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.
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.
It's really good in a "this has no business being good" kind of way, I really like it.
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.
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.
Its enjoyable and I think it struck a right mixture of things got get popular
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.
Pokemon fans were so desperate for any kind of innovation instead of the same game over and over and over with worse pokemon designs. At this point the ai ripoffs feel more like pokemon than actual pokemon. An ice cream cone? Ice cube head penguin? Really gamefreak?
It is crazy. Not to mention all of the other attempts at the Pokémon "formula" have mostly just rehashed it. Cassette Beasts is the first I saw that really made some changes... And even they were slight. Digimon and Shin Megami Tensei are quite different but they've also been around for yonks.
I mean, a pile of sludge and a boulder with hands aren't much better right?
Don't forget keychain Pokémon and fridge Pokémon! Truly signs of wild imagination.
Impressive
Very nice.
Now let's see Paul Allen's numbers.
The original Pokemon universe is limited because it's "family friendly all ages", and there's so much depth to be had that fans want but can't get. This is why Palworld is exceeding; it's embracing themes that the original Pokemon universe can't.
And just not vomiting up garbage games.
Arceus showed ambition, then did nothing to build on it or fix the bugs.
Scarlet and Violet did build on Arceus quite a bit as far as the open world and catching elements went, but they did not adopt a lot of the turn based combat changes.
S and V were somewhat hamstrung by poor optimization and performance at launch, and I believe this is the reason much of the landscape looks so sparse. I would love to see a breakdown on why Zelda's two most recent entries can look so grand at such a large scale and still get solid frame rates on the Switch while S and V cannot. Is it because of the game engines being used or some other rendering process that is less optimal?
I am a huge Pokémon fan, and I'll be the first to admit that TPC needs to get their crap together. They need to hire the best software engineers and developers they can get that are cohesive with their team, embrace new gameplay ideas, rework their combat system in a way that is innovative and fresh (turn based is nice for younger kids who are playing games for the first time, but there are many other turn based approaches that could offer a larger variety in tactics), and overall step up the grand scale and quality of their games. I would love to see a compelling story with voice acting that can be disabled, game systems that are easy to use but offer masterful depth, improved multiplayer experiences, and difficulty scaling in some fashion so I don't feel like the game gets to a medium difficulty 5 times in the entire playthrough.
Making games that can be enjoyed by all ages is very tough at times, but TPC has the resources to revitalize Pokémon and see insane record sales. I love what they have done to transition to an open world game that can be played alongside a friend, but it's time they take the quality of the game up to 11 and stop peddling us low quality, under-baked attempts at something that could be so grand. You can have the soap box back now. 😅
I really don't want to make a list, but Pokemon will innovate and then just straight up forget about it in every game that comes after.
For anyone considering the game, there's a relevant quote from the developer in one of their blog posts, that I think could help them decide whether it's a game for them or not:
Although Pal World is a very interesting game, I would like to add one point: it is not at all suitable for players who prefer single-player games and want to enjoy the story, so please be aware of that. There's almost no story, so those people won't enjoy it. Fans of survival craft genres such as Minecraft and Valheim will enjoy this game.
I'm not a fan of survival games. Is Palworld that fun? I may give it a try. It's on Game pass anyway.
I’m predicting we’ll see even crazier numbers once the work week is over
I personally think we're close to the high water mark, might see 2.5m, maaaybe 3 but I'm skeptical. You've seen most of what the game has to offer after 10 hours, and the jank + lack of story is sure to cause lots of people to bounce off of it pretty quickly. I think given some time it'll improve, but by then you won't get these crazy peak concurrent numbers.
After CSGO?
Are there any metrics that also include GamePass players? Considering it's included, I have to imagine that's a sizeable chunk.
