Palworld is a really interesting fusion of genres - creature collecting, FPS, and base / factory building.
The creature collecting elements are strong even this early in the game - obviously you want to collect as many unique species of pals as possible, but there is also heavy incentive to collect individuals of species you already have. Each pal has unique traits that impact its work speed, work preferences, or combat strength, so you can spend some time collecting ideal pals. You also get extra exp for your first ten captures of a species, which is extremely important for progression. Finally, Palworld pulls some inspiration from Pokemon Legends: Arceus and has what it calls “Lucky Pals” - effectively alpha pokemon. These have boosted work capacity and battle capability.
I am not a huge fan of FPS games, so I can’t speak as to how good the FPS elements are compared to other games. The combat generally feels very good - the hitboxes are on point, attacks are fast enough to be scary to dodge without feeling impossible. The first boss felt like a bit of a health sponge. I ended up dealing the majority of my damage myself rather than relying on my pals, which felt a bit sad, but I might just not be using the right pals.
Base building is extremely fun! Picking which pals work is a complex and meaningful choice, and watching them run around and go about their day is lovely. There are some bugs in this arena, which is to be expected - sometimes pals that are collecting items will get stuck in a loop of picking the item up, dropping it, picking it up again, forever. Sometimes pals get stuck on terrain and have to be reset using the palbox. Sometimes pals ignore jobs - this seems to largely affect heating jobs and handiwork jobs.
At this point in the game, I’m heavily dependent on my pals picking the right thing to work on, or else losing a lot of time assigning them to stations that are only active sometimes. I hope to see some refinement in these systems - a way to prioritize work would be extremely helpful. It would also be great to be able to set resource levels - something like “Keep 200 berries”. Pals would work berry farms until you hit 200 berries in storage, then stop. I’m hoping for the complexity of factory building to continue to increase.
All in all I am loving the game so far - it’s a lot of fun even in its current early access state, and shows a lot of promise going into the future.
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The first time I booted up Palworld I played for 11 hours, and if my mouse hadn’t run out of battery I think I would’ve probably played a bit longer. My Airpods died earlier, but I just switched over to wired headphones. Needless to say, I’m pretty hooked. It’s everything I wish Pokemon had grown up to be.
There are some bugs to be ironed out for sure - mainly (in my experience) around base-building and Pals working automated tasks: mine often leave berries unpicked, furnaces unkindled, and coolers unchilled, but for the most part, I haven’t run into any huge bugs that have hindered my gameplay, which is a good sign, considering I’m playing on a PC. I’ve also installed it on my Steam Deck, but so far I’ve been enjoying playing it on the desktop with max graphics settings. I’m pretty sure that playing on the Steam Deck will be just fine too, though.
Also, when you mention “Lucky” Pals, are you talking about the shiny/sparkly ones you find in the wild? Or are you referring to Pals that’re particularly suited to various work tasks on your base? Shiny-hunting in Pokemon never really appealed to me, but Shiny-hunting is much better-incentivized, and I really enjoy the fact that catching them is a little bit more difficult too, compared to catching regular Pals. Each Shiny feels like its own mini-boss, and I find myself having to make judicious use of my Pals’ attacks and abilities in order to wear em down.
I’m pretty happy that the game has sold so well (2 million in 24 hours!) as I’m hoping that that will give the devs/studio leeway and incentive to further improve and polish the game. I didn’t know that it was early-access when I bought it, but if I were just going off my gameplay experience, I don’t think I would’ve known that.
I’m looking forward to doing a full play-through solo, at my own pace, and I’m not one to usually play through games more than once, I find myself also looking forward to doing another play-though with multi-player toggled on. I’m pretty antsy to get back into the game - I find myself continuously glancing at my mouse to see whether it’s charged or not. It’s still glowing red, to my dismay, haha. I’m so tempted to just take the weekend off work and just relax with a game like I used to. I think it’ll take my mouse a long while to fully charge back up, so maybe this’ll be a good excuse to see how the game plays on the Deck.
Anyway, I’m glad you’re having fun with the game too. And I’m glad that someone made a Lemmy community for Palworld - I was thinking about setting one up, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the game long enough. Hopefully the community will become popular enough to find people to play with when I go for a multi-player playthrough on my second go-round.
I mirror all of your opinions! I’m usually very scaredy about doing online playthroughs, but it seems like it’ll be fun.
Lucky / sparkly pals - yep! I think lucky is what the tool tip called them but I could be totally misremembering. The first one I came across was a level 4 celaray. I was really afraid my level 13 daedream would one shot it…it ended up killing me instead, lol! That was a bit of a rude awakening.
90% of the game is literal copy-paste from Ark so if you ever played Ark you know Palworld. Ark is awesome btw for those who havent played it.
This is what I realized when I first went to craft something/level up. Like I saw the comparisons, but goddamn is it just Ark lol. I’m not really complaining, cause it’s a really good translation of gameplays, but still.