Palworld (as a survival game...)

Obviously it’s a very hyped up game, and I was apprehensive posting this as they have sufficient marketing behind them already. It’s meme’d as “Pokemon with Guns”, but at its core is a very heavy survival play style.

Have you tried it? How many hours in are you?

If you have, what do you think? How does it stack up against other survival games for you?

My view is in the comments…

Edit: First 2 votes are downvotes and into minus immediately? I get you may not like the hype. Say it, but this is to also stimulate debate and build this community. We’re off the lemm.ee first page and any downvote is just going to contribute to keeping this community buried when it needs a little oxygen. Do we really want another dead small community? It’s also an opportunity to bring folk into survival games…

PopOfAfrica,

The killer feature for you as a survival game is allowing your monsters to do work for you. It really cuts out the tedium that a lot of other survival games like valheim suffer from.

Mathazzar,

The last 4 days I’ve played have been me trying to get pals optimized into actual automation. It’s a new type of tedium of trying to get things running smoothly.

They kind of overplayed the amount of automation you could do, I feel. Some of the trailers are very misleading in this regard. One video shows lines of Cattiva carrying ingots from behind a forge, but they won’t pull from a forge AFAIK. So it appears they dropped a stack to let the cats carry to a chest in the semblance of a bucket brigade.

A lot of my work in fixing my bases is getting them working the jobs they’re best at. Anubis is my tier 4 crafter? Well he’s busy carrying berries.

Still enjoy it though. I wish I had a Digimon game like it.

scutiger,

It’s closer to Ark featuring Pokemon than just Pokemon with guns. It’s a survival crafting game that adds cute animals that can work and fight for you.

It sort of feels like the best of both worlds, but from my 5 hours of play, it feels a pretty shallow. Ark has you explore the island and evade dangerous predators. It has you find hidden artifacts and fight bosses with an army of dinos. Palworld’s world is pretty but sparse (though less than the latest Pokemon game,) I don’t think I’ve encountered anything actively aggressive towards me except for weak humans, and the boss battles feel like very toned-down Souls bosses.

SurvivalMariner,

Direwolves will go for you, also I think the Vyre ones do at night. The NPCs that get a little more effective near the Ruins. I think the boss fights are scaled in terms of difficulties.

I think you need to do the bosses in dungeons to get the Ancient fragment type thing which is needed for certain things like egg incubators etc. The boss in the tower was a little challenging for me before I levelled up first.

scutiger,

I’m only about 5 hours in, and being an avid Soulslike player, I felt the first tower boss was very easy. Like playing an easy Souls boss with help from a Pal.

I’ve only seen one dungeon so far, and it was a bit too easy. I assume it’s just because it’s early in the game.

I guess I need to get further into the game to start seeing actual threats. I’m used to playing Ark and getting chased by half the wildlife at all times.

SurvivalMariner,

Ah, OK. Fair enough. You’re probably a more skillful bosser than I am. Not sure if a harder difficulty would have helped you.

scutiger,

Maybe, like I said I’m still early in the game, so I don’t know what it’s like further in. I know I’m used to dodging mechanics in general, and the boss I fought didn’t attack quickly or frequently.

I will say that bows seem overpowered, since they do pretty high damage, and most enemies seem to move slowly which makes headshots easy. I imagine with guns being a thing, enemies will have to be harder later on, otherwise the game will be a breeze.

Kiosade,

It gets harder for sure. Not hard as Elden Ring or anything, but definitely harder than what you’re seeing now.

lolrightythen,

I down voted for complaining about down votes.

SurvivalMariner,

I downvoted because you seem unable to read. Already been said:

lemm.ee/comment/8679030

Edit: Looks like you have 1 post. No moderating communities. A shining example of giving something back to Lemmy… (negativity, it seems).

lolrightythen,

Sorry for upsetting you on your post about video games

SurvivalMariner,

I’m going to completely ignore the sarcasm, and assume you’re being wholesome.

Thanks very much. I appreciate and accept your apology. :)

UnicornKitty,
@UnicornKitty@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve played it, but don’t get a lot of time during the week to dive into new games. I really like it. It’s fun and doesn’t seem focused on just catching animals.

totallynotaspy,

About 5 hours in after finding it on gamepass. Its enjoyable, mind you I've just been upgrading my base and exploring to find new pals. There is a bit of a grind as is typical with these games to unlock everything. Would I pay more than $30 for this at this time? No, but for what is there it is quite enjoyable. Either wait for it to go on sale, wait for more features, or play if with gamepass.

As another user pointed out, it feels like My Time at Portia or it's sequal My Time at SandRock

Krackalot,

It is $30 on steam. Plus 10% off. It’s actually a fairly priced game with a good hook, and plenty of hours of content. Broken and clearly a little cheap, but decent and well priced to me.

Jaysyn,
Jaysyn avatar

I don't generally care for survival games, but I've got something like 23.5 hours played in the past 3 days for Palworld.

FMT99,

I see the charm of it but the survival aspect seems a little basic to me and as a result I haven’t bought it yet. I got a bit of a “My Time At Portia” vibe. But I’d be happy to stand corrected.

My preference goes to either survival with some kind of automation or increasingly complex mechanics (eg Factorio) or those that requires actual survival and mastery of it’s systems that make building your first base rewarding (lately I found out about and have been absolutely addicted to Vintage Story, before that it was Haven and Hearth)

SurvivalMariner,

I mean there is a level of automation in terms of picking the right pals to work on your base with the different skills, either cutting trees/rocks or farming, or carrying, or producing drops (cows for milk, some others for wool). I’m not too far in, but that automating the resource gathering has meant I don’t need to worry about food, stone or wood any more, which is nice :).

slazer2au,

I am enjoying it. We haven’t hit any game breaking bugs yet but the netcode could do with a polish, playing on a server 300ms away has odd interaction.

The game gives me more Ark vibes than Pokemon, but I haven’t played any of them since the gba gen1 remakes.

knatschus,

Downvoted because of heavy downvote whining.

The game looks promising but also very unfinished. I will look into it in a year or two.

SurvivalMariner,

I raised my concerns because it was multiple into the negative and I did not want this post or sub to get buried. There is a lot of negativity from folk that haven’t played and probably don’t even realise it’s a survival game. Downvote whining is all about ones self and karma. It’s from reddit, and you can downvote my comments all you want as it doesn’t matter. I’m trying to build a small community up on Lemmy so you can go to it for gaming as well as tech. Small communities and posts on small communities get buried, then they die from lack of engagement.

What are you trying to do to benefit anything other than yourself (such as Lemmy)? Not seeing many posts, not seeing any communities you moderate…

soloner,

It’d be nice if we were only allowed to vote in posts for communities we are following. That way folks browsing from the front page can view but not vote. Keeps the voting restricted to community members who understand the goals, content, and rules, while still allowing it to be visible for non-members.

halykthered,
@halykthered@lemmy.ml avatar

I enjoy survival games. First played Minecraft, I enjoy Empyrion, put a few hours a week into Valheim. I started Conan Exiles, but found out about the slavery aspect after stumbling upon the options in the game. I thought that was distasteful, but I enjoyed the other aspects of the game.

In Palworld, can you still progress through the game without enslaving and working these creatures to death? In Pokemon, you travel around with your buddies, and you form connections with your team. From what I’m hearing about Palworld is you have minions who you exploit.

Is it an option to play the game with that companion feel of Pokemon, where my monster buddies are helping me out for the benefit of us all? Versus just using monsters for my own benefit? I want to play the game, but I’m not going to get any enjoyment out of taskmastery and buggery.

StitchIsABitch,

Honestly I think the whole “exploiting innocent creatures” thing is overexxagerated for the fun of it. Yes you can throw them around, yes you can butcher them and leave them to starve, but you don’t have to. At it’s core the only “necessary” mechanic is having the pals do work for you, which is never implied to be bad. A collectible log even explains that they seem to want to help people and do it on their own without being forced.

Personally I don’t mistreat mine as I also prefer the wholesome adventure vibe, when they get angry or depressed I take care of them and pet them, etc. And it’s not like mistreating them is an actual mechanic, there’s no “slap” or “punish” button, it’s just you not engaging with the mechanics to treat them well, if that makes sense.

It does feel slightly jarring to headshot a fluffy sheep with a musket, but is it really worse than having a lvl. 100 Charizard use Flamethrower on a lvl. 2 Caterpie, just because the violence is explicit instead of implied? Feels kind of hypocritical to me.

Dagnet,

There is something you can build that you can use to force them to work like slaves but it’s really not necessary and I never really used it. The existence of that implies that they will do ‘normal work’ willingly tho, and the game does show them having fun with each task completed.

Mikina,

I have around 16 hours played, and so far it has been pleasant. I really like the clever mix of genres that works really well together, and the game is pretty chill to play.

It still has some issues, namely AI pathfinding bugs or non-customizable controls, but other that that I didn’t really encounter any serious problems.

Also, I’ve been digging into the team behind it, to see whether it’s just a soulless cash grab by some random company, and it turned out that it’s actually a pretty wholesome story and it’s kind of a miracle that the game even exists.

PocketPair started as a three man studio, passionate about game development, that couldn’t find an investor for their previous games even though they’ve had really fleshed out prototypes, to the point where they just said “Game business sucks, we’ll make it and release it on our own terms”, and started working on games without any investor.

They couldn’t hire professionals due to budget constraints. The guy responsible for the animations was a random 20-yo guy they found on Twitter, where he was posting his gun reload animations he self-learned to do and was doing for fun, while working as a store clerk few cities over.

They had no prior game development experience, and the first senior engineer, and first member of the team who actually was a professional game developer, was someone who randomly contacted them due to liking Craftopia. But he didn’t have experience with Unity, only Unreal, so they just said mid-development “Ok, we’ll just throw away all we have so far, and we’ll switch to Unreal - if you’re willing to be a lead engineer, and will teach us Unreal from scratch as we go.”

They had no budget. They literally said "Figuring out budget is too much additional work, and we want to focus on our game. Our budget plan is “as long as our account isn’t zero, and if it reaches zero, we can always just borrow more money, so we don’t need a budget”.

For major part of the development, they had no idea you can rig models and share animations between them, and were doing everything manually for each of the model, until someone new came to the team and said “Hey, you know there’s an easier way??”

It’s a miracle this game even exists as it is, and the developer team sound like someone really passionate about what they are doing, even against all the odds.

This game is definitely not some kind of cheap cash-grab, trying to milk money by copying someone else’s IP, and they really don’t deserve all the hate they are receiving for it. But I also don’t deny that their inspiration with Pokemon is too much at some places, and I hope they will address that in the future.

There’s also one relevant quote from the article, said by the developer himself:

Although Pal World is a very interesting game, I would like to add one point: it is not at all suitable for players who prefer single-player games and want to enjoy the story, so please be aware of that.

There’s almost no story, so those people won’t enjoy it.

Fans of survival craft genres such as Minecraft and Valheim will enjoy this game."

SurvivalMariner,

I don’t usually go with new games. I tend to wait a few weeks or a month first for the hype to die down, see the reviews and wait for big bugs to be squashed, but really fancied the look of this one. Tried it, and I’m pleasantly surprised with how cohesive and smooth it is. I’m told it’s quite like Ark: Survival Evolved (which I bought but never played) but without painful taming mechanics. Gave it a spin, and getting so much fun. Looking forward to my next time playing it.

Jaysyn,
Jaysyn avatar

I have played Ark & that's a good comparison.

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