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The brand-new indie game Palworld has taken the gaming world by surprise, with an overwhelming reception from different sources, and in just 4 days since its release in early-access, the game has sold over 6 million copies.

Palworld has been in development since 2021 by Pocket Pair. The game focuses in a survival environment similar to that of ARK, with the option to play it co-op online, but with the twist of the game having creatures called "Pals" that the player can catch and battle, similar to that of Pokemon, and once caught they can even aid the player in all kinds of tasks. These Pals come in a variety of forms, with over 100 creatures, and the player can become involved in the fights between the creatures, as well as fight off other people, or one of several antagonist factions found in the game. The fights can be done with all kinds of weapons, ranging from melee weapons to even guns, and this can also be used against the creatures, or to aid the creatures in battle.

In the 4 days since the game's launch January 19th, 2024, the game's hasn't only sold surprisingly well with its 6 million copies, but it has also achieved the record of having the 2nd All-Time Peak concurrent players at the same time for a paid game with a number of 1,864,421 players being the all time peak registered as of today. PUBG still holds the #1 record on Steam (when it was still paid), which retains the record with around 3.2 million as the all time peak concurrent players online.

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Source
Steam's Most Played
Palworld on Steam

 

[yoyoyo69]

i dont think any pokemon fan dreamed of owning weapons and shooting pokemons with pistols rockets and machine guns to catch them lol, i must be very blind to the request of pokemon fans to do that lol.

Ok, thanks for your input, I guess...lol?

I'm curious why you focused entirely on guns, but omitted large world, good frame rate, human "pals", good frame rates, coop, the host of other features not present in Pokémon?

 

[Xzi]

I know it isn't as purposely jarring, but if they instead (or also), had the humans use powers, it would feel more coherent.

Guns somewhat make sense with the direction they seem to be taking the story in. Humans that have been cast out to this land need whatever advantage they can get just to avoid being eaten or having meteors summoned down on them. Far as I can tell, there's only one friendly town in the game right now, and it's nothing but a small group of rusted-out shacks with a single armed security guard out front. Good visual storytelling there.

TBH there are much more jarring tonal shifts than even guns. The "black marketeer" guy always has a huge creepy smile, and I once found him in a cave surrounded by roughly twenty nooses and guillotines. If the devs wanted to, they could absolutely make the player character out to be the bad guy in all this, but they're also positioned to be a reasonable middle ground between the "Syndicate" and "Free Pal Alliance" hardliners.

 

[Jaxom]

I remember trying their previous game on my Series X and found it relatively relaxing.
Palworld was so heavily inspired (in term of designs) from Pokémon that I was a little reluctant, but then switched on the "heh, why not?" side yesterday.

Well... I'm enjoying it so far, I clearly recognize the inspirations from time to time (after more than 20 years playing Pokémon, I must say that I didn't expect that a mix Goodra/Venusaur would be so cute, it's a shame I was underleveled when I found it, but as soon as possible, it will join the team), the survival aspect isn't too harsh (I play in Normal mode, considering the game is still in early access, no need to put extra frustration to the mix) and I must admit I got more caught up in Palworld's gameplay cycle than for the last DLC of Pokémon Scarlet.

Can't wait to explore more of what the game has to offer and maybe get a few friends to join the adventure.

 

[MHKN]

kill me but from the perspective of someone who makes art for money and even happened to design a bunch of characters, the designs are so fucking uninspired, somehow surpasses the blandness of gen1 pokemon


like. i look at these and i cannot say much besides that some of them look like one of those knockoff monsters you would see on a chinese bootleg pokemon merch.
some look too similar to actual pokemon

and the idea of carrying guns is just so much edgy to me i feel like i'm seeing a work of some 13 year old from newgrounds who's so scary and evil and gangsta

overall, nothing about this game appeals to me, and the fact devs are having a big romance with AI apparently, this only makes me err on the "no thanks" side

last time i played a game that would fall under the "pokemon knockoff" umbrella and was actually entertaining was yo-kai watch lol

 

[tabzer]

kill me but from the perspective of someone who makes art for money and even happened to design a bunch of characters, the designs are so fucking uninspired, somehow surpasses the blandness of gen1 pokemon


like. i look at these and i cannot say much besides that some of them look like one of those knockoff monsters you would see on a chinese bootleg pokemon merch.
some look too similar to actual pokemon

and the idea of carrying guns is just so much edgy to me i feel like i'm seeing a work of some 13 year old from newgrounds who's so scary and evil and gangsta

overall, nothing about this game appeals to me, and the fact devs are having a big romance with AI apparently, this only makes me err on the "no thanks" side

last time i played a game that would fall under the "pokemon knockoff" umbrella and was actually entertaining was yo-kai watch lol

When you say "kill me" what do you actually mean? I'm tempted to destroy you.

 

[GengarsGhostlyGiggles]

kill me but from the perspective of someone who makes art for money and even happened to design a bunch of characters, the designs are so fucking uninspired, somehow surpasses the blandness of gen1 pokemon


like. i look at these and i cannot say much besides that some of them look like one of those knockoff monsters you would see on a chinese bootleg pokemon merch.
some look too similar to actual pokemon

and the idea of carrying guns is just so much edgy to me i feel like i'm seeing a work of some 13 year old from newgrounds who's so scary and evil and gangsta

overall, nothing about this game appeals to me, and the fact devs are having a big romance with AI apparently, this only makes me err on the "no thanks" side

last time i played a game that would fall under the "pokemon knockoff" umbrella and was actually entertaining was yo-kai watch lol

your loss then.
the game is extremely fun.

Also AI is future, all the big videogame engines are heavily implementing AI workflows with Nvidia's support. Gamejams are already promoting AI 3d asset generations.

Also Palworld with the unreal engine vr mod is MIND BLOWINGLY AWESOME!

 

[MHKN]

your loss then.
the game is extremely fun.

Also AI is future, all the big videogame engines are heavily implementing AI workflows with Nvidia's support. Gamejams are already promoting AI 3d asset generations.

Also Palworld with the unreal engine vr mod is MIND BLOWINGLY AWESOME!

imagine telling a creative anything positive about LLMs/AI that literally feed off of artists' work without their consent or compensation

you, my guy, are the walking definition of the r-word

 

[GengarsGhostlyGiggles]

imagine telling a creative anything positive about LLMs/AI that literally feed off of artists' work without their consent or compensation

you, my guy, are the walking definition of the r-word

I understand you feel threatened and are lashing out by insulting me.
However I didn't insult you, I was just letting you know that its the future. Most trees and worlds in large videogames were created by AI with light human tuning for a while now.
Also Adobe's Art AI was literally trained on the data they owned, and most will be in the future.
AI is not going away, and it's only increasingly being used for voice, art, 3d models, and even auto npc generation (nvidia) now.

 

[Guacaholey]

This feels like an April Fools joke.

It's not. Palworld is insanely fun. It's like Ark but with Pokémon-like creatures instead of dinosaurs.

 

[ShadowOne333]

AI is not going away, and it's only increasingly being used for voice, art, 3d models, and even auto npc generation (nvidia) now.

Amen to that

 

[pedro702]

Ok, thanks for your input, I guess...lol?

I'm curious why you focused entirely on guns, but omitted large world, good frame rate, human "pals", good frame rates, coop, the host of other features not present in Pokémon?

oh yeah becuase that game runs on the switch right? oh damn i forgot it runs on pc and xbox that is like 3x more powerful...

if anyone makes a game that runs like that on the nintendo hardware let me know...

Also this is a survival game first, this is basically ark evolved and replace dinosaurs with pokemon knock offs, there is no story no anything, all you do is survive with no ending in sight or objectives per say, no tournament, no elite to defeat or towns to unlock, its a survival game that happens to have pokemon, if this game had animals like a mix of a bear tiger instead of pokemon it would have been just another survival game and little to no people would have been interested.

 

[Daggot]

Its Ark but it's actually good and not owned by a company that is the equivalent of a longrunning embezzling scam. It's exactly what it needs to be, its fun! People are just having trouble realizing that in the end no matter how they feel thats all this dev had to focus on to find success.

 

[yoyoyo69]

oh yeah becuase that game runs on the switch right? oh damn i forgot it runs on pc and xbox that is like 3x more powerful...

if anyone makes a game that runs like that on the nintendo hardware let me know...

Also this is a survival game first, this is basically ark evolved and replace dinosaurs with pokemon knock offs, there is no story no anything, all you do is survive with no ending in sight or objectives per say, no tournament, no elite to defeat or towns to unlock, its a survival game that happens to have pokemon, if this game had animals like a mix of a bear tiger instead of pokemon it would have been just another survival game and little to no people would have been interested.

Wow kid, relax, lol

Do you even have a Switch, have you played or seen any games? There are many games better than this. Lol

You're clearly the desperate person crying to Nintendo and any Pokémon company which will listen, hahaha lol (fitting with your apparent requirements, assume lol translate ls to "over"/"stop"?)

 

[Skelletonike]

Bought it yesterday but I'm somewhat disappointed with the game as is, given that it's early access it's normal.
It should have a pause function in offline mode, like it happens in Valheim, I didn't like that we just randomly start the game without any intro or explanation either, even though the NPC's mention that we drifted to the island.

 

[pedro702]

Wow kid, relax, lol

Do you even have a Switch, have you played or seen any games? There are many games better than this. Lol

You're clearly the desperate person crying to Nintendo and any Pokémon company which will listen, hahaha lol (fitting with your apparent requirements, assume lol translate ls to "over"/"stop"?)

i play my switch a lot lol and im not a kid.
just stating the obvious differences between the performance you asked for and the hardware pokemon is limited to be released in.

There arent any switch games that run at that resolution and framerate that have open worlds in full 3d... i know im a switch collector so yeah sadly the switch cant make a 60 fps 1080/4k open world game with lots of npcs roaming around.
Sure there are better games but not better on those specifications you asked for...

 

[KingVamp]

Guns somewhat make sense with the direction they seem to be taking the story in. Humans that have been cast out to this land need whatever advantage they can get just to avoid being eaten or having meteors summoned down on them. Far as I can tell, there's only one friendly town in the game right now, and it's nothing but a small group of rusted-out shacks with a single armed security guard out front. Good visual storytelling there.

Well, to be fair, we would probably be pretty use to guns in Pokemon, if they stuck with it. That said, it probably still wouldn't be a gameplay mechanic of people shooting Pokemon, even if guns stuck around.

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[yoyoyo69]

i play my switch a lot lol and im not a kid.
just stating the obvious differences between the performance you asked for and the hardware pokemon is limited to be released in.

There arent any switch games that run at that resolution and framerate that have open worlds in full 3d... i know im a switch collector so yeah sadly the switch cant make a 60 fps 1080/4k open world game with lots of npcs roaming around.
Sure there are better games but not better on those specifications you asked for...

I'm not sure if you're intentionally making things up, in an attempt to defend your mistake? You're the one who went off on a tangent about performance?

Lol, kid

 

[pedro702]

I'm not sure if you're intentionally making things up, in an attempt to defend your mistake? You're the one who went off on a tangent about performance?

Lol, kid

im 33 ... also i made no mistake, all i said is the limitations of the hardware compared to the hardware palworld runs on...

 

[yoyoyo69]

im 33 ... also i made no mistake, all i said is the limitations of the hardware compared to the hardware palworld runs on...

You were mistaken, once again. You're the person who brought the switch hardware into this. Now your trying to swing around, again, that the Switch hardware is different to pc/Xbox hardware, it is.

The Switch is 720p, surprised you didn't know this. You keep abandoning your point to argue from another angle. You haven't taken on board a single thing. Once again, there are much more demanding games on the Switch already. Wasting my breath, lol

 

[Ondrashek06]

games don't need constant agenda, propaganda

This part is incredibly important. It's sometimes very obvious that a game is used to push an agenda. It's like they completely forgot that games are meant to be a fun way to pass time while playing in a virtual world that has no connection to the real one.