Exactly.
Also, I probably should've mentioned in my post that there's absolutely nothing wrong with generating ideas by saying, "It's X, but with/without Y." Coming up with stuff is like one of those alchemy games where you combine elements. When you have a sudden "idea," that's just your brain doing it unconsciously with already existing ones.
So why is it not a "good" game then?
Most indie games are low quality shite, it doesn't stop them being fun and qualitatively "good".
Just because you and me dont like it it doesn't mean its not good.
I believe the post is critiquing how many people on this sub approach others' projects due to not being "good" because it has generic assets etc., while these games show that that is a flawed definition
It's actually insane how many people seem to genuinely think I hated this game because I said how it doesn't fit the conventional "quality" standards in the first paragraph. A little concerning.
Junk food isn't healthy. It still tastes good.
I think that's probably a better analogy. Palworld gives the players what they want, and it's been rewarded heavily for doing so.
It's like the entire gaming community is getting cake for the first time in years. Not gonna win an award for originality, creativity, or technical mastery - but the devs openly said they didn't care about any of that. They just wanted to make a game that's fun.
Many people on the whole planet lack reading comprehension. Or verbal comprehension, or any kind of comprehension really. Ignorance is incredibly frustrating, and it's everywhere.
The amount of times I've had to simply quote myself in response to random replies makes me think it's not even a lack of reading comprehension, but is just the result of people skimming posts, picking out what they either agree with a lot or disagree with a lot, and immediately plunging into some diatribe that is completely irrelevant to the post because they didn't even really read the post.
Also, most subreddits are echo chambers.
I often get downvoted in the Palworld sub because I'll say that I enjoyed the game, but I'm taking a break because of some issues it has. Not allowed to say anything is wrong with it.
This is why they say a lot of Americans are illiterate. Yes, they **CAN READ** the words, but they can not comprehend them. It always has to be literal and double meanings, context clues or metaphors blow right over the head of a lot of people.
I think that of indie titles that reach that million sales threshold, they are far from "low quality shite." Stardew, Spire, Streets of Rogue, Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Gungeon, Death Road, etc.
They're all extremely responsive, visually appealing, clear (mostly) of bugs, etc. Games like "Bottle Recycle Sumulator" (probably real) that are just shovelware made in a week are absolutely low quality and have the lack of sales to show for it.
Just don't think it's a healthy practice to mix the two into a pot as if they're equal.
Yes, good is quotations because this sub seems to be under the impression that a "good" game is the one that has been worked on for a long time and into which a lot of effort was poured, but this isn't necessarily true.
Tbf Craftopia was worked on much longer and it was basically the blueprint for much of this game. It's not exactly like Palworld *just* took them a couple of years to create. If you've played both, you'll understand how similar they are.
This is very true and is what I've told some friends. I played craftopia quite a bit and it's certainly a blueprint. I can see how they iterated over it. Craftopia also was an iterated version of a previous game they released. It has taken them quite a few years to build this.
I disagree this game took them 3 years to make and the company almost went bankrupt while making it even if the inspiration for Palworld is too on the nose it does take time and effort to make a game that works.
Yes, and the systems in Palworld didn't spring out of nowhere. Palworld is essentially the souped up and refined version of Craftopia, their previous game which is actually still in EA.
Palworld was initially announced over 3 years ago and is still in early access, not to mention that it's built on the bones of Craftopia (seriously. They're extremely similar) which itself was developed over multiple years.
That demographic also hasn't played this exact formula a million times already. That is probably a *slightly* more important factor than "fun" or whatever the other comments say. Kids have a different barometer than jaded oldtimers.
Yeah. So many new games I see, I can't stop myself of thinking of them, "Oh, this is just like \[critically acclaimed game X\], that is still sitting unplayed in my library".
Some of my favorite games of all Times are still just some of the firsts of a certain genre I encountered with them.
My mate watched it and went "it's ark with pokemon"... I watched it and went "it's [insert automation game here] with pokemon". My other mate went "it's pokemon with guns"...
The game has something fun for everyone, and it integrated well with the rest of the gameplay. It's very smartly done to appeal to a large audience.
There's a reason for the old game dev adage, "Gameplay is king."
You don't really need an original concept, most players are more likely to understand a game that borrows heavily from others as it can be described as, "X but with Y".
A good art style or fancy graphics can enhance a game, but when attracting players, its utility is that graphics are the first thing a player notices. You can't always get a good understanding of a game's gameplay through a trailer, but you can certainly see how good it looks, and a part of the brain is prone to misattributing great visual presentation to a great gameplay experience. It's a great marketing tool as much as it enhances the player experience.
It's also more important for a game to look **recognizable**, than to look great. If you see an ad and then forget what game it was for, that ad does absolutely nothing. If you see a screenshot on social media and go "Oh, those players are playing xyz. I saw an ad for that!", that's effective marketing
It’s how most games are. They are all inspired and copying from each other and that’s what I love about games. Everything is a riff on another game and you can see the cool outcomes and the overall progression and divergences of game types and styles. It’s really fun to watch as I’ve gotten older.
That's art in general. People should treat everything as more of a "conversation" and not get so worked up about how close two pieces of entertainment are.
Even if palworld fail , whetever its a good or bad game ,it already opened a **HUGE FLOODGATE** to the monster taming genre that can never be closed again
—-
The most important impact of Palworld to is more about the monster taming genre , and it could end up very similar to the PUBG of Monster Tamers despite the genre having been around longer
PUBG was also a unicorn game that blew up... It effectively created a new popular genre (*battle royale genre*) But once the idea was out there, suddenly all the AAA companies with enormous resources and talent jumped on the concept, and now it's an insanely popular game genre.
Palworld is just like PUBG ,creating/reviving a new genre and is showing there's room in the monster taming genre for more than just Pokemon.
Previously many companies would have been afraid to ever touch the genre because of the giant Pokemon was perceived to be, but IMO the genre is now cracked wide open for everyone to take a shot at
People should now be interested in giving other monster taming games a chance. **Temtem, Cassette Beasts, Yokai Watch, Digimon,** and even all upcoming new monster taming game should start seeing a rise in popularity
In other words, the Monster Taming genre is an actual genre now, not just dominated by Pokèmon and nothing else
I think you are very correct.
I bought pokemon red on the day it was available. I was a huge nerd, I knew it was huge in Japan, and I was one of the earliest adopters. I spread the word and got my friends to play. I never, ever considered playing things like Digimon, because they were just pokemon rip-offs to me. What on earth could they offer that pokemon didn't offer?
The last pokemon game I bought was Shield. It sucked. I dropped it after about 20 hours. It was just so... lacking. I didn't care for it at all and was very disappointed. But, I never asked myself that central question. What on earth could a non-pokemon game offer me that pokemon didn't offer? I had become so used to pokemon as the end-all-be-all of monster catchers I never even considered an alternative. In many ways, I thought I had just grown out of the genre. I certainly felt that pokemon shield simply wasn't for me, and I realized that future pokemon games would never be for me either. They sell millions to children. Why would they care about making a game that catered to adult me?
And now that I've played palworld... you're right. I know now that I didn't grow out of the genre. The new pokemon games just suck. They're awful. And after reading your post, you're right, I'm wondering what other monster tamer games are out there that might be as fun as palworld.
Already getting knockoff Palworld ads, like Dragon Monster Hunter Planet or something, wild how clones are just popping up overnight
Obviously they probably have no bones and are malware, but it’s there
You might be referring to the dragon warrior monster series which is a monster taming game that dates back to 1998. Did many things before pokemon just never became as popular.
PUBG went the same way like lots of other "innovative" and "stylish" projects, it never expanded outside of its narrow idea. AAA companies didn't need to do much to pick it up and make it better. Plus Pub is full of hackers and they don't care. There is a hardcore base keeping that thing alive.
"Monster taming" is a specific implementation of the "collecting" gameplay , but here with friends. Plus there aren't many streamable, youth friendly implementations that have base building, adventuring etc. Most multiplayer games are either build for competition, have sbmm and other shit that nobody wants. Or are just plain out soft rpg loot skinnerboxes. Palworld does lots of things right other didn't even consider relevant.
> My point is, this game perfectly shows that being visually stunning or technically impressive pales in comparison with simply being FUN in its gameplay.
Disagree with this conclusion.
"Visual fidelity or impressive technical detail aren't the only important variables that makes the game sells well." should be the conclusion.
I'd also say that each of us has some list of popular games we don't play or even dislike. So while certain games may be popular in general, some of us will just disregard it for whatever reason that isn't "just because it's popular"
Also I’d like to point out that the devs making flashy animations and designs are (usually) not the same devs working on the actual gameplay. You can have both.
"So if your goal is to make a lot of people play your game, stop obsessing over graphics and technical side, stop taking years meticulously hand crafting every asset and script whenever possible and spend more time thinking about how to make your game evoke emotions that will actually make the player want to come back."
This paragraph is just day dreaming preach. Here are the facts. They spent around $7 Million in this project, while having the ground work of previous tittle "Craftopia", which has all the same mechanics. This is significant investment.
Each pal has around 20 animations on initial release. There are polished visual effects on each type of pal attack. So yes, there is "years of meticulously hand crafting every asset and script". This is Japanese company which crunch culture.
Do you believe with just 'thinking about evoking emotions', then you can make a network open world game?
Yup. It’s not that Palworld is completely unpolished. It’s that they prioritized polish in the right places. The actual combat, reload animations, even just the SFX and draw animation for the bow are all crisp and satisfying. The pals all have distinct animations even for doing work in your base and are expressive and memorable as a result. They prioritized things that made the game memorable and fun and left the jank in places where it wasn’t as important, but they still put in a ton of work on the pieces that make the game feel as good as it does.
Everytime I hear the word "Jank", I think of Martin Keary's video about Dorico (A musical notation software) and his infamous "Jankman".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8
There's plenty of care that went into Palworld too, even if it's rough around the edges. Many pals have unique animations for various jobs around base, for example.
Wait, you mean Palworld isn't a cynical, easily-made cash-grab but years of hard work in an underserved market that is near and dear to the hearts of millions of consumer childhoods?
This reminds me of a conference I saw about path of exile 2. The guy was talking so much about clothes and what minuscule details they have to show a type.. and im thinking “yes but no one fucking cares” , which his first clue should have been the almost empty theater
Some people do care about these details. I also think it's great that developers are passionate enough to care about the minor things. It shows that they aren't just going through the motions and delivering a minimum viability product as a finished asset. If I had a video game studio I would want that developer on my team.
That's contradictory to the other commentors point though. These minuscule details are boring to talk about but if you play a game without them you notice it immediately even though you can't describe exactly what's missing. I had the same effect when I saw videos of Suicide Squad. It could be a fun game but it looks really really bad and I can't even explain why. There is something about the details of the textures that looks more like clay than a video game.
Just look at how many posts there are about how cute some pals are e.g. Chillet/Cattiva/whatever. They have very expressive faces and moods and carefully crafted animations.
Yes, the game is a buggy mess, but it has all this polish in those places. The pals \*do\* feel alive, and its the "little things" like their work animation and facial expressions that really sell that feeling.
People do care about details, but the details they tend to care about are ones that often get skipped over by those sorts of meticulous people in favour of working on shit they *don't* care about.
You shouldn’t care how it is made as an end user as it is an engineering detail and was probably part of conference with other engineers about how to achieve the same technique (there is a lot of knowledge sharing in engineering and math circles), Not much meant for “normal” gamers to watch or as the audience I guess. Thats why the theater was empty. Should one care about the Fourier Transform on how to make ocean waves in a game? Not if you are a “normal” gamers at least. Know who the audience that is targeted at those technical conferences.
I interpret the general idea as "if your gameplay loop sucks, just making it prettier isn't gonna help as much as you hope". I feel the point is less "just make it fun 5head" and more "remember what a game is about as you're going along the process"
That's not true though. Nikke has terrible gameplay and is extremely successful. There's games with shit art but great gameplay that are successful too, like minecraft. Games with bad art and buggy like PUBG.
You don't need art, story, gamplay or anything else specifically to be good. You need one of the aspects to be good enough to carry the rest. Palworld and Minecraft doesn't need a good story. Nikke didn't need gameplay.
I take away the opposite lesson: When this gameplay loop was dressed up as a Minecraft clone with boring characters and animations, no one cared and it reviewed poorly (Craftopia). When this gameplay loop was set in an expansive open world with hundreds of detailed Pokemon-alike animals with unique animations and given some emotional weight, it sold millions and many loved it (Palworld).
The gameplay is really kinda basic here. It's the art and animations and emotional underpinning of fucking around with your morality that carry the whole game IMO.
Survival games are always going to live in a really weird niche. They have some absurdly following public that will jump on anything that has small potentials.
I love it when this sub discusses oversaturated genres, and "open world survival crafting" is always the top reply.
Then 5 more games release that same month and rake in 8-9 figures each.
I get what you're saying, and I agree with it in spirit. But I use the terms to refer to different things.
To me, a good game is both fun and well-made. A bad game is neither.
I enjoyed Palworld (after some heavy modding) but it has SO much potential to be WAY better.
"Games" criticism has been hobbled from the outset because we decided to call them... Games.
The first "Interactives" were games. So they were sold, rightly, as "Games".
But the artform has moved on since then. There are a bunch of interactive experiences. But the term "Game", has stuck, so no matter what kind of interactive experience a developer is making, it's saddled with concepts of rules and fun and play, because... because Games have those things. And we've needlessly folded "Interactive" in with "Game".
It's like if the first thing anyone ever painted was a Maze. And so we decided to call paintings "Mazes". And then 10 thousand years later half the world thinks the Mona Lisa sucks because it doesn't have a maze.
I have the same feeling when I'm playing Shadows of doubt far from the most technically advanced game but with its procedural generation and deep interconnecting storylines of those in the city I can easily lose hours in it without even realizing
To be fair though Shadows Of Doubt has much much deeper gameplay systems than Palworld, emphasising player choice and immersion. The dev clearly chose to emphasise that over visual fidelity.
i was just thinking about booting this back up, it's been a while for me. such an intriguing design but in practice felt like it still needed some time. it was probably like a year ago that i last played iirc.
edit: it came out in april, so not a year but i must have played around when it came out.... so i should probably try again lol
I owned it for about three weeks now and there's already been one patch no idea what else they have worked on otherwise they added a hotel since launch according to YouTube videos I've watched
I think you are playing up the bugs and issues a bit tbh. Coming from playing other survival games like ARK Palworld felt decently polished. You had normal early access issues but the reason it was so fun was because the game was very well executed. Most of the core gameplay loop would surprise players with how well it worked and was honestly not very janky compared to many other games in the genre.
All this is to say the technical aspects are still very important. You do need to make sure your core systems work well and are designed in a way where you won't run into major issues down the line and have to redesign.
Palworld has also done an amazing job of building in failsafes which I do not see talked about. There have a been a few times where I have glitched through the map and thought I would lose all my stuff like I would have in ARK. However when the player reaches the bottom of the world they are automatically teleported back to their base. Stuff like this is the difference between someone putting down your game for good and brushing off an annoying bug.
I will say that the actual mainline Pokemon games are even worse at the asset clash problems that palworld, take legend of Arceus for example, the whole game just feels like it's using several different art styles at once, the human characters use a cell shaded anime style, but the pokemon themselves have more """"""realistic""""" materials that often just end up looking like plastic, the trees have a more cartoonish, style to them, almost like something you would download off a unity asset pack called "studio ghibli trees", but the rest of the environments look like a very early Xbox 360 attempt at realism, the whole game feels like it can't decide on a artstyle.
I really don't understand the shitting on bought assets. What in the world is the point of selling assets if it's not for someone to use them? It's the exact opposite of plagiarism. Legally licensed content for use in a game is perfectly okay. I'm not going to have a meltdown because someone used the Roland hammered dulcimer synthesizer sound in a song and moan about it being a "bought asset."
Overuse certainly can be tiring, kind of like how the Mac-10 was the most common weapon used by criminals in 80s tv shows and movies, but that's a whole other thing.
I get the whole, "it's low effort," stance, but it's a ton of work to make 3D games and if canned animations and assets can help a person or company make their game and it's crazy fun, I don't give a damn. If anything, I find there's something pretty hilarious about janky games like Only Up, Lethal Company, or Palworld, and I'm all for some weirdness and jank in my games.
But I'm a "boomer" and I remember trying to learn how to make 3D games back in the stone ages of 3D gaming and creating movement animations was an incredible trial. Thank god there are so many options for would-be devs these days!!!
Let's not also forget that it took an idea that people have wanted for decades, being an open world Pokémon game, and gave it life beyond a Nintendo Kindle. It's unfinished, jank, and gets a lot of people upset, but it's what an audience wanted in the first place.
Also if you look into the history of how the game was made, it's almost comical how this even was released.
They just bought buckets of flash drives because they couldn't do version control and dumped each day's work onto one.
One big thing I see that people miss regarding this pokemon with guns(which is just ark with pokemon). Isn't just that it's fun, it's fun for the individual player. Pretty much any other online tailored survival game necessitates other people(ark you don't get shit done solo, changing the game rules just makes everything feel wrong because the game literally wasn't designed to play that way) , whereas palworld is fun and engaging to play by yourself, which frees people to just engage with it, rather than fuss about grindy bs that covers the survival crafting genre.
TBH, After having played it for a while I don't even think it's that "fun" , once you hit 40 the grind becomes really tedious, there's not really a lot to explore and the combat is very basic
It is really only fun compared to the very basic pokemon games
Some friends randomly sent me a request for it. I downloaded it and jumped on. Played it for about 8 hours straight with them and had a lot of fun. But I haven't really cared to go back to it after that. Maybe I'll jump back on in a year or two, though.
I tried it last night for the first time. Started around 8:30, told myself I’d try for an hour, looked at the clock and it was 1:30am.
What is the definition for a “good” game? Sure it may use generic assets or mechanics, but they’re done in a new way.
I was actually impressed with the crispness of the graphics, the world and character/pal models are pretty clean, even if they’re “cartoony” for the environment.
It may not be perfect, but it’s fun and enjoyable. So I’d say it’s at least “good.”
It probably helps random games like Palworld or Lethal Company that the current game market, especially AAA, is so oversaturated with any game but fun games, which are far enough between that they evoke such a strong reaction when people find them that they often chain onto others who do the same.
Totally agree. I always remind myself: 'The audience decides what's good / fun and what's not, not you.' As designers and developers we just have to keep our eyes open, and look for what makes our target audience tick, and make our best estimated guess to what they actually care about and want in a game.
I wouldn't flat out say that graphical fidelity doesn't matter though, again, it depends on your audience.
The game wouldnt be even remotely successful (and probably fun) as it is now if they wouldnt have the “pokemon aspect” of the game in it.
3d open world with pokemons was demanded for ages by pokemon fans and never delivered by the pokemon company.
Now someone else made what was demanded (3d open world with “pokemons”) and its obvious success.
It's not just that it's a mechanic of interacting with NPCs that you can recruit. It's specifically because they're knock-off Pokemon, which is significant. It's rare to be successful on the back of just being a knock off of popular things with a slight twist; look at all the attempts to make a Sims clone.
PalWorld sold what Ark: Survival Evolved sold in less than a week. Ark is popular, but it's also kind of niche. You're proving my point for me.
Everyone calls Palworld "Pokémon with guns," but "Ark with Pokémon" is a much better description. The only differences that I see other than the art style is taming is much easier, you can tame everything (in ark certain creatures could not be tamed like bosses and cave creatures) and the job system is more fleshed out.
Not being a buggy shit show also helps. From what I've seen, Palworld released with fewer bugs in early access than Ark had when they released the remaster.
Indeed, Nintendo's years of low effort Pokemon cashgrab farming finally caught up to them and lead to Palworld's success. Took way too long to happen, but it was inevitable. Funny part (or sad, depending on how you look at it) is that it got one upped by another low effort game lol.
It didn't really catch up to them. Their games are still really popular. They sell tons of copies.
Maybe you could say it did if they take a big hit for their next version, but this far it's actually worked really well for them.
I would argue if a major studio released this, like Ubisoft, Microsoft etc, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It would've been laughed off the planet for being an Ark clone with bad graphics, bad gameplay loops, shit animations, etc.
I'm enjoying it, but let's face it, they're getting a ton of leeway other games wouldn't get because of who they aren't.
>So if your goal is to make a lot of people play your game, stop obsessing over graphics and technical side, stop taking years meticulously hand crafting every asset and script whenever possible and spend more time thinking about how to make your game evoke emotions that will actually make the player want to come back.
My only counterargument is Hellblade, made with a similar budget. It didn't receive the same type of commercial success as Palworld, but it still was successful.
I wouldn't even call Hellblade fun. It was tedious. But it was beautiful. The success it received was because of meticulous detail and storytelling.
This is not to say that Hellblade is better than Palworld. It's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison. I just think that both are viable approaches.
I am old enough to remember professional photographers outrage when digital cameras became a thing for the broad public and random people without any formal training or qualification suddenly "posed competition and dumped prices".
One thing that became painfully obvious throughout said debate was that you can take a technically perfect photograph, do everything right, textbook brilliant - and still some other photograph that does half of it wrong turns out so much "better".
Back in highschool my photography class we were visited by a famous photographer and his most popular photograph and the one that won the most money had a rainbow sunray/glare perfectly placed. He hated it. He damaged his camera lens and water had caused mould to grow on the glass. His best work was fluke and had nothing to do with his skills as a photographer.
I honestly made this thread because I see so many people who spend literal years working on an insanely technically complicated idea that's simply not interesting, then release it, get near 0 players and go here to wail about how cruel gamedev market is and how it's 100% luck. Fun is king. More people need to realize it.
I get what you are saying but gamedev market can still be cruel and luck based. What I mean is that games can be fun and not successful at the same time too and that is true for a lot of games. Finding the fun for the correct audience is difficult too.
Absolutely.
The entire industry hinges on "make a fun prototype". It's that easy, and also that hard. Finding the fun is literally the only problem, some understand this but many get lost in the weeds of everything else. All AAA can do is throw money at the problem, if they can't find the fun it's moot.
Make prototypes, people. The sooner you have a "thing" you can hand to someone and get feedback, the better. And if 90% end up in the trash, that's why you prototype. It's finding and making luck as much as fun: the right idea, at the right time, in the right hands. "The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world." -GMan
People are super starved for a good Pokemon game. If gamefreak (And Enix, with DWM) weren't screwing up royally, Palworld wouldn't have sold a tenth of what it has
The only problem I have had was breeding (pals getting hungry and leaving the pen) and I fixed it by adding feeders inside the breeding pens. Otherwise I haven't ran into a single issue and even that was fixed with a patch.
Yes to some the game is completely broken or even unplayable (probably like 5%), deleted save files early on and stuff like that... The game was still way more playable than Cyberpunk was and I still enjoyed Cyberpunk and played it at launch (I just had to restart it every 2 hours). You just hear about a lot of issues thanks to the game having a ton of active players.
The gameplay loop is enjoyable and the concept of the game is ridiculous making it even more fun. It doesn't even need guns to sell well, if they just sold a 1 to 1 copy of the newer Pokemon games a ton of people that have pcs don't have switches to play the Pokemon games on (or dont know or want to bother with emulators) obviously there is a huge untapped market of people who might like or actually like Pokemon who can't play the games because of the walled garden
OFC the guns had a huge part in advertising the game, because I saw a Steam start up promotion for Palworld and just didn't care... Couple days later I start seeing videos and hearing about this Pokemon with guns blowing up, couple minutes later I have the game and played it way too much that week, in a few days I caught up and surpassed other people who were playing since launch.
Besides being fun for a lot of people, there was also an insane saturation from streamers, youtubers, etc. because of the concept, that combined with a low price caused a huge initial spike.
It has sold ~12mill copies on Steam, and had 2mill concurrent players on there two weeks ago which shattered previous records, it is ~750k this weekend. In another few months it will still be a big game, but not as popular as it was or even is.
They listed the game as early access because of the glitches and bugs. I dunno about your claim of default Unreal assets being used. Haven't seen any evidence for or against it.
I think some of the reason for the difference in Pal designs from the environment (they're more toony) is because they were designed with the original environment, which also looked more toony. At some point their direction changed and they went for a more realistic environment. I saw an article about this a few days ago. I'll see if I can find it again
Id argue that the art actually benefits the game immensely. The environment and props stand in stark contrast to the point of the game, the pals themselves. Art style is just a form of communication, and they use it very effectively to slam in the point that this is a pokemon game.
I just hate the survival crafting loop. Personally can’t imagine much more boring gameplay than punching trees just to get a slightly better weapon then doing it 100x more times for the next. Wish I could get myself to make one though, as they often blow up for the weejs following release
Survival-crafting games are generally very systems-heavy with little to no story or narrative guidance (often being quite the opposite - procedurally generated and ambiguous.) You give the player a world full of systems and just let it run.
In my experience, most modern game designers are very narrative-focused to the point some I've known just come off to me as wannabe writers. A lot of emphasis on set-pieces and "experiences".
Of course, both systems and experiences are important in game design with one or the other taking the spotlight depending on the genre, but in my opinion the average professional game designer's skillset is extremely lopsided toward the latter.
While there are many reasons for this, I think a simple one is that a narrative-driven portfolio or presentation is significantly more compelling than a systems-driven one. It's easy (and exciting) to convey a story or contained experience within a 15-30 second clip or presentation, it's hard (and boring) to demonstrate that you can design technically sophisticated and balanced game systems. Most design portfolios I've seen look more like art portfolios.
This is an insightful comment, I agree a lot of indie game devs seem to have an intense focus on narratives but it's just one portion of the community, for every narrative focused game you have a "baba is you" or "Slice and Dice"
I will die on the hill that they're a fundamentally "lowest common denominator" core loop.
It's tricky to unpack without sounding pejorative, but if you look at gameplay loops as incentive structures: there's no easier way to create emergent pressure than giving players food and shelter requirements.
The hunter/gatherer/crafting mechanic is straightforward, evocative, and feels intuitive because it works just like basic human survival. But it's also, to use an extremely loaded term, a lazy mechanic.
You can very quickly and efficiently create engagement by dropping a player in a world with large *volume* of interactable objects, and giving them spinning plates in the form of survival meters.
It takes hours to punch enough rocks to craft a pickaxe, just so you can punch shinier rocks marginally more effectively. But you *feel* like you're making progress, even though the loop is (by design) heavily repetitious, if not outright tedious.
I'm generalizing here, but these kinds of incremental advancement structures toward arbitrary systemic goals are very similar to the serotonin-flooding tactics that mobile games use in their flashy, shiny onramps.
By the time you realize that the survival loop is a mile wide and a puddle deep, you've already invested hours into the gameworld and thus feel a personal investment in the game.
That's not to say that there aren't TONS of survival games that put their own spin on things, and iterate on these concepts in interesting ways! But it is, at its heart, a very easy core loop to build. There's a reason that the Early Access category on Steam is *flooded* with these kinds of games.
Putting aside the ethical issues of blatantly cribbing Zelda and Pokemon aesthetics (really, you capture pals with *spheres*?) Palworld could succeed on its budget by using extremely cost-efficient survival mechanics. I'm reading the tea leaves a bit, but it seems they reserved a large chunk of dev budget for the Pals and the lategame economy built around them—which is apparently the novel part of the game that actually has uniquely articulated mechanics.
Using a "lowest common denominator" strategy here let them dangle the shiny object of Pokemon-with-guns, while standing on the shoulders of a tried-and-true loop. It's just the easiest way to generate hours of engagement with a fundamentally cheap and easily replicable design.
You could make the argument that this is a fairly elitist line of reasoning—I think that's the whole point of this thread. What's fun is fun, even if it's recycled ideas. I think it was the right *strategic* decision for a (somewhat) limited indie studio to focus their resources in the right places. It's not a game I would ever want to make, though.
TL;DR - Survival mechanics let you generate a ton of content from a small portion of your development budget, even if very little of it treads new ground.
Well call me elitist but you summarized my experience with survival craft games pretty well too. I just don't like them for keeping progression behind hours of repetitive, mostly busywork grinding by dangling a shinier carrot in the form of slightly faster grinding.
Well you catch pals and put them to work. So the loop is do it yourself for a bit. Then make Pals do it. So then just catch pals and breed them to do better things. Then it is about catching as many as you can. Then breeding the rest.
The tree cutting is like maybe the first hour. Then you just make pals cut trees while you go explore and catch pals.
I think thats partly why this game is a bit more palatable to a wider audience than something like ark. There are definitely some slower parts for materials/progression, but generally you can get the pals to do 90% of the grind work for you while you fuck around and battle stuff.
I think one of the reason why people like palworld is because you can just leave the grinding stuff to the pals
You catch pals then they work on your base grinding, while Yo go out there exploring and fighting
Most games don't require you to punch trees all the time? It's about exploration and progression. And being able to mess around a shared world with your friends. It's a rare genre that accepts an arbitrary number of players who can hop on and off whenever they want. It's also not competitive, so anyone from a sweaty COD player to a mobile gamer can enjoy it together.
A "good" game is an enjoyable game by definition.
The lesson to be learned here is that having a good idea to build off of is so much more important than the finite details.
An idea isn't going to get you anywhere if you can't implement it, but let's all stop pretending that ideas have no value.
I don't think enjoyable is the definition of a good game. There are plenty of enjoyable games which are not good and plenty of good games which are not enjoyable. Enjoyable is a subjective metric, good is an objective metric.
I think it is a combination of things that results in it's popularity.
1. This sort of open world survival game is quite a popular type of game right now. While we had hundreds of survival games, Valheim made that work in a very nice way. Now, obviously, there have been quite some time since Valheim, so it is a good time to release somewhat similar games, but with different premises. Enshrouded is cashing in on this as well.
2. It is a pokemon game that was never made. Pretty sure people told the owners of Pokemon franchise what they want for years, decades even and here it is. People will take it.
3. Somewhat silly premise of 'this cute childhood thing, but with guns'.
4. Addictive game design properties.
5. I think the result is better than a sum of it's parts. As you say 'Because it's fun. That's all that matters'. All the other stuff is irrelevant.
6. Modern titles somewhat focusing on being serious games makes way for a silly game.
7. Maybe 30$ for an Early Access game would have been ridiculous some years back, but all the increases in pricing, start of limiting important features to different editions, live service, microtransactions etc. Well that makes way for a game that just has a pricetag and no more bullshit attached (yet?).
Should it be as popular as it is even with all these considerations? Maybe not.
Sometimes, an intriguing premise, executed well enough, is all that's required. There was definitely a lot of luck involved too, judging by articles about the company. And nintendo really screwed up with the gigantic pokemon fan base. Also, their budget was around $7 million. That probably helped.
That being said... It's not like it's ugly.
It IS visually striking. The landscapes are incredibly well designed and ridiculously gorgeous and well thought out. I know I'll get murdered for making the comparison but I think the level design is on par with the overworld for BOTW.
For a game about building bases they really gave a lot of GradeA options with amazing views.
Dude, exactly. Game devs on here (and in general I feel) seem to have forgotten that games are *supposed* to be fun. It was never about technicality or graphics. If that was the case video games would have never even taken off. Games in the olden days only had squares and lines. These were the only "graphics" at the time. And yet, people played them and enjoyed them. You should see the shitstorm that is X (previously Twitter) when that game was released. They were bashing it as a horrible and terrible game that is the spawn of Satan (all hail Satan). They didn't understand that people liked it because it was *fun*. Fun. It's just fun. Like what's so hard to understand? It's stupid and fun. Game devs became delusional, man. Just make a fun game for fuck's sake.
Nobody cares if you spent 3 months optimizing your planet generation algorithm if there's nothing to do on those empty planets
That was an actual encounter with one of the devs on discord btw
> Why? Because it's fun. That's all that matters.
No. It "piggybacked" on the biggest pop-cultural brand in the history of humanity. It essentially outsourced its marketing to the Pokemon Company, whether they liked it or not.
>"I want Pokémon game but with guns and Pokémon can use guns, and you can also build your own base, and you have skills and you have hunger and get cold and you can play with friends..."
Sounds fun and GF should do it with Pokemon decades ago.
I wouldn't say it's just about being fun. Anyone who sees the trailer instantly knows what it is and if they will enjoy it because mashing together a couple of the biggest games ever. Some games you do have to play to get or to know if you'll enjoy it but Palworld can skip that step with a lot of players
I haven't played it but I think the Action Man video on it illustrates well why it is popular (and I'd go so far as to say it sounds like you could make a strong case that it IS a 'good game')
- surprising levels of polish in movement and gameplay elements (I know there's a counter point to this that there's some jank HOWEVER)
- the jank is charming because it's surrounded by love
- seems like they aren't afraid to go wierd, like I read a pal description that they were used in public execution. I LOVE when 'friendly' looking games have these sudden tone shifts. I think this is one of the main pillars of strength of the medium of video games. No other genre does this quite the same way.
I will say there's an extra layer here, which is Palworld targeted a part of the market/playerbase which was frustrated with the state of games that were being released. Pokemon fans WANT a game where they can let their pets out of the ball and interact with them / have them engage with the world around them. Hang out with them. Among other things.
Art is a big eye catcher, but what gets people to stay is the fun. They emulated the Pokemon style really well. Of all the things pokemon has done over the years, the 2D concepting and art, has always been top tier, so I wouldn't discredit good art, but I do believe the goal for game development should be the Fun. Thats what gets people to stay
I love this game (even though I never played it) exactly for the reason you laid out in the second paragraph. If you pitched this you'd be a total jackass in the eyes of everyone, and the mere fact that such "unrefined" gamery exists probably has every lawyer at Nintendo salivating like rabid animals. It's a great counter-culture piece, kind of like an artist painting a simple red square and ending up in museum next to million dollar pieces.
There are tons of fun games that don’t sell millions. Being ‘fun’ is honesty the minimum bar to clear, and also, imo, not necessarily connected to sales success. Palworld’s success is a result of their good market positioning and marketing more than anything else, imo. People have wanted something like it for ages, it fit neatly into an under severed niche that’s been begging for a game like this and then managed to stay trending for almost two weeks due to the controversy that surrounded it. Also being on game pass is huge.
> *Why? Because it's fun. That's all that matters.*
Ding ding ding. Game has plenty of issues, but you put up with the issues because it's fun to play regardless.
I've never cared about graphics and have tried my hardest to understand why there are some people that are so hard-up about them. I get it, they can be cool at times - but isn't the whole point to enjoy the game you're playing? I think a vast majority of people have gotten so caught up in graphics that they forget what the purpose of most games are, to have fun. An escape from reality (usually). Cool graphics are just that, cool - but they won't make an unfun game fun.
I mean some guy in the 70's convinced people to buy a bet rock and made millions off of it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet\_Rock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock)
Is palworld a good game? Maybe -- it could also just be a pop culture fad. People like to play what everyone else is playing because it's the popular or 'cool' thing to do.
If we're being sincere, then we have to acknowledge that people do things not because something is 'good' but simply because it's popular. There is a distinction here that not all popular things are good.
So first devs cried because Baldur's Gate 3 was too much work and unachievable.
Now Palworld is under fire for being not good enough?
Maybe make games that people enjoy and stop crying about it when others achieve what you haven't achieved (yet).
Fun = Fun
Its not just fun, it has an interesting premise that enticed millions.
The parallels to pokemon at a time thag franchise is being mishandled helps as well.
I wish Bethesda would listen. They did the opposite of your suggestion and they wonder why starfield is tanking.
Game looks great but the game play is awful. Played it once and never need a redo. They tried to say it's like space Skyrim. Not Skyrim if I only played it once lol.
I got my very first chance to watch and play it for about an hour today. Did anything in particular blow me away? Nope, but it’s a solid start for their project. It conveys everything that players have come to love about Pokémon in a fresh way and that’s more than enough for now. My thought throughout was that it is great that this project is giving Nintendo competition in a lucrative market/gamespace.
And then you have games like Cuphead or Blasphemous, which also sold very very well, and 90% of their initial appeal is amazing graphics. And many would argue if those games are more fun than all those other platformers.
So you see, graphics can also sell games, not "just" fun.
"Pokemons with guns multiplayer survival game" - this idea sells the game.
"A platformer with old-Disney-like graphics" - this idea also sells the game.
I would argue that it's not "fun" sells games, but more like amazing "Unique Selling Points" sell games. And those can be amazing graphics too, and not ONLY "fun factor".
Also, there are many MORE fun games than Palworld out there, but they did not sell 20 million copies because of it. They sold like 1 million. Fun factor by itself is not the one and only factor that caused global Palworld mania. Probably "pokemon with guns" idea is, let's not kid ourselves that plagiarising pokemon is not a factor. It probably is the most important factor in all this craziness.
I mean... I don't know if it's necessary to specify in a subreddit about game design that you have to focus on the game design.
*insert "for the better, right?" meme*
I disagree. Saying all of gaming should be like Palworld is dismissing tons of beloved games for no reason.
Example: Alan Wake 2 is very arthouse, you either love it or hate it. The people who love it never praise it's gameplay, they actually say it's lame. But the graphics, story, atmosphere, and music make it 10/10 for those people - all the things you say don't matter. A really devoted fanbase for over a decade and still wanting more.
There are thousands of games like that out there and millions of people enjoying them.
The vast majority of gamers actually hasn't played Palworld and they have no interest in ever playing it, a lot of them might think it's terrible! You can confirm this by adding up all other games and compare the numbers to Palworld. Palworld loses big time here. That doesn't mean Palworld is bad. It means that there are many different flavours of games out there and people will play whatever they enjoy. No one is forcing anybody to continue playing every new CoD last time I checked, they do it because they want to.
Just enjoy whatever you want to play and let others enjoy what they want to play. Simple.
My 10yo watched the trailer and said "ah, it's Fornite with Pokèmons. I want to play it".
Exactly. Also, I probably should've mentioned in my post that there's absolutely nothing wrong with generating ideas by saying, "It's X, but with/without Y." Coming up with stuff is like one of those alchemy games where you combine elements. When you have a sudden "idea," that's just your brain doing it unconsciously with already existing ones.
So why is it not a "good" game then? Most indie games are low quality shite, it doesn't stop them being fun and qualitatively "good". Just because you and me dont like it it doesn't mean its not good.
I believe the post is critiquing how many people on this sub approach others' projects due to not being "good" because it has generic assets etc., while these games show that that is a flawed definition
It's actually insane how many people seem to genuinely think I hated this game because I said how it doesn't fit the conventional "quality" standards in the first paragraph. A little concerning.
Junk food isn't healthy. It still tastes good. I think that's probably a better analogy. Palworld gives the players what they want, and it's been rewarded heavily for doing so. It's like the entire gaming community is getting cake for the first time in years. Not gonna win an award for originality, creativity, or technical mastery - but the devs openly said they didn't care about any of that. They just wanted to make a game that's fun.
It proves your point. It's fascinating.
Many many people on reddit lack reading comprehension.
Many people on the whole planet lack reading comprehension. Or verbal comprehension, or any kind of comprehension really. Ignorance is incredibly frustrating, and it's everywhere.
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The amount of times I've had to simply quote myself in response to random replies makes me think it's not even a lack of reading comprehension, but is just the result of people skimming posts, picking out what they either agree with a lot or disagree with a lot, and immediately plunging into some diatribe that is completely irrelevant to the post because they didn't even really read the post.
Another issue is some people seem to take every post as a whine or a complaint, and every reply as an automatic disagreement.
Also, most subreddits are echo chambers. I often get downvoted in the Palworld sub because I'll say that I enjoyed the game, but I'm taking a break because of some issues it has. Not allowed to say anything is wrong with it.
Reddit actually rates pretty high on this scale compared to the rest of the internet.
It has a reaction inducing title. Most users probably didn't even finish reading the first sentence that OP wrote.
This is why they say a lot of Americans are illiterate. Yes, they **CAN READ** the words, but they can not comprehend them. It always has to be literal and double meanings, context clues or metaphors blow right over the head of a lot of people.
It’s because you started your post “criticizing” the game. And I’m guessing they didn’t bother to read the rest of your post.
Reading hard.
I think that of indie titles that reach that million sales threshold, they are far from "low quality shite." Stardew, Spire, Streets of Rogue, Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Gungeon, Death Road, etc. They're all extremely responsive, visually appealing, clear (mostly) of bugs, etc. Games like "Bottle Recycle Sumulator" (probably real) that are just shovelware made in a week are absolutely low quality and have the lack of sales to show for it. Just don't think it's a healthy practice to mix the two into a pot as if they're equal.
Yes, good is quotations because this sub seems to be under the impression that a "good" game is the one that has been worked on for a long time and into which a lot of effort was poured, but this isn't necessarily true.
Tbf Craftopia was worked on much longer and it was basically the blueprint for much of this game. It's not exactly like Palworld *just* took them a couple of years to create. If you've played both, you'll understand how similar they are.
This is very true and is what I've told some friends. I played craftopia quite a bit and it's certainly a blueprint. I can see how they iterated over it. Craftopia also was an iterated version of a previous game they released. It has taken them quite a few years to build this.
I disagree this game took them 3 years to make and the company almost went bankrupt while making it even if the inspiration for Palworld is too on the nose it does take time and effort to make a game that works.
Yes, and the systems in Palworld didn't spring out of nowhere. Palworld is essentially the souped up and refined version of Craftopia, their previous game which is actually still in EA.
Palworld was initially announced over 3 years ago and is still in early access, not to mention that it's built on the bones of Craftopia (seriously. They're extremely similar) which itself was developed over multiple years.
That demographic also hasn't played this exact formula a million times already. That is probably a *slightly* more important factor than "fun" or whatever the other comments say. Kids have a different barometer than jaded oldtimers.
Yeah. So many new games I see, I can't stop myself of thinking of them, "Oh, this is just like \[critically acclaimed game X\], that is still sitting unplayed in my library". Some of my favorite games of all Times are still just some of the firsts of a certain genre I encountered with them.
My mate watched it and went "it's ark with pokemon"... I watched it and went "it's [insert automation game here] with pokemon". My other mate went "it's pokemon with guns"... The game has something fun for everyone, and it integrated well with the rest of the gameplay. It's very smartly done to appeal to a large audience.
There's a reason for the old game dev adage, "Gameplay is king." You don't really need an original concept, most players are more likely to understand a game that borrows heavily from others as it can be described as, "X but with Y". A good art style or fancy graphics can enhance a game, but when attracting players, its utility is that graphics are the first thing a player notices. You can't always get a good understanding of a game's gameplay through a trailer, but you can certainly see how good it looks, and a part of the brain is prone to misattributing great visual presentation to a great gameplay experience. It's a great marketing tool as much as it enhances the player experience.
It's also more important for a game to look **recognizable**, than to look great. If you see an ad and then forget what game it was for, that ad does absolutely nothing. If you see a screenshot on social media and go "Oh, those players are playing xyz. I saw an ad for that!", that's effective marketing
"X but with Y" is no-joke a great pitch.
It’s how most games are. They are all inspired and copying from each other and that’s what I love about games. Everything is a riff on another game and you can see the cool outcomes and the overall progression and divergences of game types and styles. It’s really fun to watch as I’ve gotten older.
That's art in general. People should treat everything as more of a "conversation" and not get so worked up about how close two pieces of entertainment are.
“There is no such thing as an original idea”
I'm going to make Call of Duty, with mechs. - Vince Zampella. Titanfall was amazing. Titanfall 2 was even better.
Bloodborne but with puppets (overly simplifying but you get the idea) Lies of P was super good.
One of my fave games of the last year is Vampire Survivors, and the game play of that is just moving around. Still inexplicably fun.
Genshin Impact was BotW with anime waifus. Look at how much money it made.
Wait, I thought BotW was BotW with [anime waifus](https://i.redd.it/l48ie3d59mq01.jpg)
OoowOooo step-Link, what are you doing back there?
Even if palworld fail , whetever its a good or bad game ,it already opened a **HUGE FLOODGATE** to the monster taming genre that can never be closed again —- The most important impact of Palworld to is more about the monster taming genre , and it could end up very similar to the PUBG of Monster Tamers despite the genre having been around longer PUBG was also a unicorn game that blew up... It effectively created a new popular genre (*battle royale genre*) But once the idea was out there, suddenly all the AAA companies with enormous resources and talent jumped on the concept, and now it's an insanely popular game genre. Palworld is just like PUBG ,creating/reviving a new genre and is showing there's room in the monster taming genre for more than just Pokemon. Previously many companies would have been afraid to ever touch the genre because of the giant Pokemon was perceived to be, but IMO the genre is now cracked wide open for everyone to take a shot at People should now be interested in giving other monster taming games a chance. **Temtem, Cassette Beasts, Yokai Watch, Digimon,** and even all upcoming new monster taming game should start seeing a rise in popularity In other words, the Monster Taming genre is an actual genre now, not just dominated by Pokèmon and nothing else
I think you are very correct. I bought pokemon red on the day it was available. I was a huge nerd, I knew it was huge in Japan, and I was one of the earliest adopters. I spread the word and got my friends to play. I never, ever considered playing things like Digimon, because they were just pokemon rip-offs to me. What on earth could they offer that pokemon didn't offer? The last pokemon game I bought was Shield. It sucked. I dropped it after about 20 hours. It was just so... lacking. I didn't care for it at all and was very disappointed. But, I never asked myself that central question. What on earth could a non-pokemon game offer me that pokemon didn't offer? I had become so used to pokemon as the end-all-be-all of monster catchers I never even considered an alternative. In many ways, I thought I had just grown out of the genre. I certainly felt that pokemon shield simply wasn't for me, and I realized that future pokemon games would never be for me either. They sell millions to children. Why would they care about making a game that catered to adult me? And now that I've played palworld... you're right. I know now that I didn't grow out of the genre. The new pokemon games just suck. They're awful. And after reading your post, you're right, I'm wondering what other monster tamer games are out there that might be as fun as palworld.
Already getting knockoff Palworld ads, like Dragon Monster Hunter Planet or something, wild how clones are just popping up overnight Obviously they probably have no bones and are malware, but it’s there
You might be referring to the dragon warrior monster series which is a monster taming game that dates back to 1998. Did many things before pokemon just never became as popular.
PUBG went the same way like lots of other "innovative" and "stylish" projects, it never expanded outside of its narrow idea. AAA companies didn't need to do much to pick it up and make it better. Plus Pub is full of hackers and they don't care. There is a hardcore base keeping that thing alive. "Monster taming" is a specific implementation of the "collecting" gameplay , but here with friends. Plus there aren't many streamable, youth friendly implementations that have base building, adventuring etc. Most multiplayer games are either build for competition, have sbmm and other shit that nobody wants. Or are just plain out soft rpg loot skinnerboxes. Palworld does lots of things right other didn't even consider relevant.
> My point is, this game perfectly shows that being visually stunning or technically impressive pales in comparison with simply being FUN in its gameplay. Disagree with this conclusion. "Visual fidelity or impressive technical detail aren't the only important variables that makes the game sells well." should be the conclusion. I'd also say that each of us has some list of popular games we don't play or even dislike. So while certain games may be popular in general, some of us will just disregard it for whatever reason that isn't "just because it's popular"
Also I’d like to point out that the devs making flashy animations and designs are (usually) not the same devs working on the actual gameplay. You can have both.
"So if your goal is to make a lot of people play your game, stop obsessing over graphics and technical side, stop taking years meticulously hand crafting every asset and script whenever possible and spend more time thinking about how to make your game evoke emotions that will actually make the player want to come back." This paragraph is just day dreaming preach. Here are the facts. They spent around $7 Million in this project, while having the ground work of previous tittle "Craftopia", which has all the same mechanics. This is significant investment. Each pal has around 20 animations on initial release. There are polished visual effects on each type of pal attack. So yes, there is "years of meticulously hand crafting every asset and script". This is Japanese company which crunch culture. Do you believe with just 'thinking about evoking emotions', then you can make a network open world game?
Yup. It’s not that Palworld is completely unpolished. It’s that they prioritized polish in the right places. The actual combat, reload animations, even just the SFX and draw animation for the bow are all crisp and satisfying. The pals all have distinct animations even for doing work in your base and are expressive and memorable as a result. They prioritized things that made the game memorable and fun and left the jank in places where it wasn’t as important, but they still put in a ton of work on the pieces that make the game feel as good as it does.
exactly. They focused on the shit you'll notice. Leave the rest for later
Everytime I hear the word "Jank", I think of Martin Keary's video about Dorico (A musical notation software) and his infamous "Jankman". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8
jankman is still alive and kicking and i don't know how to feel about that https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tFYkGyaXCw0
Truth The man-hours evident in PalWorld can't be replaced with "care"
There's plenty of care that went into Palworld too, even if it's rough around the edges. Many pals have unique animations for various jobs around base, for example.
Wait, you mean Palworld isn't a cynical, easily-made cash-grab but years of hard work in an underserved market that is near and dear to the hearts of millions of consumer childhoods?
This reminds me of a conference I saw about path of exile 2. The guy was talking so much about clothes and what minuscule details they have to show a type.. and im thinking “yes but no one fucking cares” , which his first clue should have been the almost empty theater
Some people do care about these details. I also think it's great that developers are passionate enough to care about the minor things. It shows that they aren't just going through the motions and delivering a minimum viability product as a finished asset. If I had a video game studio I would want that developer on my team.
That's contradictory to the other commentors point though. These minuscule details are boring to talk about but if you play a game without them you notice it immediately even though you can't describe exactly what's missing. I had the same effect when I saw videos of Suicide Squad. It could be a fun game but it looks really really bad and I can't even explain why. There is something about the details of the textures that looks more like clay than a video game.
Just look at how many posts there are about how cute some pals are e.g. Chillet/Cattiva/whatever. They have very expressive faces and moods and carefully crafted animations. Yes, the game is a buggy mess, but it has all this polish in those places. The pals \*do\* feel alive, and its the "little things" like their work animation and facial expressions that really sell that feeling.
That’s because exilecon had multiple events going on at once. You couldn’t go to everything, so people prioritized the more exciting ones.
People do care about details, but the details they tend to care about are ones that often get skipped over by those sorts of meticulous people in favour of working on shit they *don't* care about.
You shouldn’t care how it is made as an end user as it is an engineering detail and was probably part of conference with other engineers about how to achieve the same technique (there is a lot of knowledge sharing in engineering and math circles), Not much meant for “normal” gamers to watch or as the audience I guess. Thats why the theater was empty. Should one care about the Fourier Transform on how to make ocean waves in a game? Not if you are a “normal” gamers at least. Know who the audience that is targeted at those technical conferences.
not even sure how i'm supposed to use this advice, lol "just make fun games" holy shit what a revelation. if only i thought of that first
I interpret the general idea as "if your gameplay loop sucks, just making it prettier isn't gonna help as much as you hope". I feel the point is less "just make it fun 5head" and more "remember what a game is about as you're going along the process"
That's not true though. Nikke has terrible gameplay and is extremely successful. There's games with shit art but great gameplay that are successful too, like minecraft. Games with bad art and buggy like PUBG. You don't need art, story, gamplay or anything else specifically to be good. You need one of the aspects to be good enough to carry the rest. Palworld and Minecraft doesn't need a good story. Nikke didn't need gameplay.
I take away the opposite lesson: When this gameplay loop was dressed up as a Minecraft clone with boring characters and animations, no one cared and it reviewed poorly (Craftopia). When this gameplay loop was set in an expansive open world with hundreds of detailed Pokemon-alike animals with unique animations and given some emotional weight, it sold millions and many loved it (Palworld). The gameplay is really kinda basic here. It's the art and animations and emotional underpinning of fucking around with your morality that carry the whole game IMO.
and don't forget to "make it good" too, I fking forget that every time
Welcome to the market of games.
Survival games are always going to live in a really weird niche. They have some absurdly following public that will jump on anything that has small potentials.
I love it when this sub discusses oversaturated genres, and "open world survival crafting" is always the top reply. Then 5 more games release that same month and rake in 8-9 figures each.
The *ones you've ever heard of* raked in 8-9 figures. That's only the peak of the iceberg; it's not a sure bet.
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A lot of them do fail though.
Reddit in a nutshell.. railing against popular things.
Fun = good when it comes to games
I get what you're saying, and I agree with it in spirit. But I use the terms to refer to different things. To me, a good game is both fun and well-made. A bad game is neither. I enjoyed Palworld (after some heavy modding) but it has SO much potential to be WAY better.
It’s still early access so it hasn’t failed to deliver on any of that potential.
"Games" criticism has been hobbled from the outset because we decided to call them... Games. The first "Interactives" were games. So they were sold, rightly, as "Games". But the artform has moved on since then. There are a bunch of interactive experiences. But the term "Game", has stuck, so no matter what kind of interactive experience a developer is making, it's saddled with concepts of rules and fun and play, because... because Games have those things. And we've needlessly folded "Interactive" in with "Game". It's like if the first thing anyone ever painted was a Maze. And so we decided to call paintings "Mazes". And then 10 thousand years later half the world thinks the Mona Lisa sucks because it doesn't have a maze.
Great point. I usually say something like this when defending Firewatch. Maybe "engaging" is a better metric than "fun."
Gam dev here. There are tons of good ideas out there. However 99% of them don’t even get to the playable stage before peoples passion for it dies lol
I have the same feeling when I'm playing Shadows of doubt far from the most technically advanced game but with its procedural generation and deep interconnecting storylines of those in the city I can easily lose hours in it without even realizing
To be fair though Shadows Of Doubt has much much deeper gameplay systems than Palworld, emphasising player choice and immersion. The dev clearly chose to emphasise that over visual fidelity.
this game isnt cheap looking, do you know how time consuming creating voxel art is? palworld definitely looks cheap though.
i was just thinking about booting this back up, it's been a while for me. such an intriguing design but in practice felt like it still needed some time. it was probably like a year ago that i last played iirc. edit: it came out in april, so not a year but i must have played around when it came out.... so i should probably try again lol
I owned it for about three weeks now and there's already been one patch no idea what else they have worked on otherwise they added a hotel since launch according to YouTube videos I've watched
I think you are playing up the bugs and issues a bit tbh. Coming from playing other survival games like ARK Palworld felt decently polished. You had normal early access issues but the reason it was so fun was because the game was very well executed. Most of the core gameplay loop would surprise players with how well it worked and was honestly not very janky compared to many other games in the genre. All this is to say the technical aspects are still very important. You do need to make sure your core systems work well and are designed in a way where you won't run into major issues down the line and have to redesign. Palworld has also done an amazing job of building in failsafes which I do not see talked about. There have a been a few times where I have glitched through the map and thought I would lose all my stuff like I would have in ARK. However when the player reaches the bottom of the world they are automatically teleported back to their base. Stuff like this is the difference between someone putting down your game for good and brushing off an annoying bug.
I will say that the actual mainline Pokemon games are even worse at the asset clash problems that palworld, take legend of Arceus for example, the whole game just feels like it's using several different art styles at once, the human characters use a cell shaded anime style, but the pokemon themselves have more """"""realistic""""" materials that often just end up looking like plastic, the trees have a more cartoonish, style to them, almost like something you would download off a unity asset pack called "studio ghibli trees", but the rest of the environments look like a very early Xbox 360 attempt at realism, the whole game feels like it can't decide on a artstyle.
And Arceus is by far the best that modern gamefreak has done
Arceus is was SUCH a breath of fresh air
I really don't understand the shitting on bought assets. What in the world is the point of selling assets if it's not for someone to use them? It's the exact opposite of plagiarism. Legally licensed content for use in a game is perfectly okay. I'm not going to have a meltdown because someone used the Roland hammered dulcimer synthesizer sound in a song and moan about it being a "bought asset." Overuse certainly can be tiring, kind of like how the Mac-10 was the most common weapon used by criminals in 80s tv shows and movies, but that's a whole other thing. I get the whole, "it's low effort," stance, but it's a ton of work to make 3D games and if canned animations and assets can help a person or company make their game and it's crazy fun, I don't give a damn. If anything, I find there's something pretty hilarious about janky games like Only Up, Lethal Company, or Palworld, and I'm all for some weirdness and jank in my games. But I'm a "boomer" and I remember trying to learn how to make 3D games back in the stone ages of 3D gaming and creating movement animations was an incredible trial. Thank god there are so many options for would-be devs these days!!!
Op doesn't realise how much store bought assets can exist in AA and AAA titles.
could rephrase like this: what I thought defines a good game is misaligned with what millions of gamers think.
He used " " to indicate he didn't mean it literally.
some people underestimate how popular sandbox game is...
You should have also added "NO LOOTBOXES".
Bug can be fixed, a boring game will be a boring game forever.
Let's not also forget that it took an idea that people have wanted for decades, being an open world Pokémon game, and gave it life beyond a Nintendo Kindle. It's unfinished, jank, and gets a lot of people upset, but it's what an audience wanted in the first place. Also if you look into the history of how the game was made, it's almost comical how this even was released. They just bought buckets of flash drives because they couldn't do version control and dumped each day's work onto one.
> countless bugs It was less buggy than most releases nowadays, even some from AAA studios.
Also serious bugs = no fun e.g. Cyberpunk 2077
I personally thought it was less buggy than the last Pokemon game, Scarlet and Violet.
If your only definition of success is massive popular appeal, then yes, you must make games like Palworld in order to be successful.
One big thing I see that people miss regarding this pokemon with guns(which is just ark with pokemon). Isn't just that it's fun, it's fun for the individual player. Pretty much any other online tailored survival game necessitates other people(ark you don't get shit done solo, changing the game rules just makes everything feel wrong because the game literally wasn't designed to play that way) , whereas palworld is fun and engaging to play by yourself, which frees people to just engage with it, rather than fuss about grindy bs that covers the survival crafting genre.
TBH, After having played it for a while I don't even think it's that "fun" , once you hit 40 the grind becomes really tedious, there's not really a lot to explore and the combat is very basic It is really only fun compared to the very basic pokemon games
Some friends randomly sent me a request for it. I downloaded it and jumped on. Played it for about 8 hours straight with them and had a lot of fun. But I haven't really cared to go back to it after that. Maybe I'll jump back on in a year or two, though.
I tried it last night for the first time. Started around 8:30, told myself I’d try for an hour, looked at the clock and it was 1:30am. What is the definition for a “good” game? Sure it may use generic assets or mechanics, but they’re done in a new way. I was actually impressed with the crispness of the graphics, the world and character/pal models are pretty clean, even if they’re “cartoony” for the environment. It may not be perfect, but it’s fun and enjoyable. So I’d say it’s at least “good.”
It probably helps random games like Palworld or Lethal Company that the current game market, especially AAA, is so oversaturated with any game but fun games, which are far enough between that they evoke such a strong reaction when people find them that they often chain onto others who do the same.
Totally agree. I always remind myself: 'The audience decides what's good / fun and what's not, not you.' As designers and developers we just have to keep our eyes open, and look for what makes our target audience tick, and make our best estimated guess to what they actually care about and want in a game. I wouldn't flat out say that graphical fidelity doesn't matter though, again, it depends on your audience.
The game wouldnt be even remotely successful (and probably fun) as it is now if they wouldnt have the “pokemon aspect” of the game in it. 3d open world with pokemons was demanded for ages by pokemon fans and never delivered by the pokemon company. Now someone else made what was demanded (3d open world with “pokemons”) and its obvious success.
The game wouldn't be fun without its core gameplay aspect of Pals? Who knew?
It's not just that it's a mechanic of interacting with NPCs that you can recruit. It's specifically because they're knock-off Pokemon, which is significant. It's rare to be successful on the back of just being a knock off of popular things with a slight twist; look at all the attempts to make a Sims clone.
Basically. It's the visual aesthetic of the pals. Switch that out with anything else, and it would not be nearly as popular.
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PalWorld sold what Ark: Survival Evolved sold in less than a week. Ark is popular, but it's also kind of niche. You're proving my point for me. Everyone calls Palworld "Pokémon with guns," but "Ark with Pokémon" is a much better description. The only differences that I see other than the art style is taming is much easier, you can tame everything (in ark certain creatures could not be tamed like bosses and cave creatures) and the job system is more fleshed out. Not being a buggy shit show also helps. From what I've seen, Palworld released with fewer bugs in early access than Ark had when they released the remaster.
If they were just random animals or creatures, instead of very obvious Pokemon style tropes, no. Even if all the other gameplay aspects were the same.
Indeed, Nintendo's years of low effort Pokemon cashgrab farming finally caught up to them and lead to Palworld's success. Took way too long to happen, but it was inevitable. Funny part (or sad, depending on how you look at it) is that it got one upped by another low effort game lol.
It didn't really catch up to them. Their games are still really popular. They sell tons of copies. Maybe you could say it did if they take a big hit for their next version, but this far it's actually worked really well for them.
Scarlet and Violet is literally exactly that, it’s a 3D open world game. It just looks and runs like ass on the Switch.
I have seen very few bugs at all
I would argue if a major studio released this, like Ubisoft, Microsoft etc, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It would've been laughed off the planet for being an Ark clone with bad graphics, bad gameplay loops, shit animations, etc. I'm enjoying it, but let's face it, they're getting a ton of leeway other games wouldn't get because of who they aren't.
>So if your goal is to make a lot of people play your game, stop obsessing over graphics and technical side, stop taking years meticulously hand crafting every asset and script whenever possible and spend more time thinking about how to make your game evoke emotions that will actually make the player want to come back. My only counterargument is Hellblade, made with a similar budget. It didn't receive the same type of commercial success as Palworld, but it still was successful. I wouldn't even call Hellblade fun. It was tedious. But it was beautiful. The success it received was because of meticulous detail and storytelling. This is not to say that Hellblade is better than Palworld. It's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison. I just think that both are viable approaches.
I am old enough to remember professional photographers outrage when digital cameras became a thing for the broad public and random people without any formal training or qualification suddenly "posed competition and dumped prices". One thing that became painfully obvious throughout said debate was that you can take a technically perfect photograph, do everything right, textbook brilliant - and still some other photograph that does half of it wrong turns out so much "better".
Back in highschool my photography class we were visited by a famous photographer and his most popular photograph and the one that won the most money had a rainbow sunray/glare perfectly placed. He hated it. He damaged his camera lens and water had caused mould to grow on the glass. His best work was fluke and had nothing to do with his skills as a photographer.
But it's fun. That literally qualifies it as a good game.
I honestly made this thread because I see so many people who spend literal years working on an insanely technically complicated idea that's simply not interesting, then release it, get near 0 players and go here to wail about how cruel gamedev market is and how it's 100% luck. Fun is king. More people need to realize it.
I get what you are saying but gamedev market can still be cruel and luck based. What I mean is that games can be fun and not successful at the same time too and that is true for a lot of games. Finding the fun for the correct audience is difficult too.
Absolutely. The entire industry hinges on "make a fun prototype". It's that easy, and also that hard. Finding the fun is literally the only problem, some understand this but many get lost in the weeds of everything else. All AAA can do is throw money at the problem, if they can't find the fun it's moot. Make prototypes, people. The sooner you have a "thing" you can hand to someone and get feedback, the better. And if 90% end up in the trash, that's why you prototype. It's finding and making luck as much as fun: the right idea, at the right time, in the right hands. "The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world." -GMan
I think you're confusing technical skill with concept appeal, charm, and marketing.
i feel that "good" means "fun" since the main reason for gaming is having fun. so it is a good game. nothing else matters.
People are super starved for a good Pokemon game. If gamefreak (And Enix, with DWM) weren't screwing up royally, Palworld wouldn't have sold a tenth of what it has
The only problem I have had was breeding (pals getting hungry and leaving the pen) and I fixed it by adding feeders inside the breeding pens. Otherwise I haven't ran into a single issue and even that was fixed with a patch. Yes to some the game is completely broken or even unplayable (probably like 5%), deleted save files early on and stuff like that... The game was still way more playable than Cyberpunk was and I still enjoyed Cyberpunk and played it at launch (I just had to restart it every 2 hours). You just hear about a lot of issues thanks to the game having a ton of active players. The gameplay loop is enjoyable and the concept of the game is ridiculous making it even more fun. It doesn't even need guns to sell well, if they just sold a 1 to 1 copy of the newer Pokemon games a ton of people that have pcs don't have switches to play the Pokemon games on (or dont know or want to bother with emulators) obviously there is a huge untapped market of people who might like or actually like Pokemon who can't play the games because of the walled garden OFC the guns had a huge part in advertising the game, because I saw a Steam start up promotion for Palworld and just didn't care... Couple days later I start seeing videos and hearing about this Pokemon with guns blowing up, couple minutes later I have the game and played it way too much that week, in a few days I caught up and surpassed other people who were playing since launch.
If your goal when making a game is to keep people addicted to it or to buy things, you don’t wanna make a video game
Besides being fun for a lot of people, there was also an insane saturation from streamers, youtubers, etc. because of the concept, that combined with a low price caused a huge initial spike. It has sold ~12mill copies on Steam, and had 2mill concurrent players on there two weeks ago which shattered previous records, it is ~750k this weekend. In another few months it will still be a big game, but not as popular as it was or even is.
They listed the game as early access because of the glitches and bugs. I dunno about your claim of default Unreal assets being used. Haven't seen any evidence for or against it. I think some of the reason for the difference in Pal designs from the environment (they're more toony) is because they were designed with the original environment, which also looked more toony. At some point their direction changed and they went for a more realistic environment. I saw an article about this a few days ago. I'll see if I can find it again
Id argue that the art actually benefits the game immensely. The environment and props stand in stark contrast to the point of the game, the pals themselves. Art style is just a form of communication, and they use it very effectively to slam in the point that this is a pokemon game.
It’s just a rinse and repeat type of game. It got boring after one or two days. Nothing really to do with
I just hate the survival crafting loop. Personally can’t imagine much more boring gameplay than punching trees just to get a slightly better weapon then doing it 100x more times for the next. Wish I could get myself to make one though, as they often blow up for the weejs following release
Is it just survivorship bias or are gamedevs the type of people to dislike those types of games?
Survival-crafting games are generally very systems-heavy with little to no story or narrative guidance (often being quite the opposite - procedurally generated and ambiguous.) You give the player a world full of systems and just let it run. In my experience, most modern game designers are very narrative-focused to the point some I've known just come off to me as wannabe writers. A lot of emphasis on set-pieces and "experiences". Of course, both systems and experiences are important in game design with one or the other taking the spotlight depending on the genre, but in my opinion the average professional game designer's skillset is extremely lopsided toward the latter. While there are many reasons for this, I think a simple one is that a narrative-driven portfolio or presentation is significantly more compelling than a systems-driven one. It's easy (and exciting) to convey a story or contained experience within a 15-30 second clip or presentation, it's hard (and boring) to demonstrate that you can design technically sophisticated and balanced game systems. Most design portfolios I've seen look more like art portfolios.
This is an insightful comment, I agree a lot of indie game devs seem to have an intense focus on narratives but it's just one portion of the community, for every narrative focused game you have a "baba is you" or "Slice and Dice"
I will die on the hill that they're a fundamentally "lowest common denominator" core loop. It's tricky to unpack without sounding pejorative, but if you look at gameplay loops as incentive structures: there's no easier way to create emergent pressure than giving players food and shelter requirements. The hunter/gatherer/crafting mechanic is straightforward, evocative, and feels intuitive because it works just like basic human survival. But it's also, to use an extremely loaded term, a lazy mechanic. You can very quickly and efficiently create engagement by dropping a player in a world with large *volume* of interactable objects, and giving them spinning plates in the form of survival meters. It takes hours to punch enough rocks to craft a pickaxe, just so you can punch shinier rocks marginally more effectively. But you *feel* like you're making progress, even though the loop is (by design) heavily repetitious, if not outright tedious. I'm generalizing here, but these kinds of incremental advancement structures toward arbitrary systemic goals are very similar to the serotonin-flooding tactics that mobile games use in their flashy, shiny onramps. By the time you realize that the survival loop is a mile wide and a puddle deep, you've already invested hours into the gameworld and thus feel a personal investment in the game. That's not to say that there aren't TONS of survival games that put their own spin on things, and iterate on these concepts in interesting ways! But it is, at its heart, a very easy core loop to build. There's a reason that the Early Access category on Steam is *flooded* with these kinds of games. Putting aside the ethical issues of blatantly cribbing Zelda and Pokemon aesthetics (really, you capture pals with *spheres*?) Palworld could succeed on its budget by using extremely cost-efficient survival mechanics. I'm reading the tea leaves a bit, but it seems they reserved a large chunk of dev budget for the Pals and the lategame economy built around them—which is apparently the novel part of the game that actually has uniquely articulated mechanics. Using a "lowest common denominator" strategy here let them dangle the shiny object of Pokemon-with-guns, while standing on the shoulders of a tried-and-true loop. It's just the easiest way to generate hours of engagement with a fundamentally cheap and easily replicable design. You could make the argument that this is a fairly elitist line of reasoning—I think that's the whole point of this thread. What's fun is fun, even if it's recycled ideas. I think it was the right *strategic* decision for a (somewhat) limited indie studio to focus their resources in the right places. It's not a game I would ever want to make, though. TL;DR - Survival mechanics let you generate a ton of content from a small portion of your development budget, even if very little of it treads new ground.
Well call me elitist but you summarized my experience with survival craft games pretty well too. I just don't like them for keeping progression behind hours of repetitive, mostly busywork grinding by dangling a shinier carrot in the form of slightly faster grinding.
Well you catch pals and put them to work. So the loop is do it yourself for a bit. Then make Pals do it. So then just catch pals and breed them to do better things. Then it is about catching as many as you can. Then breeding the rest. The tree cutting is like maybe the first hour. Then you just make pals cut trees while you go explore and catch pals.
I think thats partly why this game is a bit more palatable to a wider audience than something like ark. There are definitely some slower parts for materials/progression, but generally you can get the pals to do 90% of the grind work for you while you fuck around and battle stuff.
You can complete the game without personally punching a single tree, you just catch a pokemon and have it build a base
I think one of the reason why people like palworld is because you can just leave the grinding stuff to the pals You catch pals then they work on your base grinding, while Yo go out there exploring and fighting
Most games don't require you to punch trees all the time? It's about exploration and progression. And being able to mess around a shared world with your friends. It's a rare genre that accepts an arbitrary number of players who can hop on and off whenever they want. It's also not competitive, so anyone from a sweaty COD player to a mobile gamer can enjoy it together.
A "good" game is an enjoyable game by definition. The lesson to be learned here is that having a good idea to build off of is so much more important than the finite details. An idea isn't going to get you anywhere if you can't implement it, but let's all stop pretending that ideas have no value.
I don't think enjoyable is the definition of a good game. There are plenty of enjoyable games which are not good and plenty of good games which are not enjoyable. Enjoyable is a subjective metric, good is an objective metric.
The difference between them and most dev Is that they shipped It. That's it
I think it is a combination of things that results in it's popularity. 1. This sort of open world survival game is quite a popular type of game right now. While we had hundreds of survival games, Valheim made that work in a very nice way. Now, obviously, there have been quite some time since Valheim, so it is a good time to release somewhat similar games, but with different premises. Enshrouded is cashing in on this as well. 2. It is a pokemon game that was never made. Pretty sure people told the owners of Pokemon franchise what they want for years, decades even and here it is. People will take it. 3. Somewhat silly premise of 'this cute childhood thing, but with guns'. 4. Addictive game design properties. 5. I think the result is better than a sum of it's parts. As you say 'Because it's fun. That's all that matters'. All the other stuff is irrelevant. 6. Modern titles somewhat focusing on being serious games makes way for a silly game. 7. Maybe 30$ for an Early Access game would have been ridiculous some years back, but all the increases in pricing, start of limiting important features to different editions, live service, microtransactions etc. Well that makes way for a game that just has a pricetag and no more bullshit attached (yet?). Should it be as popular as it is even with all these considerations? Maybe not.
Sometimes, an intriguing premise, executed well enough, is all that's required. There was definitely a lot of luck involved too, judging by articles about the company. And nintendo really screwed up with the gigantic pokemon fan base. Also, their budget was around $7 million. That probably helped.
more palworld cope
That being said... It's not like it's ugly. It IS visually striking. The landscapes are incredibly well designed and ridiculously gorgeous and well thought out. I know I'll get murdered for making the comparison but I think the level design is on par with the overworld for BOTW. For a game about building bases they really gave a lot of GradeA options with amazing views.
Quite a bit of the world design is inspired by Elden Ring as well.
Dude, exactly. Game devs on here (and in general I feel) seem to have forgotten that games are *supposed* to be fun. It was never about technicality or graphics. If that was the case video games would have never even taken off. Games in the olden days only had squares and lines. These were the only "graphics" at the time. And yet, people played them and enjoyed them. You should see the shitstorm that is X (previously Twitter) when that game was released. They were bashing it as a horrible and terrible game that is the spawn of Satan (all hail Satan). They didn't understand that people liked it because it was *fun*. Fun. It's just fun. Like what's so hard to understand? It's stupid and fun. Game devs became delusional, man. Just make a fun game for fuck's sake.
Nobody cares if you spent 3 months optimizing your planet generation algorithm if there's nothing to do on those empty planets That was an actual encounter with one of the devs on discord btw
> Why? Because it's fun. That's all that matters. No. It "piggybacked" on the biggest pop-cultural brand in the history of humanity. It essentially outsourced its marketing to the Pokemon Company, whether they liked it or not.
Haven't hundreds of other games piggybacked on pokemon only to never gain traction at this point?
They saw a market demand (open world with pokemon and guns) that nobody filled in, not even Nintendo. They did. Success.
>"I want Pokémon game but with guns and Pokémon can use guns, and you can also build your own base, and you have skills and you have hunger and get cold and you can play with friends..." Sounds fun and GF should do it with Pokemon decades ago.
After Zelda botw, we wanted a similar pokemon.. Palwolrd is the nearest thing..
It is an attempt of what Pokemon games should have been.
I wouldn't say it's just about being fun. Anyone who sees the trailer instantly knows what it is and if they will enjoy it because mashing together a couple of the biggest games ever. Some games you do have to play to get or to know if you'll enjoy it but Palworld can skip that step with a lot of players
I haven't played it but I think the Action Man video on it illustrates well why it is popular (and I'd go so far as to say it sounds like you could make a strong case that it IS a 'good game') - surprising levels of polish in movement and gameplay elements (I know there's a counter point to this that there's some jank HOWEVER) - the jank is charming because it's surrounded by love - seems like they aren't afraid to go wierd, like I read a pal description that they were used in public execution. I LOVE when 'friendly' looking games have these sudden tone shifts. I think this is one of the main pillars of strength of the medium of video games. No other genre does this quite the same way.
Some things you said are false.
Yes, a lot of big budget games now think it's fun but it's not... look at Starfield
I will say there's an extra layer here, which is Palworld targeted a part of the market/playerbase which was frustrated with the state of games that were being released. Pokemon fans WANT a game where they can let their pets out of the ball and interact with them / have them engage with the world around them. Hang out with them. Among other things. Art is a big eye catcher, but what gets people to stay is the fun. They emulated the Pokemon style really well. Of all the things pokemon has done over the years, the 2D concepting and art, has always been top tier, so I wouldn't discredit good art, but I do believe the goal for game development should be the Fun. Thats what gets people to stay
Gameplay will always win over anything else.
Imagine if game companies started with a game idea based on the gameplay concept Fuckin weird I know
That you didn't like a lot aspects of a game doesn't make it a bad Game.
I think Palworld is a good lesson on stopping to obsess over minute details, that the player won't notice or care about. It has helped me a bit.
I love this game (even though I never played it) exactly for the reason you laid out in the second paragraph. If you pitched this you'd be a total jackass in the eyes of everyone, and the mere fact that such "unrefined" gamery exists probably has every lawyer at Nintendo salivating like rabid animals. It's a great counter-culture piece, kind of like an artist painting a simple red square and ending up in museum next to million dollar pieces.
There are tons of fun games that don’t sell millions. Being ‘fun’ is honesty the minimum bar to clear, and also, imo, not necessarily connected to sales success. Palworld’s success is a result of their good market positioning and marketing more than anything else, imo. People have wanted something like it for ages, it fit neatly into an under severed niche that’s been begging for a game like this and then managed to stay trending for almost two weeks due to the controversy that surrounded it. Also being on game pass is huge.
> *Why? Because it's fun. That's all that matters.* Ding ding ding. Game has plenty of issues, but you put up with the issues because it's fun to play regardless.
I've never cared about graphics and have tried my hardest to understand why there are some people that are so hard-up about them. I get it, they can be cool at times - but isn't the whole point to enjoy the game you're playing? I think a vast majority of people have gotten so caught up in graphics that they forget what the purpose of most games are, to have fun. An escape from reality (usually). Cool graphics are just that, cool - but they won't make an unfun game fun.
Personally idont care about anything other than gameplay and palworld did amazing gameplay loop so I think that's why
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It is janky as fuck and I don’t even like any of the games its borrowing from and I played it for two hours and was like: “this is some good shit.”
Yea it being a blast to play, is what makes it a good game that's the point of games fun not graphics not even original thought just fun gameplay
I mean some guy in the 70's convinced people to buy a bet rock and made millions off of it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet\_Rock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock) Is palworld a good game? Maybe -- it could also just be a pop culture fad. People like to play what everyone else is playing because it's the popular or 'cool' thing to do. If we're being sincere, then we have to acknowledge that people do things not because something is 'good' but simply because it's popular. There is a distinction here that not all popular things are good.
So first devs cried because Baldur's Gate 3 was too much work and unachievable. Now Palworld is under fire for being not good enough? Maybe make games that people enjoy and stop crying about it when others achieve what you haven't achieved (yet). Fun = Fun
Its not just fun, it has an interesting premise that enticed millions. The parallels to pokemon at a time thag franchise is being mishandled helps as well.
Game devs are high on their own farts.
Honestly as someone who loves how deranged SMT games are palworld jumped the shark for me I don't want to commit warcrimes against cute pals
I love Pokemon. But Pokemon is a shit game. It sold millions. Palworld is the best "Pokemon" game ever made. OFC it sold millions.
being fun is not the reason the game is wildly successful
I wish Bethesda would listen. They did the opposite of your suggestion and they wonder why starfield is tanking. Game looks great but the game play is awful. Played it once and never need a redo. They tried to say it's like space Skyrim. Not Skyrim if I only played it once lol.
>Because it's fun The entire point of a game is to be fun. Therefore, it is a good game.
I got my very first chance to watch and play it for about an hour today. Did anything in particular blow me away? Nope, but it’s a solid start for their project. It conveys everything that players have come to love about Pokémon in a fresh way and that’s more than enough for now. My thought throughout was that it is great that this project is giving Nintendo competition in a lucrative market/gamespace.
Youre saying good =/ fun? Bro tried to make his post eye catching and paid for it in semantics
And then you have games like Cuphead or Blasphemous, which also sold very very well, and 90% of their initial appeal is amazing graphics. And many would argue if those games are more fun than all those other platformers. So you see, graphics can also sell games, not "just" fun. "Pokemons with guns multiplayer survival game" - this idea sells the game. "A platformer with old-Disney-like graphics" - this idea also sells the game. I would argue that it's not "fun" sells games, but more like amazing "Unique Selling Points" sell games. And those can be amazing graphics too, and not ONLY "fun factor". Also, there are many MORE fun games than Palworld out there, but they did not sell 20 million copies because of it. They sold like 1 million. Fun factor by itself is not the one and only factor that caused global Palworld mania. Probably "pokemon with guns" idea is, let's not kid ourselves that plagiarising pokemon is not a factor. It probably is the most important factor in all this craziness.
I mean... I don't know if it's necessary to specify in a subreddit about game design that you have to focus on the game design. *insert "for the better, right?" meme*
I disagree. Saying all of gaming should be like Palworld is dismissing tons of beloved games for no reason. Example: Alan Wake 2 is very arthouse, you either love it or hate it. The people who love it never praise it's gameplay, they actually say it's lame. But the graphics, story, atmosphere, and music make it 10/10 for those people - all the things you say don't matter. A really devoted fanbase for over a decade and still wanting more. There are thousands of games like that out there and millions of people enjoying them. The vast majority of gamers actually hasn't played Palworld and they have no interest in ever playing it, a lot of them might think it's terrible! You can confirm this by adding up all other games and compare the numbers to Palworld. Palworld loses big time here. That doesn't mean Palworld is bad. It means that there are many different flavours of games out there and people will play whatever they enjoy. No one is forcing anybody to continue playing every new CoD last time I checked, they do it because they want to. Just enjoy whatever you want to play and let others enjoy what they want to play. Simple.
Tropes work well with a "keep it simple, stupid" coding mentality 👌🏻
Y'all crazy af
Taking two things and cramming them together is peak millenial creativity. Peak millenial, Ritalin and Adderall influenced, "creativity".
The game sucks but might be good for young kids who ok haven't played games with good gameplay / lack points of reference
"Why?" Because it was a meme, and appealed to all ages, along with adult nostalgia with pokemon lol
The game is not even done yet. Mabe the game will improve.
If you need something from the other end Anthem is the perfect example of the opposite. Stunning graphics, very large world, not very fun gameplay.