Last week I as on my winter break, and mostly spent the week just gaming and relaxing. On Thursday a friend took the da off work so that we could sit down and game together from the early morning hours. We decided that we wanted to try something new. We decided that we wanted to try Palworld.
What is Palworld?
Palworld is Pokemon, but fused with modern open world survival games like Ark and Rust, and with slavery. In Palworld you don't catch these creatures to be friends with them and have them do battle for you. You catch them so they can work at your base and also do battle for you. You can even butcher them and equip them with guns to become slave soldiers. It really is something else.
All in all it takes so much from Pokemon, both in terms of creature design and general mechanics. There's a elemental weakness system basically just like Pokemon and several of the Pals look very much like Pokemon we've known for years. They even ended up getting sued by Nintendo and the lawsuit is still ongoing as far as I know. It's ironic seeing as there's games out there with more similarity to Pokemon games than this. I guess they didn't like that this game became more popular than Pokemon in such short time.
Decent Early Access jank
It's hard to say I didn't enjoy a game I put 9 hours in over the span of two days. Still, I doubt I'm going to be playing Palworld much more than that for now. While the game is fun and has a good and working concept it's also very obvious that it's still in early access. The game is currently in version 0.4, and it's taken a year to get there from 0.1 in January of last year, meaning it still has a long way to go before it's released into 1.0.
For me the game is missing a lot of quality of life features and polish before it's worth jumping back into the game for real. Things like being able to adjust my UI so that the game isn't 50% UI and 50% game. Things like exploring and not having to find unfinished low resolution terrain. things like my Pals not getting stuck in the roof of a cave.
While Palworld is enjoyable at the base it's mostly just reminded me of why I need to stop playing early access games. Why spend my time playing an unfinished and unpolished game when there's so many complete games out there?
This isn't critique against Palworld. I very well understand the concept of early access. Early access just isn't something for me. I will be returning to the game when it's fully released and finished.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
I was surprised at how much of an explosion this had.
I mean, I put it on my radar too when I saw that trailer with the creatures enslaved and using machine guns. But once it came out and I tried it, I thought: it's fun, like a meme game.
But I was surprised to see how many players it had and especially to see people dedicating 40-50 hours to it. I didn't think it was bad, but I see the fights against 'important' bosses and the animations of some attacks and interactions and it still seems more like an experiment than a game.
I have never played this game, but I have seen several gameplays and some colleagues have told me that it is very similar to one that I have played a lot and I love, The Survivalists. Palworld is visually appealing, someday I will play it.
I was never really into Pokémon but I do hear an awful lot about it and PalWorld. I remember reading something about Palworld getting sued by Nintendo or something like that though. I'll probably give this one a go once you let us know that they have worked out the issues.
What the hell is that character, bro. Hideous lol
This early access shenanigans need to stop. How can you charge the full price for an unfinished game, and the game still in early access after a year? Hopefully, it is not one of those games that remains in early access for a decade lol.
I'm not against early access in general, but I'm personally sick of playing unfinished games and then be completely tired from it once it's released with all its content and features.
It looks interesting, if it's similar to Pokemon, great, I played Pokemon a lot, Pokemon Fire Red, plus Super