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The steelman is that it looks and feels a lot like shovelware, and both Minecraft-likes and the basebuilding genres are filled with them, to the genres' detriment.
Rayon bring up ARK, and that gets pretty bad at times -- the game is notoriously buggy (and so prone to subtle save-breaking glitches that most servers will run up days or up to a week of save backups, at 100+mb per), depended on user mods for basic QoL functionality for the better part of a decade, is hilariously (500GB install!) badly optimized, and throws out increasingly unbalanced expansion- or map-specific content into a heavily PvP-focused game -- but the worst part is that it's a success story, despite the flirtations with bankruptcy. It made it to a mostly-working final release, it has a fandom today, you can (and imo should) run your own servers, the story completed with the third expansion (and then got two fillers to bridge to the sequel, releasing in
2022 2024SoonTM). Similarly, Eco is still getting updates five years in, and always been as much as political statement as an actual game, but it's also mostly been lipstick on a pig.By contrast, Windborne died a pretty awful death, and TUG was taken down to await a v2.0 that will never come. Planet Explorers is at least free to play (with story DLC), which I absolutely can't recommend. Skysaga] actually got a small fandom together before falling over. And those are the memorable ones.
Even where it's not that overt of a failure, there's just a lot of stuff that gets made with asset flips, feted at length, given a long and shiny roadmap, and then completely ignored. There's nothing that inherently prevents this stuff from having tons of polish, or unique or clever mechanics or story, but there's a lot of reasons to be suspicious, not least of all that the previous game from the same dev has a lot of mechanical overlap... and are still in early access.
Palworld seems like it has more work put toward it, and it looks more competent, but no small amount of that reflects the Unity sphere have better cheap assets available. And especially if Nintendo decides to leave a
RapidashRooby's head in the developer's bed, there's more reasons than normal to expect that this game might not get out of eternal early access. Which gets to the more common complaint.The more common complaint is that it's incredibly overt in its cloning, even by the standards of satire. Now, that satire is genuinely present, if sometimes crossing the line from 'biting and clever' to 'Rick and Morty would think it a little too low', but even if this (might -- Japan doesn't really have a fair use exception for parody) make it legal as a matter of law, it makes a lot of things feel particularly shallow at first glance, and lazy more often. I don't know that this would have been as big an issue five years ago, but AI-gen and Palworld dev's takes on AI don't help, even if I'm skeptical that any AI-gen was used here -- I think that's a lot of what started things off.
((And it doesn't just borrow the mons, which tbf are only sometimes that bad. The tech tree's UI layout is very reminiscent of Ark's, for example, which... why? It's famously bad there, why not at least steal something that doesn't suck?))
The... less charitable take is that the line between condone and criticize has almost completely dissolved for at least some of the political field. The game features firearms, animal cruelty, slave labor,
pokepal-cannibalism and -shields (and whatever the 'pal essence' gimmick is), so on, all as things the players can do, and some that you're pretty strongly incentivized to do. And whatever charity that some people might have been willing to extend (or overextend) if they liked the stuff, they're absolutely going to hate on it if they already didn't want to like the game's concept....So why is it so goddamn awesome? Like, I've been dumping multiple late-night gaming sessions into it, and I'm loving it. Apparently a lot of other people are loving it too, given the massive concurrent players at the moment. Collecting resources and capturing pokeymans is fun. the automation feels pretty limited, but what there is of it is fun as well. The combat is pretty good, with the transition from base crossbow to musket being one of the most absurdly satisfying gameplay experiences in recent memory. The jank is definately there; I hate missing throws with the orbs, I hate losing orbs to a miss, building can be twitchy, interaction with entities can be a bit spotty, a few of the controls can feel a bit unintuitive... but that all pales in comparison to the joy of exploring and building and acquiring. And apparently, a lot of other people agree.
The criticism feels like it's mainly coming from critics, not players, and we're seeing another example of hostility between the consumers and the intelligentsia. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it feels real good to see members of the games journo set taking a hard L fighting obvious consumer consensus.
Regular cannibalism too. You can capture humans, and apparently the cleaver works on them as well, though I suppose they technically don't drop food products. Hey, mod opportunity!
Yeah, that's definitely fair. I've not had a chance to play anything in the last couple weeks, and almost all of the serious critics are pretty clearly working more from marketing material or watching other people's streamed play. I don't know that's entirely Critics-as-in-intelligentsia -- I've definitely seen complaints from Ark/Valheim player circles, although that seems to be changing a bit as bigger names like Syntac seem to be sticking with it -- but it's definitely a complaint that makes more sense outside of the box. Among those who've bought and played it, reactions generally seem far more positive.
(and from what I've heard, bad as building and entity interactions are, they're still not Ark-bad.)
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That brings me back. I no-lifed Eco for a couple of weeks on a public server with a few friends close to the Steam release and it was a surprisingly fun game to optimize (until our group got called into a "tribunal" for suspicion of exploiting, because our 4 players had progressed much further than the rest of the 200+ player server: supposedly we were abusing a bug that let you respec professions for free, in reality we simply specialized purely into unlocking better tech and completely ignored all of the efficiency bonuses, powering through with raw playtime). The player economy stuff was great: our currency become the de facto standard by cornering the market on higher-tier tech, and then we could discreetly mint more coins as we needed to buy up raw resources for "free". I haven't kept up with the game since, but as I understand it there were quite a few updates to prevent that particular style of gameplay.
Re: Palworld, I think your assessment is largely on the mark, though with a caveat that Palworld, mechanically, does interesting things that other (multiplayer) survival/base builder games don't. Or at least it tries to, anyway -- there are obvious issues that may or may not be addressed. Sure, Conan Exiles had a similar "recruitment" feature where you kidnapped enemies and forced them to work in your base, and you could even bring them along in a party, but it was quite horribly executed (IIRC with default settings you needed to "break them on the wheel" in classic Conan-fashion for literal hours: in Palworld you just toss a sphere and pray to RNGesus). Pals have needs and will path around your base to fulfill them: if you drop resources, they'll actually go pick them up and deliver them. This isn't technically impressive or anything like that, but it brings Palworld a step closer to something like Kenshi vs. a game like Conan where the NPCs are just crafting boosts. I recently played Enshrouded, another new Early Access survival game, and while I love the voxel-based building system (though I wish there were a few Valheim-style restrictions, like with smoke/structural support) the "NPCs" there are literally just crafting stations: you dump them in a spot and then they're completely static. At least in Terraria NPCs wander around a bit! It is shocking that no other game attempts what Palworld does. Hell, even Starfield, which is singleplayer(!!) has an utterly undeveloped base-building system compared to Palworld, and that's a game that had both Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 to build off of, but somehow managed to be a major step backwards.
Dealing with NPCs doing things in any not-fake way is surprisingly rough, especially if you have any serious amount of building or terrain movement going on -- I dunno whether it's technically impressive, but getting it to behave non-crazy ways without chugging down a server takes more effort than you might expect.
I did some unrelated small work (json and ui futzing) on a Minecraft mod called Minecolonies a few years ago, which tried to have 4 to 250 npcs doing pretty basic activities in a well-defined range, and the developers who were running the main pathfinding code had to pull some amazing tricks and awkward compromises to have it work, and it was still extremely scary just trying to help diagnose or replicate failure modes. Just the question of 'find trees in X blocks from X position had a million different ways to break.
Ark/Palworld is a slightly easier version of the problem since there's fewer nav updates (building, not block), it's a sparser field to work with, and you can more easily register just the relevant ones, but it's still something where I've got a huge amount of patience for people who try it and get a slightly-buggy result.
(Though, uh, too buggy can be a problem: Ark's solution still occasionally resulted in disappearing critters ten years in, bad enough that one of the most popular mods was a hitching post, and that was only Terraria-level wandering.)
I think there are a lot of defenses, and far more possibility: Palworld is, after all, just recently into early access, and some few games have done amazing things with the model, and just by allowing private servers and a modding api they've done a lot better than some of the more obnoxious Steam shovelware (and just by releasing something playable, they're better than the typical kickstarter scam). I'll probably try the game eventually once my free time has been consumed less by work and stem outreach stuff.
But I think there's something more than Arjin's proposed causes, than loser-hate or Nintendo-loyalty (or immune reaction to AIgen proponents).
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A valid concern, but surely, at this point everybody buying early access knows what they're signing up for?
Now this is the bit I feel I need explained - so what? I understand why Nintendo would be crying for blood, but so far they seem to be the most reasonable people of all involved, how is this a problem for players? Cheap knock-offs have been a thing since forever, normally buying one would mark you as low-status, so my first question is, if it's really that bad, how did this thing take off at all? Why is everybody trying to get in on some of the action, rather than pointing and laughing at all the losers playing discount-pokemon? Perhaps naively, the first explanation that comes to mind is that they must be scratching some kind of an itch people can't get scratched anywhere else, and so my brain ends up rounding it off to jealousy. Am I missing something obvious about cloning being bad?
Well if you want to say the UI sucks, that's fair enough, but I cannot take the complaint of "stealing UI" seriously.
To be fair, one man's early access is another man's complete package, in my opinion Early Access titles vastly vary in quality and can be as good as complete games even when still in "beta" (though I do agree open-world survival crafting games have a higher risk factor, it's a meme for a reason). The trick is mostly in sniffing out gems from the piles and piles of shit. The most egregious example is probably 7 Days to Die, it's in "alpha" for over 10 years at this point but it's a complete game for all intents and purposes and I've gotten a lot of hours out of it. Backpack Battles isn't even technically out yet, there's only a demo, but it's deceptively addictive and has surprisingly deep mechanics, which you can put to the test against other players in ranked matches. Chrono Ark keeps delaying its final update but everything else is basically complete, it's extremely impressive mechanics-wise and I genuinely consider it one of the best roguelike deckbuilders out there, above even Slay the Spire. My personal recommendation.
Palworld is... eeeh, 50/50 in this regard I'd say, the core is already incredibly solid and the base building is surprisingly fleshed out, but the AI and especially pathfinding is dreadful and needs immediate fixes, and the midgame onwards needs to be more fleshed out. Copper ore is absolutely central to your progression but you can never get enough of it, it's way too heavy to mine and carry home, and it cannot be reliably automated - ore nodes respawn, but even if you build a base on top of them, your pals will somehow only mine when you are there with them (I once left a base for an hour and came back to 12 pieces of ore, a single node is worth at least 20). Chalk it up to general pathfinding jank, my base pals regularly end up stuck on top of trees, rocks, whatever the fuck and simply give up until I throw them off or they pass out from starvation.
"It was revealed to me in a dream"
Seconding gattsuru below in that Palworld absolutely does scratch an itch that nothing else scratches, for me it was the long-awaited open-world Pokemon game, with real-time combat and a good system of
pokemonpal interactions to boot. I emulated Legends: Arceus before and thought it was pretty decent, but it wasn't until a week ago that it really sank in just how barebones Arceus is, it's arguably even jankier than Palworld, interactions are nonexistent (your ride/glider mons are all fixed unlike Palworld too) and the boss fights are just hilarity, it's basically a normal pokemon battle but occasionally you run around the boss and throw tranqs at it for half a minute so it goes into a battle phase again.Palworld's boss fights, even basic as they are, are so far above in comparison it's not even funny - almost purely by virtue of you the player actively dodging and participating. Even things as simple as the trick of recalling your pal to avoid hard-hitting attacks aimed at it add so much to the perception of yourself as a trainer working in tandem with your team. In my opinion this is exactly what is missing from Pokemon.
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You would think so, but there's no small number of fools willing to pay out for 'em still, and bitching about shovelware is how people warn each other. And there's a messier question of whether high-profiles for some of the worst games end up undermining better games in the same genre: I'll point to both
ShooterGame.exeArk (as rough as it was) and Vintage Story for games that had much rougher times getting player buy-in given how much absolute schlock was getting thrown up onto Steam.Of course, that just gets back to the question of whether this is or just looks like shovelware.
I mean, Nintendo's probably being reasonable while they coordinate the lawsuit (/hitmen), but you're certainly right in that a lot of (often very strongly anticorporatist otherwise!) people are just being bizarrely fast to put their names on the line for a big company. And some people just genuinely do have principled stances on intellectual property that I don't share nor can there really be a utilitarian (and maybe even virtue-based) argument on.
Oh, agree that Palworld absolutely scratched an itch people were looking for. If you went in time a year ago and told Ark people there'd be a less-janky fantasy game with a big emphasis on more casual-friendly play and smarter critter mechanics, they'd absolutely have drooled over it, and I think a lot of that has driven some interest from Ark/Valheim players. ((It also looks like it hits a particularly strong niche within that play, since it's just at the sweet spot of a few different game behaviors.))
And there's a fair complaint that clones aren't necessarily bad; fanfiction as a whole is about taking someone's idea into novel places (sometimes even well), and going too far from the source material in satire risks undermining any recognition. To some extent, I think that's a part of why people are complaining as loudly. If this were just another PUGB clone, it could go in the pit with the rest.
There's a reasonable response (and I think rayon and, to a lesser extent, FCfromSSC already make it) that this game is interesting, just not in ways that a lot of people see when they're looking at My Neighbor Electrobuzz, but there's 30 USD jump from here to there.
I haven't played the game; it's quite possible it works better for Palworld than Ark, given the different tech tree. But I bring it up as something that's harder to justify as part of the parody/satire. Legally, yeah, it doesn't matter, and morally 'oh no a level-based list with a pickaxe' is not exactly stealing the factory keys.
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Imagine Lego veering off into self-referential and obscure new themes, or concentrating too much on third-party themes with lots of custom parts and no real rebuildability. Then one of the Chinese toy makers, like Mould King, releases a Lego-compatible city or space or pirate line-up of sets. The designs are clearly Lego-inspired, but they are original and full of clever interactive stuff, the pieces fit together well enough that you don't really notice it's not Lego, and when they release a new locomotive they damn well make sure it can be motorized.
So you get vocal Lego purists that say they will never touch these sets, and a lot of people who go, "wow, I can't believe it's this good, it's like Lego, but fun again!"
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