I just want to say that as somebody who never played Ark, the discourse on this game is infuriating. Game reviews suck now because they’re all predicated on other games: “this game is like Blasphemy 2 meets Stardew Valley,” well that’s great unless you haven’t played either Stardew or Blasphemy.

When did we forget that good journalism defines all terms before using them? When did we start accepting this lazy non-commentary?

To me, and anyone else who has never played Ark, all we know is that Palworld apparently isn’t Pokemon-like but is some nebulous something else instead. It’s so frustrating.

What’s the LGBT thing?

Honestly I’ve watched some gameplay and it looks like a mix of pre-made and original assets which isn’t ideal, and given the history of the dev team I’m not optimistic about it going much further, but what’s there looks like fun, not good, but fun. And buggy, but so was the most recent Pokemon game.

The crypto shit gives me pause though, and if they’re TERFs I’m definitely going to pass on it.

Plagiarism doesn’t mean copyrighted. Plagiarism is a social and professional norm/ethic.

People shitting on the game are so much more annoying than people praising it. Obviously it’s not going to kill pokemon, no shit. It’s still a fun game. The progression is solid, and its fun collecting cute creatures. The whole reason it blew up is because it was surprising that what was thought to be a meme game released with the amount of quality and depth it has.

I literally don’t get what the fucking big deal about this game is.

I’m also not too impressed by its childish schlocky shock humor and implications of animal cruelty. Nope, animal cruelty is not fun or cute in a game, and glorifying it or acting like it’s hilarious is just fucking gross.

It’s not like there’s an engaging story where you’re role-playing a character, like say, Baldur’s Gate 3.

No, it just encourages asshats to be terrible asshats.

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Also, not only are the devs crypto shills, according to them, they don’t actually know what the fuck they’re doing and haven’t used version control at all. I mean, props to them for making it this far without knowing what the fuck they’re doing, but it doesn’t inspire confidence about the future of the game if they’re in the process of learning how to make it. Further, the whole bailing on their previous game before it was done (which now has MIXED overall reviews on Steam), I’m left to assume this is possibly a cash-grab.

I mean, this is supposedly an indie studio, but if they’re so indie, where the fuck did all the money to make this shit come from, and I have a very hard time believing the assets are all made by one or two artists. It’s a gargantuan effort, and it’s pretty clear that while they’ve cribbed designs, they haven’t straight copied them. They have just enough wiggle room to deny it.

Part of the reasons I have a hard time believing that about the art is because the art styles between Legend of Zelda (cough Craftopia) and Pokemon (cough Palworld) are wildly different, but somehow in both cases, they used deeply similar styles. It’s just to clean of a quality rip-off to be from an actual “indie” company. I just don’t buy it, something is fucking fishy, but I can’t put my finger on it.

Finally, if the leaks from Sony’s Insomniac Games are any indicator… The entire video game industry is hanging on by mere threads and is about to fucking explode financially.

It’s very interesting this rip-off company showed up right when the whole market is about to tumble. I wonder if they’ve got some serious money behind them hoping to swoop in and pick up the pieces of the broken industry? I don’t know, I just know it all seems sketchy and I’m gonna wait quite a while before I consider giving that company any money.