Yeah, that one is real competition - at least gameplay wise - and a wonderful example of taking inspiration from Pokemon while still making something their own. It really deserves more attention than it got.
Game Freak will learn absolutely nothing from this, except “People like Pokemon, lets crank out one every 6 months instead of yearly and make them even shittier!”
Maybe. Maybe not. Pokémon isn’t successful because it’s good. It’s successful because people want to play Pokémon. If they can have the same experience of capturing and training Pokémon in a different format and name, it may compete with them. Admittedly, PalWorld is missing a lot of the higher level Pokémon things, but I don’t think that matters to the vast majority of players, and hunting for perfect traits may make up for it.
I don’t think it’s a particularly great game, but I also don’t think Pokémon is.
no pal world is not at all a pokémon-like game. the adventure aspect is idk what to call it, the only adventure really is finding new pals for the first time. it’s kind of like ark with some inspirations from BOTW mechanics but you throw some pokemon in there
it does have a good variety of pals but honestly the only thing that feels unique is the appearances/sizes and sometimes the modifiers they have. the actual movesets don’t feel very emphasized
in my opinion the actual pal vs pal combat is pretty lackluster, it’s definitely not the focus of the game (although using slave labour is a focus of the game)
uuuuh since G5 the Pokémon plots are rehashed and banalised as heck, and there’s almost never any sensation of valuable risk or conflict to the plot. G6 literally makes the first arc of the plot “join this bunch of loser schoolers and do nothing”.
Yeah I would like a better Pokemon game, not an fps survival with monsters. The idea is that people looking for a Pokemon game probably aren’t simply looking for a collectible monster game, they want the things that are associated with Pokemon games.
For long I’ve dreamed of the heights Pokémon could reach if the mainline videogame production was handed over from a small indie company to a respectable developer with a better track record such as Camelot or CDPR.
Camelot can’t write themselves out of a paper bag. The Golden Sun games were good for their time, and had me hyped as a pre-teen, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the dialogue or story was actually good. Seriously, if you took off the portraits while characters were speaking, could you tell just by the way they talk who is who (besides Kraden, cuz that mofo likes to TALK)? Could you describe their personalities based on their dialogue, and not the character art? It’s part of why the third Golden Sun failed: it was just too generic, and they tried to stretch the little personality they could muster across 8 characters, just because the 2nd game had 8 characters, but it left them all feeling like hollow husks for the most part.
I’m not saying the games are bad, but there are definitely much better JRPG devs out there.
Interesting, I thought they were more… disposable? But now that I think about it, in ark, you had your near and dear creatures and then you had the faceless workers.
Honestly? I think they should be more disposable. You can do stuff like sell, butcher, overwork or fuse away your Pals (all of which are rather deliberate on the player’s part), but I genuinely think if there was some threat of permadeath or having them stolen by the Syndicate baddies if you get sloppy, it would give the adventure a greater sense of threat/risk. People seek out Nuzlocke rules for a reason, and currently I find the options for dropping your items and Pals on death don’t really make compelling gameplay sense (you just walk back and get them).
Setting/story-wise, Palworld supports that kind of thing so I figure it’s most likely coming as an option eventually. The game is on track for some interesting things, and as half-baked as parts might seem now, it’s already fairly fun. Definitely an addictive formula.
It’s worth waiting to see where they take it if the journey and developing those bonds with the creatures are a big part of the draw for you. I doubt you’ll get compelling turn based combat at any point, though.
So its due to sync rights. Oof. I wonder if some of the song licenses (looking at you, Experience Hendrix) are the culprit.
The Line really is an example of a painfully average game held up by its narrative, and hot damn, how well it held up. I adore some of the moments of this game, especially for their vicissitude.
The licenses referenced likely have to do with the game’s music. During the The Line’s menu screen, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” can be heard while the game’s soundtrack includes Martha and The Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run.”
The same thing happened to the first Alan Wake before they worked something out to get it back (even though it took almost a decade). Consequently, that's also one of the reasons they wrote original songs for the sequel. It's very much a gamble these days to license music for games. More or less puts it on a timeline to be removed at some point.
If you have time for some reading, here's a really great article from a few years ago that talks about licensing in video games and how complicated it can be (the first half of the article is really the only relevant part). Depending on what exactly you want to do with the music in/with the game, a developer could be looking at having to deal with more than one license. I imagine it could get expensive very easily.
Pyrocynical used Midge Ure’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” in a video covering Half-Life 2 or a mod of it, and that meant Midge needed a cut, the original writer David Bowie, his estate needed a cut, Kobalt Songs, who owns the rights for Midge’s cover needed a cut, Warner Chappal, who owns the Bowie library needed a cut, ASCAP needed a cut, PRS needed a cut…
You only get a small fraction of who owns what off SongView. It’s a removed. Pyro paid $24,000 for the sync rights. That’s the budget for like five of his videos right there.
I wish this process was easier. Contacting a label’s sync office is typically the start of the nightmare.
Perpetual sync rights licenses aren’t unheard of, but typically these require an ongoing revenue split of sales or a big up front. More often than not, limited rights are used to save scratch and because its going to be for a set period, like 30 days (for an ad campaign).
In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if Take Two opted for perpetual, and decided they won’t afford a per unit sale anymore, and pulled the game to stop paying.
So basically music rights owners are too greedy and demand so much money for a reasonable license they have publishers can’t afford it? Sounds about right.
It gets really murky and there is a question of intent but… I think it is truly elevated by how painfully average it is. That is the game that everyone was making and playing, right down to the overhead camera explosives shot with the mortars.
And what made The Line “work” is that… it pointed out how fucked up it is that this is so normalized. We had been trained, arguably indoctrinated, by so many Call of Duty style games that there was zero question about how fucked up what we were doing was.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so. Rather than understanding that “walking away” is… maybe not buying the annual, rather mid, "shoot brown people in the middle east’ simulator.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so.
What the fuck!! This is for me personally one of the best military shooters ever released. This is a fucking tragedy. If you can get it on gog or pirate it, it’s a seriously phenomenal game I can’t recommend it enough and it breaks my heart to see this. It starts out as a generic bland 3rd person mil shooter, but ends with an entirely different feeling.
“You’re a good person.”
Edit: Hendrix must be rolling in his grave to know that his anti war music in an anti war game was used to stop the anti war game from basically existing at this point in stores.
I hate to say it, but games should stop using licensed music. Or at least if it has an expiry date, which they all seem to. Every game that licenses a song becomes a ticking time bomb before it is either pulled from sale or all of the music gets patched out, even if you purchased it before then.
I don't understand why a company would even want to use the music if it means they can only sell the game for so long. Obviously, it's not the current reality, but I would outright refuse any deal that involves a limited amount of time to use material that goes into a video game, movie, any form of media except maybe live services that are constantly changing anyways (which is a separate issue).
At the very least, people should be made aware of a game's sale period, though I'm sure that's kept under NDA.
I mean the game came out in 2012. It’s not really that absurd to base ones licensing contracts for 14 years when the medium (games) generate the vast majority of their revenue in the first months.
Most digital products have an end of life. I agree that the whole digital ownership part isn’t fair, but I don’t think a 14 year selling window due to licensing is the part to be mad at.
It makes sense financially if the game is expected to have a big spike of sales initially, and after a while have very few sales, so the expected additional lifetime revenue is less than the cost difference between a temporary and perpetual license.
And if you really want it, some steam key resellers probably have some keys left. I really wanted alpha protocol since I played it so much in college, and was able to find a steam key from a reseller after sega pulled it from steam
Yeah CDPR doesn’t care about Linux support at all. They for years promised Linux support for their GOGGalaxy desktop client and then abruptly deleted the webpage that promised that feature. Their Linux support IME is some dodgy shell scripts that never work right.
CDPR has some interesting history. My understanding is that they got their start bootlegging games that couldn’t be got legally in their area, and transitioned to making games for their isolated market. GoG felt like a way to he true to their roots, distributing the old games used to bootleg legally.
Yeah GOG has an interesting legacy. For a long time it was the only place to get working games for abandoned platforms that didn’t require ages of tinkering. They’d give you a bundled copy of dosbox or some other emulator preconfigured to work with the particular game on Windows.
It’s moved so far from its roots that they’ve all but abandoned the acronym. A bit like how TLC used to stand for “The Learning Channel”
Just a reminder that the industry that is laying off thousands, is having one of the most profitable years ever. But if they think that they can make more money by firing thousands, thats exactly what theyll do.
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