The Fascinating Dichotomy of Palworld.

T world has done nothing but shock the world ever since it was first revealed back in 2021 with a trailer that starts off showing generic Nintendo adjacent action with cute creatures only for it to shift and reveal that the game has real life Firearms both being handled by and used to Target its vast catalog of monsters and when it was first revealed it made waves it felt like everyone was talking about the weird Pokémon with guns game but the waves it made back then pale in comparison to the numbers it's doing now with a staggering 19 million copies of the game sold in the first two weeks and the game swiftly earning the title of best-selling third party on Xbox we are clearly in the midst of Po World fever but for a game that was seemingly an instant hit with a giant Community forming almost instantly there is an equally as large Comm imunity voicing disdain for the project with accusations of developer greed plagiarism and laziness swiftly following any discussion of the title and honestly it's not unfounded this is the shocking Brilliance the unsurprising incompetence and the Justified controversy of Po world first dropping into po world even as someone who was decently plugged into the pre-release hype for the game I was shocked to find that it's not very much like Pokémon at all for a game that's almost exclusively referred to online as Pokemon with guns the game prompting you to start punching trees and finding the foundations of a home base makes it clear that while there is an undeniable Pokemon influence it's much closer to the Minecrafts of the gaming World more specifically this game shes a lot of DNA with art like most of its survival contemporaries the world is your oyster with the only tutorial the game offers being a simple checklist of core game mechanics that you will begin to iterate upon over over the next couple hours crafting some tools Gathering some materials establishing a place to call your home base and most importantly weakening and then capturing a pal if pal world is Pokemon with guns then the pals are your Pokemon they're your little buddies that you bring into battle with you except unlike Pokemon the pals are not exclusively used in combat with other Pals most of them bring some kind of utility outside the battlefield as well some provide passive Bon bonuses like increasing how much weight you can carry others can be picked up and used as Firearms against other Pals or a sizable number of human enemies and all of them can be dropped somewhere in your base to automate work and this is where power world really began to hook me there are four main methods of progression in this game there's the player level based around experience earned from Catching or defeating Pals which increases player stats as well as earning them some technology points the technology points are essentially a large skill treat used to unlock new toys for you to craft and play with with things sometimes as insignificant as a saddle for you to ride one of your pals and things sometimes as huge as a future machine used to condense multiple Pals into one significant unit the pals individually each have their own levels and experience to keep track of increasing their strength and occasionally learning new attacks and lastly your base also has a level over time increasing the amount of Pals that you can have working and later flat out increasing the number of bases that you are allowed to have but rather than relying on experience the base levels are instead achieved through building requirements having whatever workstations you need built inside the base which is often times locked behind technology points which are gated by player level which ties everything together in a neat little bow it creates this wonderful feedback loop of go out on a quest catch Pals level up unlock new things go back to home base and integrate whatever new Pals and items you have into into your workflow using the resources generated by your pals while you were gone and repeat and that's not even talking about the plethora of other activities that you can tackle at your own Leisure like breeding and hatching pal eggs rescuing Pals from camps belonging to these strange human enemy factions and the Dungeons and boss fights that reward you with strong Pals and rare materials to make even more complex machines and frankly I had a blast with this it's why I have such a hard time calling it just another Survival game and find it weird that so many people are framing it as if it's a rival to Pokémon when in reality the gameplay is not very similar at all it's more like if you took the world design of breath of the wild the general aesthetic inspiration of Xenoblade Chronicles the base creation resource management and automation of something like factorio the creature interactions of Monster Hunter and of course the monster collection Elemental type advantages and General Monster design of Pokémon and plopped it all into a survival sandbox P World Peace meals together a lot of design and gameplay influences to make a really interesting final product interesting because it doesn't really excel at any of the gameplay ideas presented but simply presenting all of them in one package makes for a shockingly strong experience for the first 10 or so hours unfortunately after that P world's main gameplay Loop really hits a wall like you're strongly encouraged to catch multiples of every pal with the game giving you heaps of XP for each catch until you hit a total of 10 of them and this is great in the early game as you play more you realize that everywhere on the map has the same four or five low-level Pals and eventually you will catch 10 of all the safe easy to get species meaning that eventually you have to start grinding the higher level encounters and that would be fine a higher level player tackling higher level enemies it makes perfect sense the problem is that while the enemies become progressively stronger and catch rates go progressively lower the play fire does not progress on that same scale maybe this is a skill issue but I consistently found myself getting one shot by every pal higher than like level 10 and this becomes a real problem because when you die you drop all your items and all of the pals that you had in your party and I would have been fine with either losing your items or your pals but losing both at the same time feels far too punishing you're encouraged to explore this vast open world but you accidentally aggro the wrong guy and next thing you know you're spending 20 minutes scaling Cliffs cuz he used a flying pal to get up to an area just for you to die instantly Furthermore with catching being the best way to level up and weakening Pals dramatically increasing your catch rates I find it especially strange that there is no way to tell your pals to just not kill every single guy they see there's no false swipes equivalent you can command them to stop or simply call them back into their pal Ball but you need to have perfect timing to get them just the right amount of weak or you run the risk of the pal you're trying to to catch breaking out and then when they do inevitably break out there's no one else to draw enemy fire which means you just get one shot again and you could try to mitigate this problem by crafting higher strength pow balls so you spend less time dancing around the enemies when trying to catch them but to craft higher strength balls you need metal ore and metal ore is also a whole song and dance number you see in the average po World experience you're supposed to cut down trees and gather Stone from large rocks in order order to build things in your base but pretty early on you unlock a lumber yard and a stone pit to have your pals do that for you in fact most major resources in the early game get some sort of automation equivalent enemy drops can be farmed through a ranch and Advanced Materials like palum fragments and fiber can be exchanged at a ratio with normal wooden Stone but for some reason there's no equivalent to these systems for the metal ore there are ways to automate collection from the large slabs of metal you see throughout the world but those require very specific layouts and the usage of specific Pals and the AI for inside the bases just isn't good enough for that to be a reliable option and this becomes a huge problem when almost all of the lat game items require metal and worse than that they require a lot of metal when it comes to creating an automation system like this the whole point is the feeling of progression you do a monotonous task a handful of times so you can feel a sense of accomplishment when you get a machine that does the monotonous task for you then you suffer through that machine being slow and annoying and probably not worth the effort so you can feel that same progression and accomplishment when you upgrade it later you use wood till you get stone and then you use Stone till you get iron you know the drill and not having a way to automate the collection of metal ore or at least no way to do it without relying on buggy inconsistent AI really drags the entire experience to a Hal in fact the AI in the bases as a whole is another sour note for me because so frequently they just break and stop doing anything and you can try to reassign these Critters to different tasks but they never stick permanently so frequently would I leave my base to go accomplish a task and come back hours later to discover that most of my workers were suffering in some kind of way and nothing was accomplished by them in the interim combine this with the fact that as you get deeper into the game base upgrades become far less frequent with them beginning to require upwards of three player levels in order to unlock the items you need to do one base upgrade and I just stopped feeling any sense of progression I'm not leveling up I can't catch anything my pals are either killing creatures before I can catch them or those creatures are killing me meaning that I have to spend exuberant amounts of time retracing my in-game steps and I'm spending more time collecting metal than I am doing any other activity and I just couldn't be bothered why am eye the player being stuck with the monotonous tasks and not you know the worker drones that you just spent the first chunk of the game establishing as a force to make my life easier it's a shame because I spent most of my time with power world really enjoying it and then out of nowhere any forward momentum the game once had goes completely out the [ __ ] window to artificially inflate playtime by way of a nasty grind a grind that could be more manageable if I had friends alongside me or if there was some form of narrative to follow in the meantime but in the game's current state for the lone player I really can't be bothered this game dropped for $30 and I got more than 30 hours out of it I'm cool calling it there I was going to give this game an impassioned recommendation but now that I'm on the other side I have a hard time recommending this to anyone who doesn't love the feeling of squandered potential and all of this was before I found out about the controversy yes that is correct po world has managed to find itself in hot possibly boiling water because it exists in the exact cross-section of Pokemon discourse and an overwhelmingly popular game and for the uninitiated Pokémon discourse is always something to behold po World wears its many Inspirations on its sleeve most notably its inspiration from the Pokemon series and while it's not necessarily a Pokemon clone I think the gameplay difference is more than justify drawing that Line in the Sand it's pretty obvious that poor is trying to ride off the coat Tales of Pokémon if not as a direct ripoff then definitely as a parody out of a total of 113 different pales present in pal World a good most of them feel like they are either very heavily based off of or straight up plagiarized from existing Pokemon designs and before I say anything else on this matter I would like to clarify that I am not an artist so if you're at all interested in this topic or find something I said objectionable I highly encourage you to look at more qualified takes than mine but me personally I could let this pass if po world was indeed intended as a Pokemon Parody then I could see a reality where having so many different designs that don't pass the sniff test of originality is fine but with that being said there was also pretty strong evidence of Pokemon models being reused in pal world like the 3D equivalent of art tracing and honestly I find this inexcusable there are some doubts to the legitimacy of this evidence with one of the original people to bring attention to it being more than dishonest about their findings also either a fantastic [ __ ] poster or a little off their rocker but as of right now the general consensus on the tracing allegations is that even if they're not complete model reuses they're still far too close for comfort and I agree listen whether or not these were completely Handmade by a talented artist subjectively they're still far too derivative for me to find much enjoyment in them but that might just be a me problem and on the legal end at the time of recording the Pokémon company has released an official we're looking into it so I guess we'll know for sure whether or not these are an actual problem soon enough I am not a staunch Pokemon Defender by any means and I don't necessarily want the big end coming in to give power world the cease and assist but I do think that straight up ripping off somebody else's work like that is just not cool especially so for a product being sold on actual marketplaces and there's a large body of people who are very okay with this blatant plagiarism just because the Pokemon games haven't been living up to people's expectations as of late and personally I don't love this mindset in fact I find it very disingenuous for someone to say that they are pro artist only to turn around and be okay with art theft because the artist being stolen from just so happened to work at game freak this whole stealing business could be chocked up to the inexperience of the company pocket pair has gone on record saying that this is the first time they've ever made and rigged models inh house instead of purchasing them from some outside party and that could explain why the final product looks more like poke fusions ran through mid Journey AI but they could have done that without reusing parts of the source models looking back at some of the company's older titles these ones are just as if not more Shameless in their ripping off of other more popular games but poor is their first title to reach both this level of originality and this level of success maybe this is me coping because I really like the base game and would love for the developers to not just be evil greedy corporate suits but it's entirely possible if unlikely that with their new found community and monetary gains pocket pair will now have the resources to not have to make shovelware depender to what's popular and maybe once they realize they're out of this hole they can make some big sweeping changes like remaking all of the PO models per chance because I do feel like deep down despite all of its issues po World clearly has the sauce it has potential but it's being bogged down by the obvious reuse of Pokémon models a graphical facelift to change the designs into one's more fitting of the world around the pals while also doing away with the plagiarized material would fix this problem and while that may be a big ask I don't think it's an impossible one there have been games with pretty radical transformations from betas before and pal world is an early access title so I pray for a timeline where I can have my cake and eat it too a cool game and no art being repurposed so where does all this leave me with pal World personally I still really like it and that's why it's so hard for me to say that you should probably stay away from this one until some important changes occur the Ripoff designs unfulfilling endgame and the overall unfinished nature of of the product leave a lot to be desired but optimistically that's nothing that can't be changed over time this was released first and foremost as an early access title and as it stands right now it's not a half bad experience especially when you consider that this is the first game of this scope for the studio behind it obviously the plagiarism needs to be addressed in some form going forward there's a growing community of artists that resent this game like no man's business and if pocket pair can't find a way to make them happy then I predict that this game will quickly Fall Into Obscurity but the core gameplay has so much promis that I can't help but root for it to get a proper meaningful release release that's fine assuming this game isn't just a flash in the pan Which let's be honest it very well might be after a decent chunk of bug fixes model Replacements and content updates I could easily see this being one of the finest in the genre the battle will be getting to that point plus it's a one-time purchase with no signs of a gotta pole system or a battle pass or any kind of paid expansion and while the bar May literally be on the floor I am appreciative of that I can only hope going forward that this game can recover its reputation and make an effort to write the wrongs that it's done by the art community because after all artists are the backbone of any online space no joke a pretty good limus test for any fandom staying power is found in the amount of fan art being generated for it and personally well I haven't seen any fan art for po world is this a for boing sign of things to come we'll just have to wait and see see [Music] y up to the sun okay soon we will see living the dreams of our [Music] gener that's right

Channel: RVRocks

Views: 1,251

Keywords: palworld, palworld farming, palworld poachers, palworld captivating adventure, palworld release date, palworld pal breeding, palworld mysterious creatures, palworld intense battles, palworld pal, palworld pal commerce, palworld food shortages, palworld trailer, palworld survival, palworld pal bonds, palworld video game, palworld perilous world, palworld immersive soundtrack, zelda tears of the kingdom, indiana jones and the dial of destiny, world of warcraft

Id: 7AW7ekzODWM

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2024