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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3294 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A valid concern, but surely, at this point everybody buying early access knows what they're signing up for?

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.exe Ark (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 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?

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.

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?

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.

Well if you want to say the UI sucks, that's fair enough, but I cannot take the complaint of "stealing UI" seriously.

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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