“Palworld is now one of only seven games that have seen over 1 million concurrent players on Steam – the others include: PUBG (3.2 mil), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.8 mil), Counter-Strike 2 (1.4 mil), Lost Ark (1.3 mil), Dota 2 (1.2 mil), and Cyberpunk 2077 (1 mil).”
This game will be dead in 6 months.
As is the case for most streamer-bait games like this. Know anybody who’s still playing Only Up?
Yeah this is one of those games you play for what it is now because chances are it’s about as finished as it will ever be.
checking out the other games of the dev on steam pretty much concludes just that
Starfield was dead on arrival and was a 80 dollar game. I have a lot of fun but i won’t play the game in a month and probably come back when it’s don or they add something. Why does every game has to be a forever game? Imagine playing super mario on the nintendo and your annoying friend comes over to tell you: you know that you will only play this game for 600 hours and then it’s boring?
On the one hand it’s kind of disgusting, but it’s also heartening: this is a studio that had done nothing but asset flips. Their artists didn’t even know what a rig was. They were completely out of their depth.
And while the game is the most cynical thing I’ve ever seen, its creature designs are blatant mash-ups of Pokemon, and its media hype is absolutely bewildering and somewhat suspicious… but by all accounts it’s decently good fun and looks decent visually too.
So, a studio with no idea what they were doing managed to poop out a moderately good game and smash it out of the park in terms of success.
That should be heartening. That should say “maybe I can do it too” to all the hopeful indie devs out there. That should be a massive endorsement of the tooling that the industry has developed, that a completely unqualified group of guys can make a fun and successful online multiplayer action game.
This game gives me weird vibes. The studio already had 2 other games in early access before this one, both of which are seemingly abandoned or at a standstill development wise. The gameplay itself just kind of looks like a generic base building game but with Pokémon and guns. Most of the steam reviews are just making jokes about the knockoff elements, guns, animal cruelty, etc.
I honestly can’t tell if this game is actually good or if it’s just a brief trend.
I’ve played it on PC Game Pass, and IMO, it’s mostly shock and hype. After a short while, it becomes the same thing over and over. Capture or kill a lot of pals to level up and improve your strength. Then do it again on new pals for more strength. The base stuff changes a little, but it’s still basically the same.
This feels like new world and lost ark all over again. Huge hype while twitch bounties are up and then the player base will tank. Hopefully I’m wrong since it’s always nice to see small dev companies win.
Don’t worry, the devs have already won if the sales numbers are any indication.
As far as winning the larger gaming community’s opinion, I think that will depend on how they handle updates and bug fixes for the game going forwards. As an example, the dedicated servers have a massive glitch that causes you to lose all your progress and it’s hard to tell what causes it. Personally, how they respond to that bug (or bugs of similar magnitude) is my litmus test for whether this game will stand the test of time or not.
When you boil down any game like that, they don’t sound very fun. It’s about the experience as a whole.
I guess I should put it in perspective by saying I like Clicker (incremental) games. The good ones, anyhow. Yeah, every game is a loop of the same general thing. It’s how to you iterate on that thing as the player progresses that makes it good or bad. There isn’t enough change here as the level goes up.
I see 2 games, Overdungeon (which seems finished or at least out of EA with positive review scores) and Craftopia which is still receiving updates and was also pretty well reviewed until people started giving it bad ones when palworld released.
I haven’t tried it yet but it seems like a more polished Ark and that game is a massive hit despite the developers being just outright terrible.
I don’t know, for some reason I find the addition of guns to this type of game upsetting. But I also want to try it… I don’t know.
i played for about 3 hours, and afaik you don’t have to make/use the guns. pals don’t even have death animations they just get anime KO swirly eyes and you get whatever their drops are in your inventory, so you could even easily convince yourself youre just knocking them out like in Pokemon.
IMO the only reason not to buy it is the lack of depth beyond being a base-building survival game. I thought there would be some big story and grand questline, but nope. youre just dropped in the world and guided through base building and pal catching.
I’m at the spear and bow stage and it barely feels like weapons. When you “kill” a pal, they just get X.X eyes and fall over. We’ll see how it feels when the butchering starts.