this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Is this game really that good or is it just massively overhyped? I watched a videogamedunkey video about it, and I know he overly satirizes things for humor, but it just didn't look all that great.
It's a very specific type of game. If you don't like Rust, Ark, Raft, or any of those games like it Palworld probably isn't for you. At least not until mods come out.
I'd put rust aside from other survival crafters because the challenge is pvp. Actually surviving alone in rust is easy and even boring. Though I also haven't played palworld multiplayer yet, but you definitely shouldn't jump into MP to start a game like this.
Palworld's multiplayer is more cooperatively focused, not PvP focused like Ark and Rust. It's fine to jump into MP on day 1.
Idk I don’t like Rust or Ark but I’m totally hooked to Palworld
I brought great shame to my family with the mods I installed in the future. Shame so embarrassing that it breaks causality.
Survival crafting games have always been extemely bare minimum effort by most studios. Look how well Ark did despite it being buggy garbage with dlcs. Palworld has almost everything you'd want from a survival crafting game and is 10x more polished than its competition. Dunkey highlights the bugs, which are definitely there, but for day 1 it is actually very well done and includes a lot of polish and QoL features that I would normally expect an early access game to add months after launch. I don't know if he made a video from day 1 of ark or rust but it would be orders of magnitude worse than this. Also keep in mind this is the opposite of the type of game he usually plays.
Besides all that, it's multiplayer and the core gameplay is simply fun.
It’s a very fun, silly, well-made game with a very addictive loop where you’re given a lot of small, easily achievable tasks that have you going: “one more and I’m done”.
On Sunday I played for 13 hours. I don’t know if they have a team of psychologists that found out how to make the game addictive, but the results speak for themselves.
It’s a fun and beautiful place to explore, full of vibrant colors and cute pals. Your base building is not boring because the boring resource gathering is automated by your pal slaves. It scratches optimization itches, and you also get raided which can result in hilarious outcomes that give you an opportunity to rebuild and organize your base more efficiently.
The main dev doesn’t seem capable of such well thought out tactics.
He has more of a "monkey see, monkey do" sort of approach to making games.
He just nailed it by jamming creature collection + survival. I love both and I’ve been addicted to the game. If this game doesn’t get more work done on it (from the devs or modders) these numbers will fall hard. It’s fun but it's a quick high that will last a couple of weeks.
It's a survival crafting game. It's functional, but yeah, I think overhyped. Most people play for the novelty, and that covers for the boring gameplay.
That's overly reductive. I don't play it like a crafting game, I play it like a pokemon game and I'm having fun catching new pals while barely touching the base building.
You can do the same thing in Ark, that doesn't change what it is lol
Ark is worse than Palworld, even just in terms of polish.
In all fairness, the AI in Palworld is abysmal, too, but they at least acknowledge it (it's one of the top items to fix in their roadmap), and it's a just-released early access game, rather than a been-out-for-years title.
/
Same difference
It's really good in a "this has no business being good" kind of way, I really like it.
It's incredible for early access and will be the game of the decade if the devs continue to polish and refine it. And if it doesn't get sued for its similarities to Nintendo IPs, which I doubt will happen but is still possible.
I took Pokemon Legends Arceus to 100%. I can firmly say Palworld has a better loop than PLA.
We were almost capped on Palworld and reset our server yesterday. I have spent over a dozen hours since our reset playing the game. I would have put PLA down permanently if I was almost done with the 100% dex and lost my save data. I am missing 2 achievements on Horizon Zero Dawn on steam for that exact reason.
Early access is fine if you look at the game as it is now instead of thinking about “what it will be”.
Agreed. The Early Access just tells me that they plan to make more content for the game, which is really exciting.
Don't get me wrong, as-is it's already very playable and fun. Worth the price by a long shot. I'm hopeful it will continue to improve but even if the company vanished tomorrow and left the game in its current state, I would be satisfied with my purchase.
Its pretty clear that the automation aspect was a little over sold in some of the trailers. In one trailer, two lines of cattiva are carrying iron bars from what appears to be a forge.
Pals won't pull out of forges AFAIK. So it feels like they threw 2 stacks of iron behind the forge and recorded it as an automation demonstration.
I think I've spent the last 4 days not doing anything except trying to get the pal automation to be a little more controlled..
Yeah it would be cool to see something similar to the factorio logistics network for pals, crafting stations, and storage. Requesters, providers, and storage settings on inventory slots is all it would take
This sounds like SlaveWolrd than Pal lol. Lines of pals carrying resources like conveyor belts.
No the pals already do this by default, I just wish I could control which chests they use more finely
Probably something more like RimWorld would be it. Filters on boxes, task bar to tell your anubis to stop wasting time on mining and prioritize crafting, stuff like that.
For $25 it's a pretty fun game.
My rule of thumb with early access is that if you're happy in its current state, then it's worth it. If you're buying on the idea of future promises, you're a sucker. If they were to suddenly declare the game finished, the content right now would be worth the price tag imo. It needs some polish, but then again it's more polished then anything game freak has put out in recent years lol.
I normally agree. In 99% of situations skip that early access and wait for, at minimum, fully supported Beta release after the major issues have been ironed out. This is that incredibly uncommon 1% that's worth it. First Early Access title I have grabbed in years.
It's a game that should be terrible but is actually fun as hell.
It hits the sweet spot in different areas. You can tell it’s a bunch of ideas from other games stitched together. Its Ark but more accessible, with pokemon flavor, elden ring’s tough enemy in the newbie area, deep rock galactic pick your friend up off the ground, automation lightly inspired by factio. If you look closely it’s got dark humour in all of the Pal descriptions. It’s just broadly appealing and enjoyable If you don’t take things too seriously, or if you can find the humour in the fact that everything is extremely familiar and just slightly altered to avoid being sued into extinction. If you read the developer interview it’s pretty funny too, new daily flash drives as version control, he couldn’t get hired at a big studio and was super surprised that steam would let Just anyone publish anything. It feels like it shouldn’t exist
I'm also curious.
Everything about it looks like it copied a bunch of elements from other games and just seems very mediocre.
Not sure why people are so hyped about it.
yeah it seems like Genshin Impact copied Breath of the Wild, and Palworld copied Genshin Impact, and added Ark Survival Evolved (which copied Pokemon and Don't Starve), and Valheim (which copied Minecraft and Fortnight)
(just speaking generally here, please don't do a deep dive into how accurately these examples align)
I think it's overhyped, but it's not as if there's nothing good there.
It's goofy, it's got those building and travel mechanics people like from other games, you can capture a cute/funny team of animals that people love from pokemon, it's a good stream game with multiplayer which means lots of free publicity
I think it could be way better than it is, but it's easy to see how it got to where it is.
It's overhyped, but it is a fairly good Breath of the Wild mixed with Pokémon with light survival game elements and base building. It's nothing particularly new or special, but it is pretty good at being what it is, which is a weird combination of a bunch of existing things.
It's not game of the year or anything, but it's fine. I got bored after a while because there's no real challenge to the game. It needs to have something pushing you to progress, and that really isn't there at the moment.
Its enjoyable and I think it struck a right mixture of things got get popular
Good is subjective. I don't think I would like the game very much now, but me ten years ago probably would have put thousands of hours into it.
It's good for a $30 survival game.
Huge world map to explore, a variety of different monsters to capture, bosses to work up to, automation that allows the more annoying parts of survival games to happen in the background as you explore, space to fiddle with the monster capture stuff through breeding and condensing.
A lot of people I know enjoy it for the shock value of pokemon-with-guns that you put into a sweatshop and then butcher, but you don't have to do it that way and it can just be a not-pokemon game where your gardevoir helps you craft stuff.
I've been enjoying it. I'm midway through the game right now and I will admit the mechanics are getting rather repetitive and I feel like I've seen most of what it has to offer, other than new technologies to unlock at higher levels.
If the devs add some more content for the leveling and endgame stages of the game, I would say it absolutely lives up to the hype. It's still early access so anything is possible, but I know better than to get my hopes up
It will depend on how (if at all) will they maintain the game, and how that will turn out. Some might be just buying extra copies and leaving it running on a backup toaster PC, just to stick it to Nintendo/wokes/artists/whatever. Most people seem to having fun with it.
Lmao this is a wild theory.
Culture war rots people's mind, and many just wants to win either internet points, still have the "early age of console wars" mentality, don't want to criticize the underlying systems, etc.
Yeah I highly fucking doubt that, bro.