Never been a fan of pokemon or pokemon style games and I gotta say I am not really interested in monster catching aspect of palworld either but still the game is just so much fun to me
If you look at their site, it honestly looks like they just took their EXISTING game from a few years back (Craftopia) and cheaply re-skinned it for PalWorld.
So the cost posted might only be for the re-skinning cost too, making it even cheaper.
I saw this game, like, 5 minutes ago and I can already say it looks bloody awful. It’s like they put all the buzzwords in a hat and decided to make a game from them.
I can see bits of Fotnite, Zelda, Pokemon, and every Minecraft clone under the sun. Not a single new thing brought to the table.
Combining things that haven’t been combined before is the quintessential creative act. Because as you said, there is nothing new under the sun. But there are new ways of combining those things.
Factorio was inspired by Minecraft mods BuildCraft and IndustrialCraft, but yeah, few games have done what Factorio has, and those that have tried never quite reached it’s level. Sure, there are games that feature automation with complex recipes (Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Shapez), but only Factorio actually managed to pull off a sense of exponential scale.
Yeah, I’m aware of the Minecraft mods, but I wouldn’t have called the ideas established before Factorio came along. As for Satisfactory et al, they were inspired by Factorio itself, so obviously don’t count.
Look at how little hype it had until day one of release, no one was talking positively about it
Look at people complimenting it now, talking about how it fills a niche for adults wanting to play Pokémon when it is nothing like Pokémon and that niche is already filled
Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn’t know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.
You say that as if any of those games or series are truly original:
Fortnite
Fortnite just copied other survival games like Rust and Ark. Epic put their own spin on it by combining it with a battle royale - sorry, with a PUBG game mode.
Zelda
If you’re talking BoTW and ToTK, you can argue they just copied other open-world games like The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry and added a Zelda flair. Weapon degradation was even present in the older TES games.
Pokemon
Pokemon is just a kid-friendly version of the Shin Megami Tensei games without the fusion mechanic. Some of the Gen 1 Pokemon designs were also more or less lifted straight from Dragon Quest.
Minecraft
It was more or less virtual Legos when it first came out, and the survival mechanics gave it a unique spin.
So if you really wanted to, you can reduce all of the games you mentioned into their influences and what they straight-up copied. Funny thing is, these are all very well-received games because their core gameplay mechanics and designs were very good, and they added their own spin on things. Copying others isn’t a bad thing so long as you’re either iterating on it to improve it or to do something different to it somehow.
I dunno. Plenty of AAA developer spend way more money copying other people’s ideas. Just look at all the battle Royale games that came from what started as a mod for ARMA which was already based on a movie that itself was based on a book/manga.
While I generally agree with what you’re saying. Jedi Fallen Order has several hallmarks of the soulslike genre. Meditation resets enemies. You collect “souls” under a different name. The difficulty isn’t really up to scratch for a soulslike, mind you, but IMO it definitely falls into that genre.
It’s a good game. If you’re gonna copy, do it well and they did. Probably the best SW games in a long time and the combat system works really well with it. But yeah it’s nicked entirely haha.
Did you ever play Force Unleashed or the KOTOR games? I like the idea behind the new Jedi games, but they really do not give me that Star Wars vibe like FU or KOTOR did. Force unleashed made me feel like a force user who we normally only hear about lore wise (Revan for sure, maybe lore accurate Anakin/Vader) but the KOTOR games were SOAKED in Star Wars vibes.
I’m only asking because the new Jedi games just felt mediocre (to me!) and uninspired.
Yeah both those games are better than anything recent, still amazed we haven’t gotten a proper remake of KOTOR yet tbh. Easily one of the best Star Wars stories in any medium and that whole era could be its own movie saga.
It was a 3D Metroidvania, not really Soulslike IMO: the abilities unlocked as the game progresses that allow the player to explore places they couldn’t go or take shortcuts they couldn’t take are the staple of Metroidvanias, and so many people seem to forget it, but that rest to save / enemies respawn mechanic was in many Metroidvania games long before Dark Souls. I would also say that Souls-like games are characterized by their build variety and combat difficulty, which were notably absent from J:FO.
I would classify Soulslike as a subgenre of Metroidvanias, but sure. I also oversaw what is arguably the most characteristic characteristic in Soulslike games: the loss of all currency on death, with a possible retrieval.
It also helps if the game is genuinely fun or interesting to play. I can tell you I’m having a hell of a lot more fun watching people play this than recent Pokemon games, and it’s making me consider dropping some money to buy the game.
Consumers are stupid. They seldom want something new, more often than not they want something familiar with a few slights twists. Movie studio’s don’t do reboots because they’re lazy, they do it because people keep fucking going to see them.
A handful of people online complain every year about how “Sports Game Franchise '23 is just SGF '22 with some new player skins” and yet it still sells like hotcakes. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn’t you do that, there’s no financial incentive to spend more money on development.
I starting playing MMO’s with the Ultima Online beta, and was in a number of other betas over the years. Vanguard, The Chronicles of Spellborn, etc. The number of beta players who kept shouting “it needs race X from WoW” and “why aren’t there any druids like in WoW” was deafening. For decades, people talked about the next “WoW killer”, which meant “a game close enough to WoW for people to migrate but maybe with slightly better graphics”.
Do you know where the money gets spent when you come up with original ideas? Into the trash can. It’s literally paying people to write down ideas on paper or in code, iterating, and then throwing them out, over and over again.
AAA titles also spend a truckload on voice acting and mocap. You don’t need to mocap a round sheep monster. Sure, you could be incredibly stupid and pay Alan Tudyk to voice act the sheep, or pay Vin Diesal millions to say “I am Groot” 300 different ways, but no one should be ashamed for not doing so.
“consumers are stupid”. So I guess you and everyone else is stupid? Calling people who like things you don’t like stupid means you have the mind of a toddler and probably act like one.
But you’re right. People don’t want new things. It’s why movies like Oppenheimer bombed and only made almost a billion. It’s why “Everything, everywhere all at once” bombed and nobody watched it nor talks about it ever.
People like things that they like. Crazy.
Yeah a lot of people grew up with superheroes, so they watch their favorite franchises. Less so now since we can see some decline with people getting sick of it all.
People like sports, so they buy sports games. EA has a strangle on licensing rights for the players. People want to play as their favorite players. Fucking wild right? If a competitor came in, had the license rights and made a decent game, guess what, people would probably buy it.
I started off in MUDs. When WoW was new, the class synergy and the contexts in which they worked was new, exciting and fun. Yeah people wanted to see that outside of WoW because back then it was new.
You sound like a grognard loser who likes the smell of their own farts and tries to establish their milquetoast opinion as fact
Inb4 “you’re a marvel watcher” I don’t watch them because I’m not interested in superheros. Inb4 “FIFA slave” nope don’t care about sports ball.
Your reply is going to be some nonsense about how you’re right because you’re just…right! Don’t bother, I won’t read it.
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