Palworld isn’t slowing down, hits 19 million players across Steam and Xbox

It's silly fun. No idea if it'll last, but I'm enjoying it.

Happiness is a dead lamball rolling down a cliff

All this time and I still feel horrid farming Lamballs. Why on earth is the fodder creature so damn cute?
- I still avoid killing them. :(
Their little death squeals fuel me
Have you seen the most recent Let's Game It Out?

Gotta be honest, rockpapershotgun’s coverage of this game hasn’t gotten me very interested in this being anything other than a hyped flash in the pan but we’ll see

I had no intention of getting it after finding out it's less like Pokemon with guns and more like Rust with Pokemon, but a friend got it for me a few days ago.
I am already bored. I never got into shit like Rust or Ark before, either. The loop is the same, except with the addition of capturing critters to use as laborers in your base or to help in combat; not the sole means of combat and relying on them sucks because you don't command them like you do in Pokemon but like you would in Elder Scrolls with AI about as smart. You level up to learn new tech that ultimately just helps you do higher level areas or lower level areas faster.
I think with most players it is just going to be forgotten in a few months; but the people who really like Rust and Ark and things like that, will keep Palworld going a long time because it is, at least on a technical standpoint, better than those and does have quite a lengthy tech tree to unlock. Plus it's cuter.
- FYI, when you get more pal tools it lets you do things like riding pals where you have direct control over them.
Literally the only thing I know about it is "pokemon with guns" and "it's SOOOOOOOO popular! You should try it because it's popular! READ HOW POPULAR THIS IS!"
- i mean the good part about it is the survival aspect. it's a pretty similar direction as ark except it's actually playable (unlike ark). and it deviates from some other games like valheim enough for it to feel like a unique experience
  the enslavement is just a neat bonus
  right now it already feels like it had a lot more player-experience effort put into it than many already popular games (and way more than pokémon if that's relevant lol), and even though it has some noticeable bugs and doesn't have as much content as you might want, it definitely is something that feels like it has a lot of growth ahead of it. the mechanics on their own set up a good foundation for new additions ahead
  the main thing that bugs me about it is some quality of life things, probably the biggest being storage management/sorting (god damn it this happens in every game i play) & not as much automation as i'd expect. if they made it so you could, i don't know, link all your chests/storage nodes with some storage interface (maybe that pal computer that is already used for a lot of stuff), allowed you to assign which chests/chest slots pals can put which items in, allowed pals to take items from specific assigned chests to e.g. automatically craft certain proportions of items, etc. it'd make me want to play the game 100x as much. add a "factorio but with slaves" aspect to the game to appeal to a wider range of players, you know, even the minecraft redstoners might get in. basically adding a "storage & task management screen" would be sick
  another thing is that i've found it really tedious to manage a large number of tasks/pals currently, which is why i mentioned "task management", it'd be cool if you could easily manipulate priority/necessity to certain tasks and stuff
  overall though they just need to focus on ironing out the bugs and then adding more content to the world to make it feel actually rewarding/interesting to explore (i guess this basically just means add more lore to the world, because it is severely lacking in story), and it'll be an actually really worth-it game
- It's just a well made game in an era of badly made games that hype themselves up bigger than they are.
  Palworld is "just" good monster collection, good combat and some good survival crafting. I'm not going to play it, but it's very easy to see the appeal.
  It's like the newer doom games. They're "just" good shooters. You "just" get to go through well built levels, nice visuals and good music.
- It's one of the best survival rafting games in the market right now to be honest. That's why I'm enjoying it. I'm 36 never played Pokémon.
I actually like it. It's kind of like ARK but mixed with Factorio/Satisfactory
- It is missing too much to call it like factorio or even rimworld as you cant even set task priority or do much optimization, but it has the foundation and could certainly go that route with some major ai improvements.
- My friends all call it Valheim, but with cute fluffy animals.
  The ability to customize difficulty settings is also a big hit.
Katharine's review today steps back from that flash-in-the-pan take (and it wasn't a good one).
No doubt there's some empty calories here, though.
- Idk I guess I still didn’t get the vibe it was anywhere as special as the hype train is treating it. It honestly feels weirdly artificial for a hype train too.
It's surprisingly entertaining, but you might want to wait until it leaves early access if you're on the fence. It's very buggy and there's big aspects of the game that aren't filled out yet.

All the people blaming "clickbait youtubers" or "AI bots" for this game blowing up are idiots. Its actually fun, it delivers a satisfying game loop that no pokemon game ever has, and it has support for multiplayer. It's big enough to explore a lot, has a deep tech tree to unlock, some pretty interesting base automation mechanics, and over 100 pokemon to discover and catch, and a surprisingly robust breeding system to unlock new pokemon instead of evolving. It's just FUN, and lots of games lately lack that. Despite it being buggy and early access, its very playable. I hosted a dedicated server and my friends and I can play together and explore and adventure and find bosses, and work on our base together. Haven't had a game that lets me do that in a long time.

The fact that you call em pokémon instead of Pals tells a lot.
- Well, it is Pokemon you’re capturing and using after all

Neat. Hopefully it doesn’t corrupt Pokemon into being a survival/builder game.

Pokemon has barely deviated in almost 30 years, I think it will be fine
- I can only hope. I’ve already watched Zelda be ruined.
Wouldn't want Gamefreak to deviate from the same formulas they've had for decades and have never bothered to change, while putting out worse and worse quality games every year.
Yeah could you imagine the horrors of Pokemon changing their core gameplay loop after decades of stagnation? Horrible. Just look at how it ruined Zelda!
- Pokémon can't even shake up enough to figure out what to do with an open world. They took away puzzles and mazes and replaced them with... nothing. Never seen a more boring open world than Scarlet/Violet. No events or minigames, nothing to discover along the way, only bland scenery and low draw distance creatures.
- BOTW ruined Zelda for people like me who enjoyed the dungeons, unique items and narrative progression of older games even if it was a great game for open world fans. Pokemon is even further removed from that action-survival gameplay so it's not hard to see why people would want new games to be similar even if the current formula is stale.
- Yeah, basically. Breath of the Wild is the worst Zelda game, mainly because it’s not a Zelda game. I know lots of people like it, but it’s not a Zelda game. Same with Palworld. It’s not a Pokemon game.