this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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I don't get this game, can someone explain what the hype is about? The very little I saw of it looked like just another mediocre survival game, but with a twist.
The discussions I saw on twitter were a mixed bag too. On one side fuck them for using AI, on the other I couldn't care less for the plagiarising claims when it's plagiarizing Nintendo, lol.
The devs seem to be a bunch of chuds tho. Their other games in development are literally a BOTW and Hollow Knight copies, which just smells like cheap uninspired crash grabs.
For reasons I don't exactly understand among survival players this is basically enough to make it in the survival genre so long as the twist is novel enough, and I guess ark's dinosaur capturing and Palworld's creature capturing is enough to propel them forward.
I personally think the game just feels bad/janky to play and is a worse mashup of other games it's taking inspiration from (notably: pokemon, satisfactory/factorio, botw/totk, Valheim).
Their previous game Craftopia also struck me as a "what if all these other games' mechanics but worse than any of them individually" as well.
The branding of the game (the edginess) is what made it go viral and the pokemon aesthetics is what got people to try an ark-like game who wouldn't have otherwise is my best analysis of why it blew up so quickly.
Yeah you're most likely right. I also don't get why people go crazy over survival games, my brother loves it somehow.
I tried playing a bunch of survival games but I just find it the most boring shit imaginable. The only survival games I like are Minecraft, Terraria and Valheim, and of these three, as much as I love Minecraft it is also boring as hell most of the time.
Still, it's a mistery to me how Palworld is apparently breaking Steam record after Steam record. I could see it getting really popular, but not this much.
Outside of quest-driven modded minecraft I agree with you. When I play MC it either has to be with an explicit creative building goal or a hands-held progress-through-this-tech-modpack (I still fool around with GT:NH regularly).
I've also accepted that maybe my interests are just not the target market for the survival genre and there's something there that I'm never going to "get."
I also think the pokemon aesthetics are enough to take a generally non-mainstream genre (survival-crafting) and blast it to a broader audience. If I had to guess the recent popularity of Lego Fortnite introducing younger gamers to the survival genre was probably also instrumental in prepping them for a game like this mechanically- now it's just got the aesthetics of another franchise that younger players have current interest in (pokemon) and older players have nostalgia for.
Oh, preach comrade, I completely agree!
I wouldn't say this genre is not mainstream. These types of survival games always explode in popularity, gets featured incessantly on twitch and afterwards it usually retains quite a chunky commited playerbase. But I completely agree with the rest of what you wrote.
I guess I should have said mainstream appeal in the Minecraft sort of way.
Valheim/Terraria are large, but Palworld is looking at its current trajectory to be fighting with the giants.