TwilightVulpine

It would have been nice to have a proper Remake but this is not bad per se, though I’m not a fan of how much it’s being dragged out, and that Vincent and Cid still won’t be playable still.

Vanillaware keeps making me hungry as always

Every day that passes piracy is proven even more as the only guarantee any culturally significant work might remain.

Weird to have so many versions of the same form but no kid Goku.

The person in social media who extracted and compared assets admitted they modified them to appear more similar because they didn’t like how the game promotes animal cruelty.

One thing that a lot of people don’t seem to realize in this whole discussion is that, whatever you may think of it as far as artistic integrity goes, Pokémon only owns the full complete design of their characters and the actual game files, but not every possible independently produced variation or recombination of those traits. They own Wooloo but they don’t own every possible roundish sheep-like creature.

To be fair it’s obvious that Palworld’s company Pocket Pair doesn’t care about originality. But whether the are literally infringing on the Pokémon property is unclear, and a lot of people are making serious but baseless accusations out of snowballing social media outrage.

If there’s any actual, real issue that warrants a lawsuit, you can be sure that the Pokémon Company’s lawyers will find it out. It’s not like they need anyone to defend them, we are literally talking about the biggest media brand in the world.

I get it, but part of my point is that there are games that are very much like Pokémon for someone who wants 90% of that with a little bit of a different twist. Meanwhile I’m seeing some people looking into Palworld and going “Wait is this Minecraft? I wanted Pokémon with guns.”

Yeah, but I would say that already makes it more markedly different, even compared to, say, Monster Hunter Stories. Sure, there’s cutesy creatures which gives it some similar aesthetics but the gameplay experience is not even remotely similar.

Compared to Lies of P which looks and plays like Bloodborne, it’s not really that close.

Look, I want a Steam Deck from the deepest depths of my heart and I love what it offering… but this take just isn’t it. The Steam Deck is said to have sold “multiple millions” of units, lets say generously around 10 million. The Nintendo Switch has sold 132 million units. The Steam Deck couldn’t hope to begin threatening the Nintendo Switch.

Though in all fairness, I don’t think it needs to. It’s much more of a specialized device rather than something you give to your kids.

The creature designs are similar to Pokémon but that’s where it begins and ends. Palworld is a survival sandbox with creature collecting, it doesn’t even have turn-based battles. It’s far more similar to Ark or Rust than Pokémon.

If anyone wanted a game that “is but isn’t Pokémon” they should look into TemTem or Cassette Beasts.

Caring about the product is not incompatible with making profit, but it is incompatible with maximizing profit, because then your design priorities must shift to emphasize functionality and entertainment to cutting costs and expanding monetization opportunities.

It’s easy to see in gacha games. Even the best of them have to have to obstruct fun to make money, from the way they limit gameplay options so that people will gamble for them to the way that they gate progression behind repetitive daily grind so that people will keep coming back out of habit and FOMO.

Even beyond the monetization itself, great games require a willingness to take time experimenting and polishing, time which would seem like wasted wages to more money oriented companies. Sometimes it pays off, like Larian, but sometimes it doesn’t, like the old Clover Studio.

That’s why “to some extent”. Nintendo does some unsavory moves, but I’m not sure the point of it is profiteering, especially when it comes to taking things out of sale.

But you can’t deny that they put out games of consistent quality, and not overly monetized.

Not in the rare cases when the company is owned by someone who cares about the product, who resists investor pressures. To some extent Larian, Valve and Nintendo manage it so far.

Decline through endless profit chasing only seems inevitable because profiteering investors are so thoroughly present in nearly every company.

This is also bad.

They approved the game to be on the platform, banning people for recording scenes is ridiculous.

To this day I resent Sony for not allowing me to stream Persona 5 to my sister, which is a series we used to play together a lot.

Dishonored was a bit like that

That’s true, but blasphemous content created a lot more controversy than sheer violence. I remember when D&D books were getting burned because parents thought it was satanist.

Cult of the Lamb is explicitly demonic and yet it’s still the possible addition of sex that is creating all this hubbub. Personally I think it’s going to be about as explicit as The Sims at most, getting in a sleeping bag and them some shaking and effects.

It’s funny that in a game about demonic cults and blood sacrifices this is somehow considered unusually controversial.

As much as I’m very critical of both these studios, that’s really downplaying Sonic Frontiers. It was puzzling that they decided to go for a realistic style while having floating platforms everywhere, but that was a competent game that a lot of people enjoyed. I wouldn’t even call it glitchy, playing it lately I didn’t see a single one. Maybe it had some glitches on release, but unfortunately this is commonplace these days.

They are just lying. I don’t trust this response for a single moment. We have seen how the slope as far as game monetization practices goes is in fact slippery.

Sports games already use in-game ads. They will keep going for as long as players take it.

Not a single game out and they are already ruining several studios…

Big publishers weaponizing randomization elements in games against the players’ wallets. I hate this era of gaming…