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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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