Yeah, the novelty is basically that it’s Pokemon with the rose-tinted glasses off. But I’d argue that’s not really what carries it and neither is gameplay that works surprisingly well for something they glued together from Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, and any survival action game.
What carries it is that Pocketpair have kept improving the game despite legal interference and without succumbing to the temptation of charging more money.
There’s no pre-launch DLC. There’s no out-of-early-access price hike. The 1.0 release had so much new stuff in it that it could’ve been sold as an expansion pack in the pre-DLC days and they just pushed it as a free update because they felt the game wasn’t done yet. Even the crossover content is free.
This is a game where the developer actually seems to care about delivering a good product. And I think you can feel it in the quality of the game.
Yeah, it would still be a great game in a universe where Pokemon doesn’t exist. The devs are very open about using established game mechanics, and those are established for a reason.
The closest game to Palworld is probably Ark, being another open-world creature collector, survival crafter combination. However, on top of all the significant aesthetic and QOL changes, Palworld still has a much deeper colony management and creature interaction and optimization angle to still make it quite unique mechanically.
Yeah, the novelty is basically that it’s Pokemon with the rose-tinted glasses off. But I’d argue that’s not really what carries it and neither is gameplay that works surprisingly well for something they glued together from Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, and any survival action game.
What carries it is that Pocketpair have kept improving the game despite legal interference and without succumbing to the temptation of charging more money.
There’s no pre-launch DLC. There’s no out-of-early-access price hike. The 1.0 release had so much new stuff in it that it could’ve been sold as an expansion pack in the pre-DLC days and they just pushed it as a free update because they felt the game wasn’t done yet. Even the crossover content is free.
This is a game where the developer actually seems to care about delivering a good product. And I think you can feel it in the quality of the game.
Yeah, it would still be a great game in a universe where Pokemon doesn’t exist. The devs are very open about using established game mechanics, and those are established for a reason.
The closest game to Palworld is probably Ark, being another open-world creature collector, survival crafter combination. However, on top of all the significant aesthetic and QOL changes, Palworld still has a much deeper colony management and creature interaction and optimization angle to still make it quite unique mechanically.