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Honestly this is my read too, but if I had to try - Palworld is totally shameless about its influences, the CEO is on record saying he's a trendchaser and isn't shy of stealing popular mechanics from other games.
It can be considered somewhat shallow, I suppose. The not-Pokemon aren't directly ripped but the Pokemon parallels are glaringly obvious, and many of them can be succinctly described as "%Pokemon% but %different_type%". The game is early access, a business model that doesn't inspire confidence. The game uses a lot of basic UE5 assets, down to the gliders/pickaxe swings identical to Fortnite. The guns seem to be mostly an afterthought (although a very detailed afterthought - the gun animator is definitely a /k/ommando), and the exploitation is over the top at times - I don't have a screenshot but you can butcher captured pals for drops, complete with a gratuitous pixel filter over the pal as it's being slaughtered. Incidentally, this can also be done on captured humans.
On the other hand, the game has laid bare everything wrong with modern Pokemon games - this humble webm sent the entire /vp/ board into a hysterical meltdown over how, almost thirty years in, Pokemon games still have nothing resembling even such a basic level of interaction with your companions
yes I played Scarlet/Violet, picnics are shit, mons barely interact. The base management, far from being "exploitation", actually makes your pal team feel that much more alive and integral to the world compared to pokemon who might as well be naked statblocks - you survive and thrive alongside them both in and out of actual combat. To offset the default assets in other aspects of the game, thepokemonpals themselves have handcrafted animations, different for every one, even their work animations differ: a small penguin transports stuff by balancing it on its head, while a bigger Lovander has actual hands and just picks things up, holding them high like a plate of food.Many (including me) are convinced a literal small indie company is running laps around the media juggernaut, publicly embarrassing it on its own turf, and the massive demand (Palworld already outsold Sword/Shield and Legends: Arceus) convincingly backs up that this is exactly what people want. Game Freak has absolutely no excuse.
edit: reuploaded webms
To be fair, Pokemon Sun/Moon had both the Pokemon Refresh mechanic and the weird idle game island thing.
But otherwise agreed. Even the pokemon show are really inconsistent about how much pokemon are part of people's lives outside of trainer battles or other competitions; the games have never been able to engage well with the pokemon as characters rather than stat blocks. And there's a lot of interest in it.
"Pokemon meets Zelda" was something probably every kid considered back at the time of Pokemon Red/Blue, and modded-world attempts to get some sort of serious interactions between mons or between the trainer and mons dated back some of the earliest Pokemon mods in Minecraft and elsewhere. There's been a few moderately-successful merges touching on the farming sim world (Slime Rancher is one of the more minimalistic, with only about a dozen base slime species).
Maybe Palworld will get more serious about that as time goes on (I think I've heard you can already have a
slavepal revolt?) and end up where rather than just showing all the ways being a Pokemon Trainer could make you an awful person, it contrasts the factory farm approach with a more personalized and even-handed one that might not be as strong or efficient but comes with other benefits (or less chance of getting eaten in your sleep). Or maybe it will inspire Nintendo to step up from the crappy shovelware, or for someone else to do a more creative take.It's technically already there, they don't revolt (yet?) but working pals have a SAN meter which drains as they work and refills as they eat, sleep or use amenities like hot springs. As SAN dips lower, they start slacking off and stress eating, plundering the contents of the feeding bin more quickly. Lower still, and they get depressed, start sleeping constantly or even injuring themselves, with productivity in the gutter. There are meds to treat conditions, but they're expensive and have to be fed individually.
There's even a buildable lectern that allows you to play full-on slavedriver and toggle work modes between normal, hard and
slave laborsuper hard work, making them work much faster in exchange for a greater drain on their hunger and SAN. I tried it and, hilariously, it's completely not worth it in the current state - the productivity gains are noticeable but entirely offset by pals slacking off and stuffing themselves much more often (during which they obviously don't work).Basically, even the based and redpilled pokemon slave factory game incentivizes you to treat your workers with care and provide them with decent food (making trips to the feeder less frequent), beds and amenities (less stress = less slacking). People crying about animal abuse clearly don't play the game, slavery is just plain inefficient.
Hate-reading /vp/ for a week after the release makes me very much doubt that, the Pokemon fans (at least those) are in extreme denial and display impossible feats of mental gymnastics. They will consume
productPokemon game and be excited for the nextproductPokemon game.Ah, that makes more sense. The Dwarf Fortress player in me loves the idea of a tantrum spiral, especially since there's such an asymmetry between how many Pals people look to end up having around their base in the late-game vs how many they can have on them at once, but I could definitely see that being too frustrating even if you had a ton of warning signs about it.
Interesting. I wonder if the 'harsher' modes are intended as a panic button for short bursts, or if players are intended to use longer periods at default-speed (such as dedicated servers when offline) to build up simple resources to support short bursts of the hard and super-hard work when players are online.
Maybe. A lot of these people are otherwise pretty critical of Pokemon, though, especially given recent flops or semi-flops like Arceus.
But even if the marginal buyer (or their parent's/grandma) doesn't end changing orders, this could still be a pretty hot fire under Nintendo's marketing and executive side, if it doesn't get solved by the legal one.
Well, I definitely hope Palworld lends its weight to the heaps of criticisms against Pokemon games. The camel's back will break someday.
The only justification I think is legit is that they are hamstrung by having to make games for the Switch, which realistically could never run something like Palworld. Dex cuts are extremely unpopular in the fanbase but those are the kinds of measures they have to take to fit their shit into a Switch (well at least I thought this until they started selling DLCs which add cut mons back, kek). The technical debt is catching up with them, they really should work on their 3d engine because SwSh and SV have both been, shall we say, lackluster animation/detail-wise. They have to start improving at some point, Palworld will not be the last to encroach on their lunch, not after such a smash hit.
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>linking directly to 4chan webms that will disappear in a few days
/v/ is not indexed by desuarchive and I cba to reupload + the thread lives for a week anyway. Any site where I can easily upload webms to link?
Catbox
God I'm a retard, thanks for reminding me catbox accepts webms. Have a bonus on the house.
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