1y ago

Palworld’s success is partially born from Pokémon fans’ discontent

www.polygon.com

Palworld is an alternate take on Pokémon at a time when the colossal franchise feels stagnant and slow

18 comments

I don't thinks so. It popular because "pokemon with guns" became a viral meme which sucks.
A a discontent pokemon fan myself I would love someone to make a pokemon clone since Game Freak is not really interested in doing good pokemon games anymore. But "Ark Survival Evolved with knockoff pokemon skins instead of dinosaurs" is not what I want
- Pokémon with guns wouldn't have gotten millions of sales on its own. When the trailers came out people were laughing but they weren't exactly eager to play.
  Given the persistent popularity of survival crafting games, I think "Ark with knockoff pokemon" is exactly what people wanted. After all, even before this, Pixelmon was one of the most popular Minecraft mods.
  
  Pokémon with guns wouldn't have gotten millions of sales on its own
  The day before sold millions (but this one was refunded by millions too) and everybody and their mom knew it was a scam since it was announced like 2 or 3 years ago. Internet is weird, if something becomes viral it will sell, the quality does not matter, people just wants to be in
- Off the top of my head, there's Temtem and Cassette Beasts that try to mimic the formula more closely, and then there are a bunch of "Pokemon but " takes on the formula that you can find with a quick Google. This is "Pokemon but . Last I heard, Ark didn't let you assign dinosaurs to a factory or have some of the more RPG systems like boss fights, but quite frankly, I found Ark so obtuse that I didn't play for long.
  
  The problem with TemTem is that it's an always online game, if the servers are turned off you won't be able to play, not even the single player campaign so it's a hard pass.
  And the art style of both games are not my cup of tea, the do a disservice selling me the game.
  
  Cassette Beasts was the true goty last year!
No, it's success is because it's extremely addicting. Especially for people with ADHD because there's so many small and easily achieveable dopamine hits that's easy to get lost for hours.
This take reminds me of how disappointed I was when I got Pokémon Violet, excited to see what pokémon would be like in open world, and then I realized there was nothing to do in between towns and bosses. Overall, it felt less interesting than older games where you needed to solve puzzles and mazes to progress. It's not even like there is much of an incentive to do things in your own order because every challenge has fixed levels. You could play multiplayer but there was nothing to do in multiplayer but to roam around. Due to the short draw distance and low frame rates it wasn't even like admiring the creatures roaming around felt so impressive.
The real time catching mechanics in Arceus were pretty fun, I liked the stealth elements, but without them SV felt like it was only going through the motions of having an open world, without understanding how to make use of it.
- arceus (and SV) wouldbe been way better if they learned to design compelling points of interest in their open world and not do amateur work that looks like auto generated landscape
- The best thing to do in pokemon violet is to make the jump over the cliffs when you're level 15 and can face level 30 pokemon on top of the cliffs in the first zone.
I'd be incredibly happy if that were true, but it isn't. We've had proper Pokemon alternatives since before Pokemon even existed and they haven't slowed that shitty franchise one bit. Megaten is still niche, Digimon is still niche, cassette beasts (the actual goty) has an even smaller audience than those games, if this was major discontent with Pokemon cassette beasts at least would be in a much better place (since it literally released last year, perfect to take advantage of Pokemon's unending failures). Gotta nip that unwarranted optimism in the bud, gamefreak sucks and will never improve, their fans suck and will never improve.

18 comments