Let's talk about
Palworld!
It's a (hopefully) legally distinct pocket monster capturing game that is also a fairly traditional craft/build/survive game in the same general vein as ARK and Conan Exiles.
Capture Pals with Pal Spheres, enslave them to work for you in your base, and use them to fight other Pals out in the world and also the Syndicate, who are totally not even a little bit like Team Rocket.
Also, there are guns.
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jn9LQslOjA
Images:
Out now (in Early Access) on Steam and XBox Game Pass.
Posts
I sunk my weekend into this game and while there are definitely barebones sections of the game due to early access (namely story/game-directed gameplay like quests and such), the main gameloop is functional and engaging to me. You gain the majority of XP through catching pals and doing your typical survival base building activities and your character level determines what level of technology is available to you. Three aspects really stand out at the EA release of the game:
- Tech tree is deep
- Map is massive
- Plenty of pals
meaning that the world is a pretty wide sandbox to play and have fun in.Streaming 8PST on weeknights
We've had a few crashes, and the pathing AI is pretty bad. I've had to rescue Pals that have somehow gotten stuck up on the flat roof of my barracks building. And they really struggle with a nearby bridge that is a built-in map feature. I regularly have to go over and pick them up and carry them across the bridge to fix them.
But other than that, I've already sunk like 8+ hours into it with my bro and another friend.
The things I'm struggling with right now is figuring out how to prevent certain status ailments from happening. Like for example, our feed box is always full, and yet our Pals are constantly complaining about being hungry. If different pals have different diets, I have not seen documentation of that in game. Or perhaps it's there and I've just missed it. We're trying to keep berries, mushrooms, and meat in our feed box, and yet our Pals still say they're hungry.
I also don't understand why they get depressed, because we've got a hotspring in the base, which is specifically stated in the item tooltip to help with mental state and restoring their sanity status.
Streaming 8PST on weeknights
The first server I rented was a trash fire of overselling capacity and not having nearly the hardware required to run even a few people at once, which was sad.
But finally just bit the bullet on Sunday, switched providers, and everything is super smooth now.
There's a management building!?
I've been throwing these dumb penguins at blocks of ice every 20 seconds
Are you on a dedicated server?
If so, it's probably related to that.
There appear to be issues with entering/exiting stasis on dedicated servers at the moment. If you log off, and no one is logged on nearby but is logged into the server, your Pals get tossed in stasis. The simulation of that seems off at the moment, as it seems like they have a need for food but do not actually produce materials (like food to feed themselves) or maybe even eat the food. I also woke up to my pokemon being depressed and starving this morning.
But if you have someone near your base while you're offline, they appear to behave as normal and eat and gather and don't get tons of ailments. I've also woken up to 5000 gathered wood and all of my Pals being happy and ready to go, in situations where someone was online in a base close enough to mine.
I played a little bit with a friend just to experiment with the multiplayer (probably will do more of that with a full group later), but mostly been playing it single player for now. I think I'm up around level 20 or so, having a great time.
Is this just a "wait until they patch it" or is there a solution listed?
If you run your base solo, just pack up your Pals when you log off of a dedicated server. Put them in poke bank, they won't get hungry or go insane.
If you're with friends it will get weird as the workers in your base are shared and can be accessed by everyone in the guild, but the bank is local, so harder to work around aside from just being around the base when people are on the server.
First, it was always "Kingdom of the Boys" based on a time when we were playing in Minecraft and building a world together. That eventually went up to be the name of any virtual world I create, and I switched the guild name to "Lost Boys".
But, inspired by my wife's reaction to us playing Palworld, I've come up with a new guild name that I'm in love with.
Line up, penguins. It's time for the weak to provide for the strong.
We were getting overwhelmed in a raid, and both me and my penguin knew sacrifices were going to have to be made if we wanted to save the base...
Palworld could meet the same end like many Early Access survival games (funny how many there are), but I think I've already gotten my money's worth. This time.
Streaming 8PST on weeknights
My grass monkey sows seeds, my penguin waters the seeds, my fire fox pokemon ignites my forge. All of this happens automatically without having to assign anybody to tasks. Of course, it might be nice to specifically micro-manage that stuff from time to time, if I have a specific job I want done RIGHT NOW.
Up to level 30 now, really getting into the grindy part of needing metal. And I'm also playing with like 3 friends so I keep restarting other games, which is actually still fun because you can spawn on different islands and get slightly different starter pals.
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
They're clearly a talented dev team but between the stuff about the CEO and the various unfinished plates they've still got spinning in EA, its definitely got me kind of hesitating on actually forking over the money for now even if I want to play super bad.
I was referring to the palbox where you can assign pals to a base. if any assigned pals are stuck, you can just unassign then reassign them to the base to reset them
Streaming 8PST on weeknights
Ill jump in and play it with Ladyjubs this weekend most likely. Arkamon sounds fun for at least a weekend forray.
The firefox flamethrower is also pretty crazy
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
At this point if an early access game is fun for a few dozen hours I call it a win.
Gamepass makes it even easier.
Did you know that you can have an army of Daedream (or Dazzi) following you? All of them in your party will Do The Thing, not just one.
(I would have titled this thread Moral Quandaries and Berry Picking)
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
That reminds me, the game really needs to let me zoom out more. I have my FOV maxed out but can't stand to have Daedream take up so much screen space floating behind me.
Streaming 8PST on weeknights
Yeah, we box them when we’re puttering around the base.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
How do you set it to be first person? I couldn't find an option in UEVR (unless you're manually adjusting the camera? I figured there was an easy button I was missing) or is it because mine is an older version of UEVR?
Overall I am quite enjoying the game. The way they tie in the Pals with the features of the base is quite fun. I spent a good while hunting down Pals to find one that would do Medicinal work cuz I wasn't gonna hold the F button down for 5ever to get that high end medicine crafted.
Attach the camera to the player mesh, adjust to the head location, then hide whatever parts of the mesh you want to.
Or join the Discord & download one of the configs someone else has setup and shared.
Which ones do you find too close to pokemon? The only ones I've seen so far are ones that are very clearly based on real animals, which you can't really copyright 'wolf but funny colors'.
Dinossum:
That's a whole lot more than just inspired by IMO. It's someone idea of the what a Meganium specifically would evolve into at best.
Which is totally fine. You don't need permission to riff on ideas. Similar, but not a copy of the same work is legit.
Like there’s riffing and there’s lazy
It just happens to be fun. I think they dumped quite a bit of passion in it -- the animations are great and some of the attacks are super fun -- but yeah not so much creativity. Just mixing a few things and doing it well, which I don't think is a bad thing either.