I doubt that’s got much to do with anything. Palworld is a pretty standard survival early access thing whose only distinguishing feature is that they’ve somehow evaded Nintendo’s lawyers until after the release window.
Maybe they sent the cease and desist to the wrong address, like there’s an 87 year old Japanese woman wondering what this strange letter is she received and what she’s done wrong.
This fuck up is entirely of Rocksteady’s own making. It might review amazing, but gamers have utterly soured on live service bullshit. The Arkham games were gamer’s games. They can’t just fob this off on us like they can with CoD or FIFA.
“But, we chased all the trends, even if they were incongruous with the property! Why don’t people want our game Uncle Phil? Oh well, time to go bury it, maybe we can get a tax write off for this like the Batgirl movie.”
Alternatively: “We’ve changed nothing after all the negative feedback, and we’re all out of ideas.”
You let companies review your game when you want fans outside your bubble to hear how good your game is. You don’t let companies review your game when you don’t want fans inside your bubble to fund out how bad your game is.
I saw shroud playing it on twitch at an event they brought him to the other day. It gave crackdown vibes but with DC character jumping around. Just fly here beat up random dudes, repeat endlessly
It’s Rocksteady, so it’ll be higher than 40s. Heck, it’s almost impossible to get a score lower than 40 on metacritic…
Mid 60s I’m guessing, perhaps as high as 69 if reviewers are feeling generous. The kind of score which would be absolutely fine if it were a cheap and cheerful B-game made by a scrappy team of underfunded devs, but which is an absolute embarrassment when applied to a multi million dollar tentpole. The kind of score that implies ‘meh’.
Could be right… though it went from me wanting to get this around launch day to… let’s hope it’s on GamePass. My backlog of games also helps me to wait on this one.
I’ve read somewhere else a couple of days ago that the official explanation is that without the public servers being live, reviewers would not get the full experience.
Not defending WB (I’m not interested in that game at all), just giving context.
Unless they’re having trouble getting them working, which isn’t encouraging for launch.
They at least have some working, they flew a bunch of streamers to LA for an event and had them stream the game a few weeks back.
Looked like a crackdown-ish game with DC character running around. Think like the Spider-Man games of the last few years but without the beloved characters
Reviewers getting copies a week before launch are generally netting like 40-50 hours of game time in a short timeframe. Combine that with the fact that it’d be more like hundreds of reviewers and you might actually have a decently active community.
I have seen it happen before when review outlets don’t get copies, but the game still turns out awesome. I think it happened for Doom Eternal.
It feels pointless to play devil’s advocate here though, since one way or another, I’m basically sure it’s going to be terrible. I just don’t like consigning internet opinion based on anything other than gameplay and actual reviews.
You are referring to Doom 2016 actually. While that turn out decent, one of their key arguments was due to it being online focused. We all know Doom 2016 had rather generic multiplayer.
With that said, it feels silly not to have issues when publishers refuse to send out review keys. Its a huge red flag for a game, this doesn't mean it will be bad but its a trend we shouldn't be happy about. Its only done to help preserve preorder numbers.
I looked up a video showing some model proportion comparisons. Yeah they do look to be pretty similar, but I guess it just comes down to: Where do you draw the line between copyright infringement and fair use? Like obviously palette swapping a squirtle to be red and making him a fire type is probably illegal? But if you take the squirtle model, change him to be all fuzzy, with a spiky shell, different eyes, etc to the point where the model meshing is no longer the same… is that really infringement?
I don’t know myself, and will leave it up to TPC to figure it out, but it doesn’t really bother me one bit either way.
I mean, the problematic part here is that they take the model in the first place, or at least that all signs point to that being the case. Sure, you can coldsteel the hell out of an existing character, but if you’re using an asset you didn’t develop and didn’t license to make a product that you then sell for money, no matter how different the end result looks from the original, that is absolutely infringement. It’s infringement that might have gone unnoticed had the models been more sufficiently edited, but at the end of the day it’s the theft of someone else’s labor.
I don’t know if that’s what happened here, but when the industry professionals say it’s hard to get model proportions that close even moving the same asset into a different engine, and the whole roster is uncannily similar? If it looks like a duck…
That’s interesting, but it’s ultimately not up to the artists.
The creators lawyers felt comfortable that they are in the clear. I don’t think that will stop Nintendo from burying them in litigation but I’d say if the lawyers are willing to say that then the assets are likely created in house.
The idea that the assets were stolen was the comment I replied to.
After 4 decades of active video game play, the last year or so has been very empty for me.
Nothing seemed to be satisfying, nothing captured my attention for long.
Sure I got my Elden Ring character ready for the DLC, but not with enthusiasm.
Sure I made it to diamond in Duel Masters finally, but it brought me no joy.
I bought Palworld last night on a whim and it has been 15 hours and the only time I have stopped was to take care of basic needs.
I am engaged, excited, and enthusiastic to game for the first time in a very, very long time. And the last time I liked a game this much it was Elden Ring at launch and I literally did nothing for 3 months than eat, sleep, work and Elden Ring.
I feel that Palworld is heading in the same direction.
Is there jank? Sure, but nothing that has broken my enjoyment yet.
I just cannot go past the bootleg aspect of everything they take inspiration from copied straight from other games. It just look like a soulless AI-generated game to me.
But sure it didn’t sell for nothing, the game is surely enjoyable and I didn’t mean to take that from you in my (somewhat caustic) comment.
Right? I see people saying "oh but the violence! the slavery!" as if it wasn't a collective act of childhood goodwill that prevented such associations being made to Pokémon. They talk a lot about friendship, but it's a friendship built on beating up creatures in the wild, which then obey and fight for you unquestioningly. Even some which are human-like and stated to be as intelligent as humans.
I consider myself a Pokémon fan and I defended them often, but it's a concept that gets a little iffy if you think about it for more than a minute.
Sounds like any RPG to me. Except that your party consists of the same creatures that you’re fighting. In that sense it’s maybe more egalitarian than RPGs featuring classical enemy races like orcs or goblins.
In Pokémon the concept of evil comes in the Form of Team Rocket and other shady exploitative organisations. Interestingly Palworld also has a counterpart organisation called Syndicates. But I still don’t know what their crime really is since you’re really doing the same thing of fighting and catching Pals. Nevertheless you have to treat the creatures in your party right, if you want to make progress in the game.
Like any RPG? Nah. C'mon, in most RPGs the characters are brought together by the story. Even the occasional antagonist who is fought and then allied with has a whole discussion where they are convinced of the merits of the protagonists. I could grant that in the Pokémon anime fairly often the creatures are convinced or decide to come along willingly, but in the games that hardly ever happens.
How do you reconcile the idea that the creatures want to come along with the active resistence of fighting them and having them break your pokéballs repeatedly?
Of course if you take the story by its word they'll say that trainers are good and friendly and only these criminal teams really are evil. And for fun I indulge that fantasy while I'm playing it, that these are martial artists pets that just love fighting so much and that pokéballs must be super comfy inside. But if you take a moment to compare what is happening you'll see that it isn't that different from what Palworld is doing.
Okay not like any RPG. It’s a special kind of RPG. And as a game it has many elements that make video game RPGs so addictive.
I agree with you on the ethics. Maybe Palworld in that sense is more honest than Pokémon. In the Pokémon anime however I always had the impression that they try to depict Pokémon as having humanlike character tendencies, e.g. some liking to get into fights and others just working as nurses in the Pokémon center…
I see people saying “oh but the violence! the slavery!” as if it wasn’t a collective act of childhood goodwill that prevented such associations being made to Pokémon.
I think the issue with the slavery (at least for me) is that there is human slavery that has exactly zero consequence. It doesn’t have much to do with the Pals themselves
I heard the game warns you against it and there are police forces that chase you if you commit crimes against humans. Though I don't know if that happens if you capture a human specifically.
Still, distasteful but I wouldn't see it much differently than, say, killing innocent bystanders in Hitman. The game allows you to do it but it doesn't encourage you to do it. It just doesn't block it either. It's not something I do or I'd approve of, but considering it's a more edgy version of the genre I can understand the game not making humans immune to the device that traps and essentially brainwashes living beings. Because, why would they be?
From what I have read about, the only thing that happens when you capture a human is that it tells you it is inhumane and frowned upon. I have not seen anything mentioning actual consequences beyond that, but it may be that people have not encountered them. If that is the case, the consequences might as well not be there.
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