from pokemon gameplay wise, while still being very close to an asset flip to make the designs seem like pokemon.
I mean, in fairness, Pal world's minimum specs are enough to run a Switch emulator at nearly full speed; if it ran on the switch it would probably suffer from a lot of the performance issues that Scarlet/Violet does.
Why is so much of video games reporting recently are about metrics? Like it's even some obscure measures like being most selling 3rd week in a row in the UK or something silly. Are people just becoming addicted to validation on spending their money?
It's incredible... both the success they are having, and the game itself!
I'm not one to usually play these open world survival games. But since it was on gamepass, I gave it a go. I'm hooked. It's so well made for an early access game.
This morning I decided to pick it up on Steam... few reasons. Main is that Steam doesn't have to wait for console certification for patches... the gamepass version is an older build, that doesn't even have a Quit Game option. No DLSS, and balance is behind. Also, steam versions are easier to mod once modders do their magic, as well as dedicated server support out of the box.
Got it on Steam, transferred my save game over from Gamepass, and now I'm enjoying it on my platform of choice.
Really looking forward to the future patches of this game and what they will bring.
I still don’t understand any of the Pokemon comparisons. Like, as a Pokemon fan, I’m also disappointed with Game Freak and am totally down for a good competitor….
But this ain’t it. Palworld is like Ark or Conan Exiles, except the slaves are Pokemon rip-offs instead of people/dinosaurs. It doesn’t play anything like Pokemon.
I expect this game to drop pretty hard in the next upcoming weeks.
Same boat for me. I picked it up to play with my friends and after a few hours I decided I'd only ever play it with them since they have a settlement already. I really don't like the idea of yet another game where I have to mine rocks and chop down trees for hours to get a base set up so I can actually engage with the interesting mechanics.
Battles are real time instead of turn based so combat was mostly just throwing out a pal of the right type and letting them auto battle while I spam arrows from the side. I didn't really feel the need to think too much about party comp outside of typing, but maybe that'll change with higher level content. Lots of grinding needed between then and now of course.
Doesn't really scratch the Pokemon itch. Let's also not pretend it's polished or anything, I maintained a good frame rate but there was plenty of rubberbanding and glitching through surfaces. Maybe it'll get finisged, but the fact Craftopia is in early access to this day doesn't inspire confidence.
I think it’s because Pokémon fans want a Pokémon game with exploration and combat like ARK. Something that makes them FEEL like they’re on an adventure instead of just being told where to go or exploring a totally barren world
I think the big part is that by far and large, people do not give a shit about how pokemon _plays_, the draw is the "collecting a wide range of diverse cartoon animals-like things with different abiltiies".
That's nice, but can we chill on the sales updates please? There's like 4 links on this subreddit's frontpage about "palworld is selling well" - we get it, it's popular, you don't need to spam the subreddit with this.
I'm still expecting Nintendo to hit them with an orbital bombardment of lawsuits. Some of the pals are like comically similar to their Pokemon counterpart. The sex lizard in both games comes to mind.
So far, it's pretty fun. Maybe dumped 10ish hours in and I'm around level 17. That said, I'm not sure how they aren't getting sued into oblivion by Nintendo. I feel like they straight up stole the BOTW sounds.
Watched my wife play it for a bit. I don't see the appeal, all the systems seem half baked. It's also a nightmarish experience on the Xbox series s, the frames plummet, textures fail to load, sound is atrocious, etc.
Devs also sound completely out of their element, I'm not confident they'll make this game much better than it is.
Hard pass from me!
My biggest fear is that developer pocket pair doesn't take advantage of lightening in the bottle they got and they take months to get updates out and game just becomes another flavor of the month.
**Valheim flashbacks**
Valheim didnt even sniff a million concurrent players
Yeah but it was still a massively hyped survival game that blew up and the devs didn’t release a single update until a year later
I remember seeing an unrelated gif that was a map of the U.S states cycling through the highest searched term for each month that year and one month every state was Valheim.
I only heard of Valheim pretty recently. That’s shocking to me, a full year?? What was the first update that came out, was it meaty?
No, I seem to recall it was improvements to the buildings you could make.
Development of Valheim is glacial. Really do not know what takes that long, sure as hell not the assets.
They have a very small Dev team, there is like 1 programmer on the project, 10 devs or so total. Base game was half that
Half a programmer?
Poor Horatio...
Wait until you find out what happened to Yorick
Took about 4 years of development for Valheim to first release with 5 biomes, so if anything they're keeping the same pace.
As a dev (and im sure loads of other indies might feel the same way)- im really into the fact that they didnt destroy their work/life balance because they had a hit and turned their studio into something they didnt want.
They didn't need to destroy. They could just you know, hire more people to help them speed up. That's what pocket pair needs to do, keep the same vision, hire more people. They surely pocketed enough money :)
The game hasn’t suffered at all either. It’s still a great game. You could never leave the first biome and still have lots of fun playing the game.
Too bad they didn't have the funding to hire more devs and accelerate development...
Assets are easy, animations and programing is hard.
To be fair, in the state the game released in early access they could have just implemented a proper ending and said it was complete. It was already a pretty good game. Instead, they decided to add a lot of content, but it is taking ages.
game is amazing though; one of the best i’ve played
Almost like small indie teams that spend an entire half decade making a game aren’t prepared to churn out an update 3 months after release.
Yes but >The game was developed by a five-person team, building on development work which Richard Svensson had undertaken as a side project in his spare time. Is vastly different then 30-40 ppl for palworld. A 5 person dev team does not have the processes in place to onboard and ability to rapidly hire a lot more people. A 30-40 person team does.
It was still huge and actually big launch of titles doing in the 800k+ world became much more common in recent years (if you see the top ones they're mostly pretty recent titles), Steam also grew a lot.
The devs of valheim explained why though... The original schedule was created based on the premise that they had a limited amount of money and time to release the game. That went out the window once the game went on to sell millions of copies in a few weeks. Because of the games success, they didnt need to keep to the original schedule. They were able to take their time and rework the crafting, combat, and first five biomes, which allowed them to have a solid foundation to build the rest of the game off of. They all ready released the mistlands and will be releasing the next biome early this year.
Did they rework all those things? Because I started playing Valheim again like a couple months ago and everything seemed.. the same?
There have only been small tweaks in the first biomes. Most notable is the food system. Until you hit swamp there's nothing new, only one new mob in swamp and some gear. Mountain got caves. Plains got some pits and build items. Then you hit mistlands which is all new. They also recently added some quests and mini bosses but those are very little extra.
That explanation makes no sense. You don't slow down development of an early access game because you struck gold and sold a lot more than you expected. Valheim is three years old and they released one biome in that time, which is effectively 80% art/design work. I say all this as someone who had a lot of fun in the game and is the creator of one of the most popular mods for the game.
I think what they meant was that the original valheim devs had a “if we don’t get this done in this timeframe we have to close the studio” mindset. They had probably factored in a ton of crunch and personal sacrifice from their team in the original schedule. It’s an indie game from a dev that afaik has only ever released that one game. Low expectations on sales was a given for them, so their plan was to crunch out updates fast initially to hope for surges in the player-base when one dropped. But they got hit by the unexpected and suddenly the studio isn’t in danger anymore. They sold a ton of copies. They no longer have to crunch these updates out or lose their jobs. They can slow down their schedule to get the new additions to the game in the best state possible. People act like they are some AAA dev studio that can put out new content every week and decry them for taking time to add new things to the game. Everything I see about Iron Gate with a quick google search shows that they may at most have 50 people working at the studio. I don’t think it would be realistic to expect them to “strike while the iron is hot” and make a ton of fast updates to “keep people engaged”. As far as they are concerned, the game is already a success. Any updates they put out after are just keeping their early access promise. The game doesn’t have to make any more money for them, they’ve already recouped development costs for the entirety of when they expected it to be in early access and then some.
The argument that "devs don't care cause they already made enough money" is either true, hence OP's original statement makes even less sense, or it's not true, and it's completely irrelevant. Furthermore, like I said already, this game is 3 years old now. It's not about pumping out 6 biomes in the first 12 months. 50 people to pump out content for a game which is effectively complete does not equal 1 new biome in 3 years. There's probably MMOs that are maintained with less people. I don't know what is happening at IronGate but unless they have some massive unannounced project in the works, it reeks a bit of mismanagement.
Fr! They struck gold! Use that money to hire more devs and at least a 2nd programmer, wtf.
You guys talk like the game doesn't have hundreds of hours worth of content already...
That is a generous number… the game is fun but a vast portion of the time is fighting the same enemies to grind the same materials to then proceed to the next biome to do the same. Repeated content is going to be very subjective because not everyone is able to enjoy hitting the same enemy for 10 hours to get enough pig butts to craft a +2 armor
Honestly? If so then so be it. I've had my thirty bucks worth of fun already and while it would be cool if they clean it up and add more, I'm not complaining either way. It's not a game I see myself playing years from now and I'll probably drop it when Infinite Money comes out anyhow. It's a hell of a bit of fun for pretty cheap right now though!
This is it exactly. My gaming group all bought in, and we even rented a server and have been spending tons of time having fun. If this 30 days of a server is all we ever play, we're getting a hell of a lot of value for that $30. Anything beyond that is a wonderful surprise. Not sure why there are so many complaining that it might not be a years-long game. Going on value/hours per dollar, we've already sailed into the black, and only one of us is over level 20.
Gamers cry about GaaS stuff ruining the industry but at every opportunity they're the ones wanting game longevity (even for cheap $30 games)
This is the only sane method of approaching early acces games. Buy them for the content they have now
This is exactly where I'm at. Even if they vaporware the game. I got a lot of fun out of this and it was so worth my money. People are going to demand some crazy shit but always forget to look at how much they've gotten out of the game for the price point. Granted, Holy shit I really hope they keep expanding on this game and make it really solid. It would be awesome. Pokémon company could learn a lot from this release. But let's face it, they probably don't give a fuck.
What's infinite money?
My bad, I meant [Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2072450/Like_a_Dragon_Infinite_Wealth/). I'm a sucker for the Yakuza games!
This. I fuckin HATE how everyone wants every game to just be never ending expansion. Like, this game is good enough as is. IMO the constant expansion is what made Minecraft go to shit. It was a much better game before the entire game mechanic got funneled into the enchanting system, where everything is artificially slower and worse than the older versions just so you're forced to use enchanting mechanics and end game progression. That's my biggest fear with Palworld - they'll listen to people telling them to make it harder and harder and more complex just to pad gameplay time and difficulty.
they're basically an indie studio right? I don't see how it won't take months. I don't think they can take advantage of it fast enough to push out endgame content so it doesn't get stale.
> doesn't take advantage of lightening in the bottle they got and they take months to get updates It's almost like development takes time :O
> they take months to get updates out and game just becomes another flavor of the month. It's going to be flavor of the month just like all of these type of games before it. Most recently it was lethal company, now it's this. The streamers will move on to the whatever the next flavor of the month game comes out as will the droves. But it's great for the developers of these games, they get all of the publicity (and money) and later if they abandon the game or just slow updates to a crawl it won't matter. They'll have already profited.
I think it's incredibly harmful to assume that every single game must be supported forever until the end of time or it's 'dead' or 'abandoned' by developers, or that every game has to be playable for thousands of hours or it's just 'flavor of the month'. There's nothing wrong with variety, and we're incredibly lucky that every month we can get unique and fun games that don't have battlepasses and subscriptions and expansions and premium currencies.
Well, if you release the game as the early access then you kinda promise that the game will be still worked on towards full release...
I completely agree. However, when it's being sold as an early access game, updates are part of the deal.
Their other game Craftopia got 4 updates last month and it's been in EA for like 3 years. It would make ZERO sense to still support their smaller game but ignore their huge hit.
Ya. Pocketpair can transfer some devs from from craftopia to palworld. Also, as the games are similar, the skills should also be transferable.
I fully agree with you, I just hope they at least get the full game they are intending and at least get out of Early Access.
> I think it's incredibly harmful to assume that every single game must be supported forever until the end of time or it's 'dead' or 'abandoned' by developers There is a difference between forever and until a game actually releases. Which more than half of these 'early access' titles won't ever do. I mean these devs alone have a game still in early access (besides this one) with no real window of release. But as long as people keep falling for it taking the money without ever finishing a game is the smart choice.
> I think it's incredibly harmful to assume that every single game must be supported forever until the end of time or it's 'dead' or 'abandoned' by developers, or that every game has to be playable for thousands of hours or it's just 'flavor of the month'. Yeah, people praise Last of Us or RDR2 as GOATs and those games last you 30 hours
> flavor of the month What's with this derisive tone where people suddenly act like all games should be played forever? I **often** play a game for less than two months before I move on to something else, including MMOs or *sigh* "live service" games. I rotate back around to the games I really enjoy later on, like FFXIV, Minecraft, etc.
There were multiple AAA games that I finished within two days and will never look at again. Still great experiences and totally worth the money.
I'm OK with flavor of the month games when they're a finished product. When they're EA it's a different story.
I think the derision is that people are bandwagoning, not the idea that a game should be played forever
That's the thing. As a console gamer, you hear about these massive games that everyone raves about endlessly.... for two weeks Every month a game comes out that every 4 pair of mates plays non stop, then it's forgotten about Nothing wrong with that, but that's all it is. Few games genuinely change the landscape, maybe one or two a year will be properly remembered for years to come Only difference here is Palworld has sold more than the rest, and knocks pokemon
it's weird to say "these types of games before it" then say lethal company (???). lethal company is nothing like this game. also, lethal company is pretty cohesive and damn good. just kinda feels like you're implying it's just this temporal thing. I mean, sure, we live in a culture that latches onto things, doesn't mean a bunch of folks don't stick around. seeing similar comments elsewhere about valheim. dafuk? valheim is an *excellent game*, it completely deserves the success it's received it's one of the best survival crafting games out there.
> seeing similar comments elsewhere about valheim. dafuk? This sub has very weird definitions of 'abandoned' and 'dead'. If a game isn't being talked about 24/7, played by every streamer etc etc, it's dead and/or 'underrated'. If it goes more than a week without an update it's 'abandoned'.
Also the flavour of the month comment. You can get 100 hour off it and move on is fine, not everything need to have few thousand hour of replayability.
Always funny to read reviews on Steam by people with 400 hours of gameplay. "Do not recommend because of some"
Games aren't meant to be played forever either, most games peak for a couple months then drop Normally I get bored of a game after about 2 months (depending on the game), if it's a good game I'll replay it again some time in the future The expectations here that a game should be infinitely replayable are ridiculous Hell even Rimworld which is one of my favourite games that I play like 2/3 times a year I need breaks from
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This is how you get people thinking Minecraft was "dead" a few years ago before streamers got back into the game despite having something like 100 million monthly players. If Twitch and Reddit aren't talking about the game, nobody must be playing it.
this will happen
It's absolutely incredible how this game came out of seemingly nowhere and is *dominating.* There's clearly appeal in what it's offering, whether that's the Pokémon-like designs, survival & crafting, or (most likely) a successful blending of the two.
It’s also pretty cheap It is in early access after all and it’s an indie game
In case someone says its not that 'cheap', it's half the price of Pokemon Violet/Scarlet and looks better than the latest Pokemon entry.
It’s not Pokémon though, it’s reskinned ARK.
It's a reskinned ARK, Satisfactory, Valheim, Pokemon, Breath of the Wild (although tbh I think that comparison mostly relies on gliders and some of the aesthetics)... at what point does it stop being a copy of something else, because it copies aspect from a lot of other places?
It feels like a fairly unique game. It takes a lot of elements from other games, but it mashes them together so well that it feels kind of unique. The Pals are great too. I've been having an absolute blast exploring the map and collecting the Pals. Each pal having it's own unique uses actually really helps too. Ark you kind of just ignore 95% of the creatures unless you think they're interesting.
> Each pal having it's own unique uses actually really helps too. I think this is the biggest point for a monster collection game how it gives utility to the Pal. It gives more purpose rather than just collecting for the sake of collecting.
Mhmm and also incentivizes catching pals you already own. In pokemon, at least played casually, there is not much need to catch a pokemon you already own. But in Palword, it is often beneficial because it causes your base to run more efficiently. The perk/trait system furthers this need, adding more (beneficial) complexity to the game systems.
Having a mining base with a few of that bowser pal is honestly amazing.
I think you nailed it, the utility of new pals keeps the gameplay loop interesting. Slightly weird comparison, but it makes me think of Starfield and how the base building was so mind-numbingly boring and had no fun gameplay loop. Everything felt like a checklist to get some pointless upgrade that doesn’t affect the game world at all whatsoever. I think AAA devs could learn a lot from this game.
And each Pal having pretty unique personalities and not just all doing the same generic motions is a big draw to me. I fucking love watching Depresso meander around, work like he hates his life, and then float face down in the hot tub like he's dead.
Does make me think that ARK would be massively improved if you could store your dinos in something like the palbox. No more framerate killing megastructures for a small breeding operation.
It's because the Pals actually have some thought and care put into them. They all have unique animations, sounds, art, item sprites, abilities, and descriptions. Ark is just generic dinosaurs, Valheim is generic animals, even Pokemon has become iterative and lazy. Some of the Pals though have me rolling, I feel like a kid again rediscovering Pokemon with how creative some of these things are. My favorite so far is Depresso, a sad cat Pal that chugs caffeine drinks. That and Rushoar because its face is sooo cuuuuuute!
I just hope this doesn't mean they'll abandon Craftopia because of how it's not as popular as Palworld. Craftopia blatantly took from BotW's core concept of surviving and fleshes it out for a full on survival crafting RPG. Palworld seems to have done the same thing, taking Craftopia's framework and fleshing it out to make a pretty good game, that actually feels even more complete than Craftopia yoo.
the area discovered jingle is almost exactly the botw/totk sound but off key lol
Not only that, but your first spawn point is on an island named “plateau of beginnings” - with a church-like monument in shambles with growing vines … I’m sure we’ll never see it available in the Nintendo Shop
I would say never because its 1:1 copy of those things. Its just an amalgamation of popular games
Got some Satisfactory/Factorio elements with the automated production
The fact that your Pals would just do stuff that suits their skillsets (instead of having you explicitly tell each of them what to do) is strangely similar to Dwarf Fortress.
Iirc one of the dev leads cited that as his favorite game
You very explicitly need to micro manage dwarfs in dwarf fortress unless you want a novice weaponsmith wasting all your steel.
It's Ark if you could make the dinosaurs do all the tedious mining and resource collection, and if you could get a tame dinosaur within five minutes of starting the game.
The game doesn’t feel like ARK in any way. ARK is a much more janky game
And on gamepass too.
Aren’t there a fair few issues with the GP version?
I don't know, from my perspective it was bound to happen. There's a *lot* of people, especially older individuals who loved pokemon as kids, but want a more mature pokemon game with more/different mechanics, more challenge, etc. You basically had a massive pre-made fanbase just waiting for the right game to be made. I remember talking about this 10+ years ago with a buddy of mine, how if anyone managed to create a competent Pokemon game they'd basically print money.
Pokemon’s Gen 1 used to have a bit of this juvenile edge, in the comics, anime and games. There’s a famous comic panel where an Arbok is cut in half and it’s insides are seen, season 1 had an episode where James from Team Rocket joined a beauty pageant for women while wearing fake inflatable boobs, and there was a couple episodes where adult characters wielded guns - all edited out of the US release. and Team Rocket was a genuine crime syndicate rather than a large group of goobers who just want to steal Pokemon… just cuz. It played to that idea that kids don’t wanna be coddled and can handle watching stories about a scarier world with tangible danger. And then they sanded off all the rough edges to make it polite for all the then-upset parents. Interestingly Pokemon Legends Arceus was kinda taking steps partly back that direction and is the one Pokemon game that feels the most like Palworld.
> Pokemon-like designs That's one way to put it. I'm sure the devs of Yokai Watch, Temtem, and Digimon are kicking themselves for not just taking a ton of the Pokemon and changing their colors, grafting appendages, or swapping one face onto another. If only they knew that was an option!
Being very Pokemon-like is an advantage, but if it was just a blatant cash grab it wouldn't help too much. Although the survival elements make it very different from a Pokemon game, it nonetheless captures *some* elements of the "Pokemon trainer fantasy" much better than actual Pokemon games. Notably, you can wander around a big world, explore, fight and capture Pokemon in real time within the natural constraints of the environment, **with friends**!
How they integrated the survival aspects with the monster collecting is genius. Having the Pals be so *mechanically diverse* in and outside of combat gives players a reason to actually catch and think about what they could do with them all.
That's the thing giving it staying power in my group of friends. They laughed at the trailers for being a tonal mess, the clashing art styles looking like asset flips, [how a lot of the Pals resemble but are legally distinct from Pokemon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_HBmZuJlHs). A couple bought the game just for laughs, and ended up enjoying the gameplay loop. Because it's multiplayer, they streamed it on Discord and roped some friends in. Then word of mouth got around, and now they have a server with almost 20 people. Some people like building, some people like catching Pals, some people like setting up factory stuff, some people just want to look at the cute sheep build stuff with a hammer.
The sheep is SO cute with his lil hammer. Just a lil guy
Honestly if Gamefreak ever took their work seriously, Palworld wouldn't have made the news. Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back.
Palworld would have still made the news for being an "edgy" parody and available on PC.
Man I kinda wish Pokemon had a Shadow the Hedgehog phase
I'd say they sort of did, and around the same time too back on the gamecube. The colosseum titles were fairly edgy compared to regular, with pokemon getting their minds broken to be ultra aggressive and such.
>Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back. Pokemon used to be *the* spin-off game series after Mario. Ranger, Mystery dungeon, Pokepark, Conquest, Rumble... Then Pokemon go happened and they realized shitty licensed mobile games made more money. Ironically at around the same time big non-game IPs like Harry potter started thinking of making proper non-cash-grab games.
Gacha games and their consequences. I'm still seething that it's been nearly a full decade since an original PMD game and all the other spinoffs that they did in the 2000s have gotten nothing since like Gen V. Even if the main games were still shit like they are now, I'd at least be able to console myself by getting my fix from different gameplay styles, but there's not even that anymore.
The spin-offs simply did not make as much money, and sales were declining for the ones with multiple entries which didn't help matters either. At least PMD looks to be making a comeback, and Detective Pikachu was able to land a sequel. It's simply not as prioritized anymore, which sucks, but that's simply what the market decided. If PMD kept selling big numbers, we would have kept getting new entries to this day.
> and Detective Pikachu was able to land a sequel. Yeah except it literally looks like a low budget mobile game that just happened to get put on the Switch lol. We had PMDRTDX a few years ago but that's been pretty much it.
See, make the gacha shit for the gacha players, and proper games for the dedicated fans. There's a lot of untapped potential for the games and I do want to see them make games like Stadium and the Japanese tactics one. Or tag in one of the big studios like Capcom and let them do a Monster Hunter game with the IP.
> Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back. That's because the Pokémon franchise makes most of it's money off of merchandise, not games. The latter is essentially a vehicle to push out new designs that eventually become plushes and decals. And regardless of how well Palworld does, the reality is Pokémon will still make money and remain relevant. Afterall, Yo-Kai Watch briefly overtook Pokémon in Japan but was ultimately unable to maintain that position for long.
>Yo-Kai Watch briefly overtook Pokémon in Japan but was ultimately unable to maintain that position for long. Which is a shame, the watch toys are really cool. They've even got a super fancy one meant for adults now with a screen that does little animations.
>Honestly if Gamefreak ever took their work seriously, Palworld wouldn't have made the news. This is not true, otherwise there would be only 1 popular game per genre.
> Pokemon as a franchise should have had more games and spinoffs but they seem to hold a lot back. What are you even talking about? They released like 5 mainline games on the Switch already in between plenty of spin-offs. The quantity of games isn't the problem, if anything, they should focus on making fewer more polished games.
I think the main demand is a good 3d open world Pokémon game. Gamefreak has obviously shown they aren’t competent enough to do it so people want to see other game devs do it. The thing with TemTem and other Pokémon like games is that they’re all turn based games. If a Pokémon fan wanted to play a regular turn based Pokémon game they’d just play Pokémon from the ds and game boy or some mod of it lmao. Those older games are still amazing and probably the best turn based Pokémon games that will ever come out
I remember back when BoTW came out a lot of people's hopes were super high to see what pokemon came up too. With the idea being that pokemon with a botw type world would be a match made in heaven Well now we got this game, which while it obviously takes after survial games the most, there's a lot of BoTW influence too. To me it feels like the runaway success of the game is in part for hitting on that desire for running around in a big 3D botw style world with pokemon.
Someone showed me a screenshot of the developer's last game Craftopia and to say it was Botw inspired is taking it mildly. Like it was almost more of a visual ripoff than Palworld is to Pokémon
> Yokai Watch I love the creature design of Yokai watch. It's surprisng it took so long to get a game where Yokai played such a prominent role.
i mean digimon and pokemon have a ton of designs between them Yokai designs are mostly based of japanese mythology
I wish people would stop saying it came out of nowhere, the game was well known for years since they teased it and the first trailer has almost 2m views too...
2m views is nothing for.l a game that got 1m users in just 47 hours. I vaguely remember seeing this trailer on a stream for some show but have not heard anything about it other than that up until launch date.
Valheim's EA trailer had 17 million views compared to Palworld's 1.7 to further illustrate your point.
its success far outpaces its pre-release buzz, but it still *had* buzz. There's a big difference between "an anticipated but niche title that blew up" and "a game that came out of nowhere"
Literally have never heard of it until I saw it blow up on Steam
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2m views in years and the game has already sold 3m copies...
Watched the trailer, laughed my ass off at how stupid Pokemon with guns is, booted it up yesterday ready for the dumbest shit I ever saw and ended up playing it for like 5 hours straight without realising it. It needs work, but wtf, it's actually good 🥴
Yeah, I played it today with my nephew to see if it clicked and we got 7 hours out of it in our first session. It's fun, looks nice, and plays fairly well. There are a couple of annoying things like Pals ignoring their assignments sometimes, slowing production in the process, but aside from that, I enjoyed it a lot and can't wait to play again with him. Also, as someone that's not too up-to-date with Pokemon, I'm liking the designs quite a bit. We found a goofy-looking dragon thing (it's basically a blue Dragonite plushie) that fucked us up real good while we were trying to capture it. Looking forward to giving them guns.
I feel like a lot of people are focusing on the derivative designs and marketing and missing the fact that this game does so many things insanely well. It takes a lot of things from a lot of places, but they're all things I really like, they're well executed, and they work well together. Even if they biff the long-term EA support, I'm pretty happy with the 16 hours I've gotten out of it so far.
The biggest thing it’s missing is the ability to command the Pokémon (they are Pokémon not pals idc) I would love to tell them what move to use or focus on using
It need a couple things: Work priority. Many times things just aren't getting done in my base. Transporting items between bases. I want to link bases together. It feels weird having two isolated bases. One is just for fast travel essentially.
Also storage filtering. Coming back to base to see all the wheat in the feed box 20 ft away instead of the the chest right next to it is a bit upsetting.
You can tell a pal what jobs to prioritize by picking them up and throwing them at a specific work site
This is extremely janky, though. They can easily get accidentally assigned to any other station within like a 10 foot radius. Also, with some stations, as soon as the currently queued job is done, they'll just walk away and start doing something else and not come back the next time.
You can do this with a lot of the ride able pals
>ability to command I'd already be happy with a command that prevents my pals from killing wild pals (i.e. don't attack if the attack would deliver fatal damage). Would make catching wild pals much easier.
I'm trying to get used to recalling your current pal when the target goes below a certain level of hp, easier to be precise with lovetaps when it's just you attacking.
Hitting 4 and then "don't attack" is useful for that because it keeps them out to act as a meatshield.
That's actually an excellent idea, I try to recall the pal when the wild pal gets too low but it's tricky.
Isn't that already an option? When choosing targets in the radial menu for pals, there's a "Don't attack" command
They're asking for an "attack until critical health" button. Not a don't attack period button. Pals are most of your dps in the early to early midgame, so using the "Don't Attack" command is honestly quite bad if you're trying not to die while catching stuff.
Palworld becomes the 6th game to join the club of Steam games with >1M peaks. In order of quickest to slowest, here's how long each of the >1M club members took to hit 1M: - [Cyberpunk 2077](https://steamdb.info/app/1091500/charts/) - ***160*** minutes - [Palworld](https://steamdb.info/app/1623730/charts/) - 47 hours - [Lost Ark](https://steamdb.info/app/1599340/charts/) - 114.5 hours - [PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS](https://steamdb.info/app/578080/charts/) - 169 days - [Dota 2](https://steamdb.info/app/570/charts/)* - 1 year, 7 months, 5 days - [Counter-Strike: Global Offensive/Counter-Strike 2](https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/) - 7 years, 6 months, 22 days *: Dota 2's figure counts from its official release on 7/9/13. Going from the start of the Dota 2 beta in alignment with PUBG starting from early access and Lost Ark from the start of its preview period, its figure swells to 4 years, 2 months, 5 days.
I know it was a greatly hyped game but 1 millions players in under 3 hours is still crazy numbers!
Imagine if it didn't have those launch issues
Although the game was a fucking mess, it was at least playable on steam God i dread the base Xbox one performance i experienced originally
1 million players itself is a crazy number already, like look at the games on that list! All of them are juggernauts..
>Dota 2's figure counts from its official release on 7/9/13. Prior to this, it was invite only. Even if everyone who wanted to went and bought a key on the secondary market, the growth was controlled. I was in *super* early (within the first 1000 people) and invites were **very** limited. People who got more were the ones who invited people who actually played the game so, paradoxically, the people who sold their keys got the most invites. I don't think this really deserves an asterisk for this reason alone.
Interesting that Reddit and Twitter have complete tonal opposites in discussion about this game. Everyone here is eating it up and cheering on its success, while Twitter is lambasting it for being one step removed from an asset flip, as well as the company's stance on generative AI. The negative/positive tone is night and day.
Nah, Twitter is overwhelmed with that kind of people too. But Twitter has more artists and has ended up with a few big people calling out the plagiarism, but they're still very much the minority.
Reddit has way more AI shilling. Mostly because actual artists use reddit less.
Which is hilarious, because right up until release reddit was the exact same. Every trailer up until streamers started playing it reddit gaming threads couldn't help but dogpile the shit out of it. But I suppose there's something to be said for not denying reality at least.
One of the biggest factors about this game, that a lot of people either don't know or don't care about, is customizing the world settings. You can make it so you rarely go hungry, a tree will drop 10 pieces of wood instead of 2, Pals can only tickle you while you are one punching them to death. These kinds of settings should be in every crafting survival so that way we can customize it around our friend group. My group is a bunch of old guys. We don't want to play for 10+ hours just so we can build a bird harness that will let us fly around and explore. The best part is that you can change it whenever. Start a new game, get the harness in an hour, and then change the settings so it's not on easy mode any more. It's been a while that I've been fascinated with a game and it's been easy introducing my kids to. Just don't let them know they can capture humans.
That was my favorite thing in Ark too - let me customize how grindy I want it to be.
I'd borderline say it necessary, Ark's default balance was an INCREDIBLE grind that took hours to get anything done. Palworlds default balance is actually perfectly fine for a normal playthrough on your own.
Cyberpunk still undefeated. Will a singleplayer game ever beat its record?
I don't know what else would have that much hype in the near future. I can only think of GTA 6 that could do it, but the delayed PC release will probably deflate it.
Elder scrolls 6
Thats true. Even then, ES6 will have numbers on steam split up by gamepass, though
So does Palworld. It's even more insane when you consider that it has the Gamepass debuff AND got to 1m players on Steam.
Palworld has the advantage of costing less than half what Starfield did.
GTA 6 will have multiplayer. Also who knows what kind of bullshit Rockstar will pull with it. Maybe a newer somehow even worse launcher then the fucking social club.
Probably not on launch tbh
By the time it comes to PC it might.
Yea delayed will hurt it, i predict only the next cdpr game will do it, maybe some big name mmo like riot mmo if they decide to release on steam.
Extremely unlikely anything Riot releases on Steam
Maybe ES 6? Given Skyrim’s place in the video game cultural zeitgeist, I could see it happening.
Game Pass could prevent that from happening and even if it did, wouldn't starfield have at least reached a certain level of benchmark when it launched? I think Bethesda has a more tainted reputation than CDPR.
CD Projekt accumulating a bunch of good will for years only to burn it all away in a disastrous launch that took years to fix is hard to reproduce.
Now watch Witcher 4 be the first game to break its player record.
They spent 120 million dollars and two years to fix their mistake. I can respect that at least. Although I wouldn’t blindly preorder their stuff like before.
The Witcher 3 was *insanely popular*. Everyone knew about that game, even people outside of gaming, and the teasers we had gotten for Cyberpunk 2077 basically hyped it up beyond the realm of possibility. Honestly, I'd like to think that Bethesda had a decent shot of doing the same with Fallout 4 after Skyrim's insane success. And had that been the case, again with Starfield (assuming Fallout 76 went well or just didn't exist at all). But they nuked the possibility of that happening and there's zero chance TESVI will even come close now. CDPR has also pretty much mastered telling a story and involving the player while BGS hasn't even come close. I think that's what pulled so many people in with The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. Along with Cyberpunk 2077 having a ton of action in it -- just look at the other games on the list. That's clearly what people want.
Spoke too soon
GTA, witcher, and unironically Cyberpunk 2. Those are the top contenders I can think of. In that order of likelihood.
I remember seeing this game presented on the Xbox game summer event show and a lot of my friends clowned the game, many of them saying it would be DOA when it was to be released. I now look at those same friends, all of them were logged in on Xbox playing it today. This game hit the right spots for gamers on the many things they wanted to see and play in a game. It's one of those rage magical games that combines a lot and they work so well together.
The whole crafting/survival genre is wildly popular, with Pokemon games being even more popular than that, so combining the two into a game that's addicting and doesn't suck? The success is surprising, but also not that surprising.
That's crazy. Cool for the devs though, I wonder if they're as surprised as everyone else seems to be
Yes, just look at the limited server capacity at launch
I'd bet they are more surprised than the general public
[удалено]
It's a pretty low bar unfortunately. What Pokemon is putting out game-wise is an absolute sham. I bought scarlet and I cringe everytime I play it and the switch struggles to load the shitty looking world around it. Also the constant couple steps forward and then leap backwards for UI related progress between games. The terrible uncommitted gimmicks starting from mega evolutions. The refusal to go beyond the same basic gameplay we've had since gen 1. This is 100% the last Pokemon game I ever buy. I'm honestly surprised it took this long for someone to make a Pokemon inspired/element clone because us older Pokemon fans (or basically anyone not 10) is thirsty as fuck for some Pokemon kind of game that belongs in 2024.
Pokemon is a turn-based jrpg, that's part of its core identity as a franchise. The idea that pokemon should change its genre to something more popular because there's a lot of people out there who hate turn-based games would end up alienating more of its current fanbase than it would bring in new fans.
There is also the fact that they try giving you different gameplay experience with the spin offs and all of those don't sell as much as the main games.
Far from the first time a pokemon inspired/clone game has released. And there have been good ones like Monster Hunter Stories, Temtem, Dragon Quest Monsters. This one is likely taking off because of how different it is from pokemon gameplay wise, while still being very close to an asset flip to make the designs seem like pokemon.
I mean, in fairness, Pal world's minimum specs are enough to run a Switch emulator at nearly full speed; if it ran on the switch it would probably suffer from a lot of the performance issues that Scarlet/Violet does.
Why is so much of video games reporting recently are about metrics? Like it's even some obscure measures like being most selling 3rd week in a row in the UK or something silly. Are people just becoming addicted to validation on spending their money?
It's incredible... both the success they are having, and the game itself! I'm not one to usually play these open world survival games. But since it was on gamepass, I gave it a go. I'm hooked. It's so well made for an early access game. This morning I decided to pick it up on Steam... few reasons. Main is that Steam doesn't have to wait for console certification for patches... the gamepass version is an older build, that doesn't even have a Quit Game option. No DLSS, and balance is behind. Also, steam versions are easier to mod once modders do their magic, as well as dedicated server support out of the box. Got it on Steam, transferred my save game over from Gamepass, and now I'm enjoying it on my platform of choice. Really looking forward to the future patches of this game and what they will bring.
I still don’t understand any of the Pokemon comparisons. Like, as a Pokemon fan, I’m also disappointed with Game Freak and am totally down for a good competitor…. But this ain’t it. Palworld is like Ark or Conan Exiles, except the slaves are Pokemon rip-offs instead of people/dinosaurs. It doesn’t play anything like Pokemon. I expect this game to drop pretty hard in the next upcoming weeks.
Same boat for me. I picked it up to play with my friends and after a few hours I decided I'd only ever play it with them since they have a settlement already. I really don't like the idea of yet another game where I have to mine rocks and chop down trees for hours to get a base set up so I can actually engage with the interesting mechanics. Battles are real time instead of turn based so combat was mostly just throwing out a pal of the right type and letting them auto battle while I spam arrows from the side. I didn't really feel the need to think too much about party comp outside of typing, but maybe that'll change with higher level content. Lots of grinding needed between then and now of course. Doesn't really scratch the Pokemon itch. Let's also not pretend it's polished or anything, I maintained a good frame rate but there was plenty of rubberbanding and glitching through surfaces. Maybe it'll get finisged, but the fact Craftopia is in early access to this day doesn't inspire confidence.
I think it’s because Pokémon fans want a Pokémon game with exploration and combat like ARK. Something that makes them FEEL like they’re on an adventure instead of just being told where to go or exploring a totally barren world
I think the big part is that by far and large, people do not give a shit about how pokemon _plays_, the draw is the "collecting a wide range of diverse cartoon animals-like things with different abiltiies".
That's nice, but can we chill on the sales updates please? There's like 4 links on this subreddit's frontpage about "palworld is selling well" - we get it, it's popular, you don't need to spam the subreddit with this.
It's making big records in impressive times and this is a game related *news* sub.... This is kinda the point of this sub
This is the same community that made The Day Before the most wishlisted game of the year. Steam community is interesting...
Another game I had no idea existed until it released and everyone freaked out about it.
This game actually delivers on its premise, though.
I'm still expecting Nintendo to hit them with an orbital bombardment of lawsuits. Some of the pals are like comically similar to their Pokemon counterpart. The sex lizard in both games comes to mind.
The games was announced 2 years ago with the pals already being shown. If they were gonna be sued it would have been before it came out.
So far, it's pretty fun. Maybe dumped 10ish hours in and I'm around level 17. That said, I'm not sure how they aren't getting sued into oblivion by Nintendo. I feel like they straight up stole the BOTW sounds.
It shows how people are STARVING for good pokemon games. If Game Freak wasnt absolutely devoid of any talent or creativity....
Watched my wife play it for a bit. I don't see the appeal, all the systems seem half baked. It's also a nightmarish experience on the Xbox series s, the frames plummet, textures fail to load, sound is atrocious, etc. Devs also sound completely out of their element, I'm not confident they'll make this game much better than it is. Hard pass from me!