everyone getting into this fake ai pokemon game shit is the type of person to wish their dead friend back to life on a monkey’s paw and when they see the friend Came Back Wrong and is a rotting soulless animated corpse they’re like, fuck yeah he’s back! 😍
everyone’s like “well people are desperate for a pokemon game”. so what? it’s not a pokemon game. I’m never so desperate for a chocolate milkshake that I’ll drink a milkshake-looking mug of iced shit. it’s like the “hd mods” for old games that make them look their absolute darkest-timeline selves, which get covered as just “better graphics”, made by the people with the most time to throw away in devotion to your game, who you’d hope would also be your Biggest Fans, but plainly they’re not, because they think everything you made is an error they can correct.
it’s like gamers don’t see art at all, they see some vague, filtered shadow. we’re all talking at cross-purposes. you think you’re making art for them and they like it, but the substance of it, the soul of the art, goes unperceived, never enters the brain. then they turn around and show you what they think is the best version of your thing, and they’ve minced it, and they have no idea because they never saw it. you served them a pie and they thought the dish was the gift and they loved it and polished it and threw the pie out.
palworld is like someone made this same observation but thought, hey, if the gamers aren’t able to distinguish art from soulless slop, why are we wasting money putting the soul in?? focus on the people with zero taste or insight! through automated plagiarism and cheap labour, we can laser target the brain of some fuckwit who doesn’t know why they like anything. when it sells real well, we can pretend that’s evidence we did good. people love that shit.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
ngl this virulence is VERY funny to me as someone who’s played it a fair bit and thinks it’s an okay, kind of mid survival craft game in a genre that’s absolutely packed full of some of the most rote imitation anywhere. Like I’ve played a lot this genre and this game doesn’t even begin to scrape the bottom of the shame barrel. Why people have singled this one out beyond the reason of “pokemon is sacrosanct for a huge number of people for some reason” is beyond me
i don’t even like pokemon. i just hate to see such cynical fuckin garbage be successful
I guess to me this isn’t particularly more cynical than the 20 or so nearly 1:1 clones of rust/ark/valheim etc – of which this is one – on steam I could name off the top of my head. Popular genres are always full of imitations, cheap and otherwise.
What makes this one special? Is it the pokemon? If it is, why aren’t we mad at the hordes of games like Coromon, Temtem, Nexomon, etc, games that are way more faithful and nearly 1:1 in mimickry than this?
Is it just the edgy marketing? If it’s about cute creatures dying, why are we less angry at pikmin, or pokemon itself? Dogfighting isn’t a pleasant thing in real life, no matter how much we dress it up in game mechanics. If acknowledging that it creates misery makes people angry, is that edgy or is that anger coming from denial on the part of people who just want to have “cozy” dogfights?
I think it’s way more cynical that Valheim etc because I buy with many of those that they’re made by someone interested in doing Their Take On [Thing]. Valheim has its own ideas, this is specifically against having its own ideas.
As for what makes it special, why does anything have to make it special? I hate all this shit. If we aren’t annoyed at all of it equally at all times, why would that bring into question the legitimacy/fairness of our loathing of any particular one? Pokemon’s shit, this is shit, they’re differently shit, we’re talking about this at the moment
I guess it’s just fascinating to me to see what would in any other time be a flavour-of-the-month game most people aren’t even aware of or don’t care about discussed as if it’s the root of all gaming’s ills. Even the furor over genshin impact “copying breath of the wild” never got anywhere near this intense and it’s just fascinating to me. I can’t figure out what about this game makes people so, so, so mad at it
maybe just when it’s happening? there’s been a huge anti-creativity push in the last year and here’s this totally uncreative object making millions on bare minimum effort. feels like a culmination and the start of worse things
Just to check, are you still assuming the game is using AI art? Because I haven’t been able to find any evidence that that’s actually the case.
Like regardless of ‘creativity’ or whatever we want to assign it, someone still went in and hand-modeled and animated hundreds of creatures for this game. I’m pretty sure even the most generous interpertation of AI generation can’t do that.
it doesn’t matter if it is or not – that’s the level of creativity and interest going into it. it’s a no-effort ripoff, and if they didn’t use ai it’s only because it’s not up to the task yet
I guess in the end I’m not sure what this is doing that’s worse than, say, what fortnite did when it wholesale copied the entirety of PUBG over the course of 2 months when their original game plan crashed and burned
I guess I’m not sure why you think people think it’s worse than any other thing you can think of? Like who said that?
I guess I’m not sure how – as you put it- this is a sign of the start of worse things when, at best, it’s a feeble mimickry of what AAA has been doing for easily over a decade.
I don’t get the connections you’re making at all and also Cohost is now giving me like 90 pixels of width to type in so I’m gonna stop. I can barely see what I’m typing this is so weird
Fair enough, lmao. It is… getting very hard to read
I CAN’T HEAR YOU WHAT DID YOU SAY
Is the page just going to break if we keep doing this
i think I’ll run out of clickable text field before that happens
palworld i immediately recognized as being on the opposite end of a spectrum of what i would want out of a pokemon like experience, with the actual pokemon games being in the middle and the recent beautifully crafted stop motion series Pokemon Concierge at the far end (closest to what i’d want) – there are zero pokemon being captured and forced to fight, all the pokemon are treated as being equals of humans, everyone just hangs out and learns how to live together and understand each other better. it’s fuckin great, i wish the games were that instead of Cozy Cockfighting JRPG.
palworld off in the other direction and adds Guns and Human Pets. wow guys, great! and yeah its design seems completely unconsidered and its director seems like a scumbag. bzzt, nope.
so Pokemon Animal Crossing would be closer to your perfect Pokemon game
well, i have another somewhat different set of issues with Animal Crossing, but it’s definitely closer to the kind of world and mechanics i’d want to spend time in.
(tbc all these opinions are entirely my own personal taste and not intended to yuck anyone’s yum; my ambivalence towards Whittling Down Health Bars feels kind of rare.)
Ah damn yeah a Pokémon Concierge game would be killer
i have exactly one thing to praise palworld for, and it’s that it filled a niche i’ve wanted since the 90s. pokemon games talk all the time about humans and mons working and building together, palworld was the first game that let me build a house and furniture and cook with my little guys.
is the rest of it mid cynical slop from a shady dev who had absolutely no passion for it? absolutely lol. god i wish anybody else had made this. someone who wanted this game to exist and be amazing, not just someone trying to cash in on an obvious eyebrow raising pitch.
Strange to me considering there’s a wealth of indie Pokemon-likes out there that actually look worth trying, not to mention Pokemon romhacks. But the one with guns in the marketing is getting all the attention now.
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