It's super duper effective. The Palworld thread.

[Yorin Trouble]

Never made a thread before, thought I'd start with the new hotness among some internet friends. Any out there playing Palworld? I'm playing solo, and just unlocked the ability to make a new base. Still haven't had any luck with the first boss tower.

 

[Yimothy]

I wasn’t aware of this game, thought the thread would be about 50Hz gaming. Oh well. As a grumpy old man, Palworld looks like something designed to draw my Pokémon loving kids in with cute creatures and then traumatise them with the guns and the option to kill and eat your Pokémon.

 

[4-So]

... and the option to kill and eat your Pokémon.

I'm listening.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I feel like EVERYONE SUDDENLY knows about Palworld now and I completely missed when that happened.

I've never played Horizon Zero Dawn but I feel like this is what it would be with Pokemon. Like, of all the Pokemon clones, it's the one that seems to get the look at it, but also everyone is shooting each other in the face with guns.

 

[Kazin]

This looks to be everything I don't want from Pokemon, so I'll pass. Hope those who do want it enjoy it, though!

 

[SabreCat]

I was pretty amused by the trailers I first saw, and wishlisted it. Then as I followed the ongoing YouTube teasers, my interest started to wane because the actual gameplay looked terribly dull--shooting-gallery "combat" against barely-interactive bullet sponges. Then on release it came around that the studio is pretty gung-ho about plagiarism engines, and I wandered off entirely.

Those who've played, was I misled about the fighty times at least? Is the action any good?

 

[JBear]

I love the narrative of this game's public arc, going from, in those early trailers, low-effort jank that looked like a transparent cash grab banking on the shock value of pokemon gun sweatshops to actually coming out to unprecedented success (it was at one point number one on Steam for both sales *and* concurrents).

That said, while I have several folks on my friends list playing it, I don't see myself as one of them. Not really my bag, although I did enjoy Pokemon Legends Arceus, which this seems somewhat adjacent to.

I'm absolutely here for how it's tiptoeing up to the outright ip theft line, though. You have to admire the grift. Love to catch me a "Relaxaurus".

 

[Yorin Trouble]

I've always loved base-builder/crafting/survival games. This game scratched that itch for me. Throw some Pokémon type themes in it, and just adds more things to do. I know people keep calling this Pokémon with guns. I'd call it more Rust meets Pokémon.

For the combat, it's not challenging. Bosses are harder then the wild monsters, and paying attention to enemy levels. I can usually take on a monster (or human) within +-2 levels of my own without much trouble. It is just point and click with the hero character (either melee or ranged). If you summon help the abilities they use appear to be on timers, they don't go all out. They do a move, wait, do another move, wait, and repeat. When capturing monsters, you need to be quick if you have a summon out, because they don't stop fighting until the palsphere (yes i know) is activated on the enemy.

 

[Ludendorkk]

I feel like EVERYONE SUDDENLY knows about Palworld now and I completely missed when that happened.

Uhhh, this week, the game came out on the 19th lol

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

and then traumatise them with the guns and the option to kill and eat your Pokémon.

The descriptions of things are a little wild when you read the flavor text of what goes on. But it's very much G-rated where the "Pals" that get killed have spiral-eyes and merely look KO'd. The violence here is very cartoonish and abstract and no worse than Pokemon.

I've been playing for several hours with a few friends. We've yet to get our first gun. It's very much a rock-punching sim for quite a while, in the vein of ARK or Monster Hunter or Rust where you're gathering raw resources to make good, increasing your numbers to make better things, those better things unlock other things, etc.

The game is fun, but I'm not sure for how long. There's tons of bugs and things that could use QoL updates.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Uhhh, this week, the game came out on the 19th lol

To be clear, I didn't mean "I was into it before it was cool" but rather "Let's talk about Palworld" and I''m like "talk about huh?"

 

[RT-55J]

The initial trailers for this came out two and a half years ago, and were immensely viral, though I don't think there was much in the way of press between then and launch. (This game is still in "early access" btw.)

 

[Kirin]

Yeah I remember those initial trailers looked like someone had the bright idea of “lol, Pokemon with guns and shit” and just slapped together whatever assets they could find to hand. So it was amusing, but there was little confidence that it would become an actual not-completely-jank playable game.

 

[JBear]

I'm seeing reports from multiple mainstream news outlooks that The Pokemon Company will be looking into this further and consider taking legal action as appropriate. Good luck, PalWorld!

 

[Kazin]

That's unsurprising, but dumb. Let people have their dumb Pokemon with guns game lol

 

[Patrick]

I feel like this is one of those things where they have to protect their IP, in case it influences future cases. Like, maybe they don't care about this game being sold, but they will care when it's cited in a lawsuit about a more direct Pokemon knock off.

 

[Kirin]

Like, similar gameplay is fine, but the Palworld folks *really* should've done a bit more thorough job of sanding the trademarks off the monster designs. Some are just adjacent concepts, but a few too many seem like minor tweaks to existing Pokemon models.

 

[JBear]

I'd actually like to see some side-by-sides of the most egregious cases; seems bizarre to me that the BBC article just has pics of a modded copy of the game with literal Pokemon in it.

 

[RT-55J]

The Pokemon Company's statement reads more like "We know this game exists please stop bugging us about it" rather than "Say your prayers, Pocketpair."

The only actions they've taken so far is against people modding actual Pokes into the game, and tbqh that's as far as I expect them to go.

 

[Regulus]

There's some really suspicious stuff in the models; nearly identical proportions in some cases, and design elements that are copied almost 1:1 from certain Pokemon. One of the most suspect is a Pal that takes Primarina's hairstyle and slaps it on a Serperior lookalike. It's not the same model -- the vertices aren't identical. But the odd thing is that it features geometry that is only really visible in the original model if Primarina's hair ties are removed. I don't think they would have arrived at this design unless they were working directly with a ripped model.

Most of the industry 3D artists I've heard from have basically said that it's highly unlikely any of this could have been achieved by sight reference, let alone happenstance.

 

[Kazin]

Aren't Palworld's designs based on AI or something? I'm sure the AI just copied the Pokemon themselves if so lol

 

[Regulus]

The lead dev is interested in generative AI, but the game predates the big explosion in that field and these designs seem more like good old fashioned human-made copying to me. I think some AI-generated designs would have actually been a little less blatant...

 

[Kazin]

Ah, I must have read something about that and got confused. Fair enough!

 

[Phantoon]

People took against Palworld and made a bunch of stuff up. The AI thing was one of many.

 

[Regulus]

I don't think it was "made up" so much as it warped by a game of social media telephone. Comments supportive of generative AI including some examples of the dev playing around with generated Pokemon lead some to believe that Palworld itself features AI copies, but the timeline for that doesn't really add up. I can see where some would leap to that conclusion, though, especially because Palworld developer Pocketpair has an early access game available that is explicitly based around AI art.

The whole controversy around the game is rife with misinformation and stupid nonsense on both sides, though. You should see the asinine "Pokemon designs were actually plagiarized from Dragon Quest" image that's being floated around.

 

[RT-55J]

especially because Palworld developer Pocketpair has an early access game available that is explicitly based around AI art.

Fake Artist Goes to New York except with AI image generation as a mechanic is actually a cool and novel use of the technology imho

 

[Phantoon]

There was the dude manipulating images of the Palworld monsters making them look even more like Pokémon than they already do, for some asinine reason.

 

[Regulus]

What's your source on that? I've seen people claim that @byofrog on twitter did that, but the only thing byo did to compare the models was scale them uniformly so they could be compared despite the size differences.

Fake Artist Goes to New York except with AI image generation as a mechanic is actually a cool and novel use of the technology imho

I think there's a ton of cool and novel potential for the technology, really. I wish we lived in a world where it could be pursued ethically.

 

[Phantoon]

I believe byofrog claimed they were 1:1 and altered them to look like they were. They aren't. Don't get me wrong, you can absolutely see their inspiration, but you are allowed to make close designs to something that already exist. If TPC could sue they absolutely would.

 

[Regulus]

That seems to be another game of "social media telephone", going the other way this time. Byo didn't do anything except scale the the models to roughly the same size. If I were to trace a picture and blow it up 2x, it would still be traced.

Other artists have taken a look since and have verified byo's original examples.

If they had just imitated the artstyle it would be one thing (almost certainly legal by US standards, at least - I can't speak for Japan), but blatantly frankensteining actual Pokemon design elements together has invited a lot of scrutiny. If they actually used TPC-owned assets when making their imitations and there's a paper trail of this, then they could absolutely lose an infringement case. It's really up to whether or not TPC decides to sue. I suspect if it got as far as discovery, it would not go very well for Pocketpair.