Helldivers 2 will crashdown on our planet’s surface on February 8th, 2024, and turns the topdown co-op alien shooter into a flashier, fancier third-person version of the same. A new trailer release today details how its ‘Galactic War’ systems work – that is, the macro-scale conflict within which your missions and bug hunts take place.
Note: This review is specifically of the PC version of Palworld available through Steam. Because the Xbox version and the PC version available via the Microsoft Store (both on Game Pass) has significantly more issues and different features, which the developer says is due to the certification process, we will post a separate review of that version later this week.
Nothing about what Palworld does seems like it should work in the slightest. A thinly veiled Pokémon clone where you and your collectible monsters shoot people in the face with literal guns? A base building survival game where you use your kidnapped creatures as laborers, and may even resort to cooking and eating those unpaid employees when times get tough? An open-world co-op adventure where you and your friends thwack helpless sheep over the head with baseball bats to harvest their wool? Defying the odds, this wholly irreverent, gun-toting take on the creature collection genre has been unrelentingly fun across the 100-plus hours I’ve spent shooting cartoon kittens in the face. As an early access game, it’s got plenty of bugs and performance issues to go around, and sure, it shamelessly cribs the design for many of its collectible creatures. But its survival mechanics are intuitive and deep, its action-packed combat is silly and satisfying, and exploring its world in search of new Pals to kick the snot out of hasn’t come close to getting old. I am baffled to report, dear reader, that Palworld is very good.
Despite the clear, eyebrow-raising inspiration it takes from a certain creature collecting powerhouse, Palworld more closely resembles a formulaic survival game like Grounded, with a roster of lovable monsters to capture as a clever twist on that formula. You find yourself inexplicably dropped into the wilderness of a strange land filled with oversized, dangerous beasts called Pals. From there you’ll need to build a base, hilariously force the local fauna into your servitude, and upgrade your gear to wage war against the rotten human factions who try to murder you with assault weapons every chance they get. You won’t find yourself hanging out in idyllic towns or challenging gym leaders to friendly contests – this isn’t that kind of adventure. Instead, your goal is to survive the harsh land and face off against evil and/or psychotic Pal trainers who raze villages, attack your base, and command foreboding towers and dungeons filled with goons who shoot to kill.
And yeah, tonally, that’s an utterly unhinged combination. One moment I was taking in pastoral views as I explored for new Pals, gliding, climbing, crafting, and cooking like this was an off-brand Tears of the Kingdom. The next moment I was firing guns at armed thugs and considering the possibility of butchering a Pal who had been mentally broken by the poor working conditions of my sweatshop so I could consume his meat to avoid starvation. Rather than not addressing the questionable aspects of the creature collecting genre, Palworld amusingly leans into them and lets you do absurd things like pick up your fiery fox Pal and use it as a flamethrower to burn your enemies to a crisp, or equip your monkey Pal with a machine gun (which sure beats using Tail Whip). Once you get over how incredibly weird that all feels, it’s a complete blast.
It’s hard to overstate just how effortlessly funny Palworld is, often feeling like a satire of the creature collection genre rather than another straight-faced iteration of it. For example, later in my playthrough I accidentally discovered you can capture humans in your Palspheres, binding them to your will and allowing you to put them to work at your camp or take them with you on adventures like regular Pals – an insane inclusion that’s never advertised to the player and has no purpose aside from being ridiculous. Or how you can just give an rocket launcher to your panda Pal, then sit back and watch him blow some poor woodland creatures into oblivion. Palworld is steeped in utter irreverence every step of the way, and that works to its benefit since creature collecting is already silly as heck to begin with.
Catching Pals out in the open world is a ton of fun, though it’s definitely a bit weird to hack a small penguin unconscious with an ax before you can stuff it into a Palsphere – or, even more alarmingly, to take out a gun and riddle it with lead. It feels extremely wrong at first, to be sure, but I found myself disturbingly used to the ritual after just a few hours. I mean, is doing the dirty work myself really all that different from battling them with another captured creature instead?
The Pals themselves, on the other hand, aren’t quite as original as the process of catching them, as I’d describe the majority of them as “almost copyright infringement.” Seriously, there’s a mouselike lightning Pal, a sassy two-legged cat Pal, a dinosaur with a flower on its head, and many more that reminded me an awful lot of some collectible monsters from the days of my youth. That said, uninspired and derivative as they are, the designs are still mostly pretty neat and have a lot of personality, which makes each one a ton of fun to hunt and do battle against. I’m especially fond of the ditzy and nigh-helpless Dumud, a complete blob of a creature who thrives bouncing around the desert in delighted defiance of Darwinism.
Though capturing, leveling up, and fighting alongside Pals is a major and awesome part of the adventure, you’ll likely spend much more time hanging out at the various bases you’ll build. It’s there you can craft useful items and facilities, cook meals, and arm yourself for war in the epic battles ahead. Just like most other survival games, you’ll need to keep a steady stream of crafting materials flowing in, like wood, stone, and food, and the key to automating that process so you don’t spend endless hours mind-numbingly chopping down trees and swatting rocks with a pickaxe is by making clever use of the Pals themselves. For example, farming could soak up lots of your time as you plant seeds, water your plots, and then harvest the crops, but once you’ve captured some Pals and put them to work at your base, you can have a plant Pal spit seeds out of its mouth, then have a water Pal blast them with water, before another Pal comes along to harvest the crop and move it to your storage container.
This Pal-based cooperation is not only ridiculously adorable to watch, but gives you even more reasons to catch every creature you find. You might not have much use for the fox-like Pal Foxparks in battle, but if you keep one at your base, whenever you fire up the grill to cook or use the furnace to smelt some ingots, your charming fire friend will come running to shoot fire at the appliance and make the task go by faster. Even the weakest creatures give you a whole new reason to catch not just one of them, but a whole bunch to be put to work at whatever it is they do well. As you level up your character and capture Pals with different abilities, you’ll be able to transform your bases from shabby camps to industrialized fortresses, complete with conveyor belts for your Pals to go to work assembling weapons and ammo for you to use against your enemies – a hilarious transformation that made me question how much better I was than the villainous rival trainers I faced out in the wilds.
That said, there are areas where the work of maintaining your bases requires far too much grinding to keep up with. For example, the near-constant need for ore, which is used in dozens of vital recipes, becomes increasingly cumbersome the longer you play as you start consuming massive amounts of the material. Instead of being able to fully automate the process of harvesting and refining this resource like you can do with wood and stone, you have to stop what you’re doing regularly to farm some ore and turn it into ingots just to fuel your basic needs. One of the most constant uses for ore is to craft Palspheres, which are used at a rapid pace as you try to catch increasingly powerful Pals with very low capture rates – and since some sphere recipes require five ingots to create a single one, I found myself halting my adventures for 20 minutes to grab a ton of ore to build spheres, then running out again an hour later, forcing me to start the process all over again. Here’s hoping they’ll add more advanced options to automate some of this stuff later on, because for the time being there’s far too much manual work required just to get back out in the field putting your Pals to good use.
Thankfully, once you get away from the base to explore the absolutely enormous map, it’s consistently fun to run around looking for hidden chests and eggs, battle dangerous boss Pals, raid dungeons stuffed with loot, and chat with the handful of NPC and vendors scattered throughout the wilderness. In one area I get chased by wild packs of snow cats and their giant papa cat, in another I found a creepy blackmarket trader who sold rare, probably illicitly obtained Pals, and in another I watched a squad of suicidal tucan Pals rush into a camp of poachers and self-detonate, sending the whole place up in smoke. Sometimes the action even finds you, like when various enemy groups or wild Pals organize raids against your bases, including a personal favorite moment when seven high-powered “Bushi” Pals attacked my camp with samurai swords (this is the nature of war, after all).
Once you unlock the ability to ride Pals, especially flying ones, the world really opens up, and you’ll find miles and miles to explore, from bamboo forests filled with goofy panda Pals to murky swamps overrun with goblin Pals. There’s even an active volcano to be scaled where all the Pals are, predictably, made of fire. Crafting gear and leveling your Pal squad to survive increasingly unwelcoming parts of the world is rewarding, not just because of all the interesting new Pals to find a capture, but because certain biomes will give you access to materials you’ll need to bring your base and equipment to the next level. Even cooler, you’ll be able to see at least a few massive spires rising in the distance from anywhere on the world map, serving as a reference for your ultimate goal – to reach them all and challenge the lethal bosses lurking within.
Like most survival games, everything Palworld offers immediately becomes more fun when joined by friends in multiplayer – up to 32 people can be in a single server on the Steam version, though that number is currently capped to a paltry four on Xbox and the PC Game Pass version. Running wild throughout the open world, taking down powerful bosses together, and managing a collective base all work without hassle (aside from some short-lived server issues right around launch). Seriously, this thing just demands to be played with friends, especially since it also alleviates some of the stress of having to grind for resources all the time… if those friends are willing to chip in and not steal all your stuff, that is.
It probably goes without saying for an Early Access game, but be warned that you are bound to encounter technical issues and bugs on occasion, though the issues I’ve seen are fortunately mostly minor so far (at least on Steam). I’ve been hit with rough framerates and stuttering, hard crashes, and multiplayer disconnects, but none of that was so commonplace or game-breaking that it ever significantly got in the way of good times. There’s a lot more that Palworld could benefit from, like a fleshed out story and more NPCs or evolutions for the Pals, to avoid so many of them becoming irrelevant at higher levels, but I’m surprised by how polished the whole package already feels at this early stage.
Some indie hits create a legion of copycats, but others, not so much. I don’t think there are too many Papers, Pleaselikes, for example – perhaps for obvious reasons given that game’s grim subject matter.
Lil’ Guardsman is a Papers, Pleaselike though – and a seemingly delightful one. You play as 12-year-old Lil, who is a substitute guard at the castle gate for a fantasy kigndom, and you must decide who to admit and who to deny entry. It’s out now.
The world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 might seem strangely familiar, even if you never played the original. A lush, forested terrain speckled with hidden caves and cobblestone ruins; inhabited by beasts and creatures you could probably name on sight. That’s because director Hideaki Isuno intended to create a high-fantasy world that looks and feels like one that everyone would imagine a real-life fantasy world to look like.
This intention has carried over from the original Dragon’s Dogma, and is why they focused on creating a European and northern English feel, down to the vegetation and structures. The creature design has also remained grounded – as grounded as a fantasy creature can be.
“Our approach to design is to think about what a monster would look like if it existed in real life. It’s hard to remember what these monsters are named when they show up, so we’re careful to create characters that look just like their names,” Itsuno explained. “We wanted anyone in the world to be able to see its design and say, that’s a Sphynx. We interviewed lots of people from around the world after creating the first game, and there were a lot of monsters that appear in Dragon’s Dogma that people said looked exactly like their mental image of them, such as the Griffin. That’s something we’re proud of, and we’re glad we put so much attention into it. It’s great to hear people say, ‘Yes, this!’”
The Cyclops, Harpy, and Minotaur are just a few more of the creatures found in Dragon’s Dogma 2 anyone familiar with high-fantasy could probably name on sight. If you played the first, don’t expect to recognize any particular locations from Granys, though.
Itsuno said: “Dragon’s Dogma is the story of many parallel worlds, and the world we see in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is just one of these worlds. In each parallel world, Pawns interact with Arisen and other Pawns.hat’s why the story of constant rebirth that’s focused around dragons, as well as the various elements of the world shown in the previous game have all carried over to this one as well. That said, it does take place in a different parallel world, which is why I think there will be parts that are similar yet different. That’s reflected in a lot of different places, and I hope players enjoy it.”
The art director Daigo Ikeno commented that creating a parallel world actually made Dragon Dogma’s 2 design a bit more difficult. “We decided to carry on elements from [the previous Dragon’s Dogma]. Not being able to make any massive changes actually made it a little difficult, because this meant having to closely examine each little part of the game,” Ikeno said.
Rather than look at fantasy films and other more modern works as reference material for the art design of Dragon’s Dogma and Dragon’s Dogma 2, Ikeno gave the team classical paintings and medieval art that depicted ancient scenery.
“That meant we were quite restricted in a way, but I think it turned into one of Dogma’s distinguishing features,” said Keitaro Kato, the concept lead. “It was incredibly difficult to analyze what made this art good, then take that and incorporate it into our game’s maps, or into the overall atmosphere of its world.”
The team wasn’t only inspired by drawn art, but by the perspectives of real-world terrain as well. Itsuno explained: “We scouted for locations so that the team members would know what kinds of terrain I wanted and feel excited about it for themselves. This is something I’ve done ever since the first game in the series, as well as during Devil May Cry 5… We went to all kinds of places so that planning members could understand what it means to be in a place where your destination is within sight and not too far away, yet you feel excited about the path there. This mostly involved climbing mountains. I also liked ria coasts, with their clear elevation changes and blocked sightlines.”
This emphasis on blocked sightlines ties into Itsuno’s desire to make travel fun and meaningful within the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2. There’s a huge difference between traveling down a long road and being able to see your destination with nothing interesting on the way and forested paths with captivating distractions popping up around every corner. The latter is how wandering in Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels.
Itsuno said: “Travel is boring? That’s not true. It’s only an issue if your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun. That’s why you place things in the right location for players to discover, or come up with enemy appearance methods that create different experiences each time, or force players into blind situations where they don’t know whether it’s safe or not ten meters in front of them. We’ve put a lot of work into designing a game where you can stumble across someone and something will happen, so while it’s fine if it does have fast travel, we decided to design the kind of map where players will make the decision for themselves to travel on foot in order to enjoy the journey.”
The real-life visits and modern graphics helped the team create environments that clearly communicated its inherent danger or safety, too.
Itsuno continued: “Instead of using symbols to say ‘you’ll die if you fall here,’ we could start making everyone understand visually that they’d probably die if they fell in a certain place. It let us bring our real-life sense of danger, safety, and security into games as-is. Now that we were in an age where we could do that, I was conscious of creating those kinds of experiences whenever possible. That’s why we all went to this scary attraction where you can walk alongside the edge of the top of the Abeno Harukas skyscraper, because I wanted everyone to experience what was scary about it. I paid special attention at the start to teaching everyone and having them experience the kinds of terrain and views that move people emotionally.”
Though the level design and world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 are still very much based on the first, there are some unique differences. The clear new inclusion is the new race, beastren, and their neighboring country of Battahl.
This race was always intended to have existed in the world of Dragon’s Dogma, but due to the limitations in the PlayStation 3 era, the team was unable to implement them. Primarily, this was due to the beastren’s fur.
Curiously, the beastren’s origin stems from Capcom’s Red Earth (also referred to as War-Zard in Japan.) The fantasy fighting game included half-beast characters that ended up as inspiration for the beastren.
In Dragon’s Dogma 2, the humans and beastren come from entirely different cultures. While the human kingdom of Vermund is a monarchy very much with a “mainstream medieval European atmosphere,” the nation of Battahl is run by priestesses.
“We want players to understand it as a culture that stands in contrast to Vermund,” Kato explained. “We decided for the two to be different down to their most basic structures in order to change players’ impression of them.”
The two countries’ environments are also vastly different, influencing details like clothing design. “The land the countries live on is different as well, and so I thought comprehensively about what kind of clothes would fit their climate, including the weather, while also focusing on incorporating that into the kinds of visuals that the director wanted, especially at first, as well as the art director. I think that approach has created a pretty big difference in atmosphere between the two,” Kato explained.
Along with beastren, the elves also have a base of sorts in Dragon’s Dogma 2. The elvish language is entirely made up, and If you can’t understand it in-game, you can’t read it, either.
“I ended up on-site in London at the recording with the voice actors and our story writer who made up a language and wrote it out phonetically, and the result is all thanks to the studying the voice actors did. We explained that it was elvish, and told them how to read it phonetically. We wrote lines entirely phonetically so that similar words would sound the same. When the voice actors heard that they would be speaking elvish, they suggested that it be pronounced like a Scandinavian language and fully researched the subject. They put on performances there that took phonetically spelled made-up words and turned them into something that sounds authentic. And it’s not as though we recorded the full language. Our sound team managed to patch it together well to create a base for the whole language through their blood, sweat, and tears,” Itsuno explained.
This level of detail is evident throughout Dragon Dogma’s 2, implemented painstakingly by the dedicated team. Regardless of how uncannily familiar its medieval high-fantasy scenery might be, the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is uniquely its own.
Casey DeFreitas is the deputy editor of guides. Catch her on Twitter @ShinyCaseyD
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420mm AiOs are quite rare – not many cases come with space for three 140mm fans in a row – but they’re the biggest size of consumer radiators currently available and offer unmatched cooling potential. Therefore, it may be of interest to you to learn that the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420 is down to just £79 at Amazon UK, a crazy-low price for a cooler of this size and prowess.
Hey Xbox Insiders! We have a new Xbox Update Preview releasing to the Delta ring today.
It’s important we note that some updates made in these preview OS builds include background improvements that ensure a quality and stable build for Xbox consoles. We will continue to post these release notes, even when the noticeable changes to the UI are minimal or behind the scenes, so you’re aware when updates are coming to your device.
Details can be found below!
We have exciting news! Delta users can expect something new coming to their Xbox Update Preview.
My Games & Apps – Improved Filtering and Sorting
We’ve added some new filters and sorts to My Games & Apps to help you find exactly what you’re looking for! You can now filter games by Accessibility Options, Supported Languages, and Technical Capabilities. Additionally, subscription tabs have been updated to sort by recently added making it easier to see what’s new. Of course, you can always change the sorting if you prefer something else. Just head to My Games & Apps then Full library where you can find all the new filtering and sorting options.
Xbox Wireless Controller – Thumbstick Calibration
For users in the US who have independently replaced the circuit board on their Xbox Wireless Controller and Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 or users in all regions experiencing minor thumbstick issues, we now offer a user-guided self-calibration tool for thumbsticks through the Xbox Accessories App.
Please be aware this Xbox Update Preview includes the following experience or feature updates.
Capture & Share
Thanks to all the great feedback Xbox Insiders provide and the hard work of Xbox engineers, we are happy to announce the following fixes have been implemented with this build:
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Installation
System
While known issues may have been listed in previous Xbox Insider Release Notes, they are not being ignored! However, it may take Xbox engineers more time to find a solution. If you experience any of these issues, we ask that you please follow any guidance provided and file feedback with Report a Problem.
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As always, be sure to use Report a problem to keep us informed of any issues you encounter. We may not be able to respond to everyone, but the data we’ll gather is crucial to finding a resolution.
If you’re an Xbox Insider looking for support, please visit the community subreddit. Official Xbox staff, moderators, and fellow Xbox Insiders are there to help with your concerns.
When posting to the subreddit, please look through the most recent posts to see if your issue has already been posted or addressed. We always recommend adding to existing threads with the same issue before posting a new one. This helps us support you the best we can! Also, don’t forget to use “Report a Problem” before posting – the information shared in both places helps us understand your issue better.
Thank you to every Xbox Insider in the subreddit today and welcome to the community if you’re just joining us! We love that it has become such a friendly and community-driven hub of conversation and support.
For more information regarding the Xbox Insider Program follow us on Twitter. Keep an eye on future Xbox Insider Release Notes for more information regarding your Xbox Update Preview ring!
The post Xbox Insider Release Notes – Delta (2402.240118-2200) appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Alongside announcing that Lanny Smoot will be the first Disney employee besides Walt to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Disney also shared one of his newest projects called the HoloTile floor, which just may be a game changer for VR and could bring us ever closer to experiencing the Holodeck from Star Trek.
Disney shared the news and a video of the HoloTile floor in action in a blog celebrating Smoot, who holds over 100 patents and secured 74 of those during his 25 years at The Walt Disney Company.
As for the HoloTile floor itself, it is described by Disney as the “world’s first multi-person, omni-directional, modular, expandable, treadmill floor.” You have to think of it like a floor made of many tiles that do all they can to keep people or objects in the center of them. This could allow people to “have a shared virtual reality (VR) experience, walk an unlimited distance in any direction, and never collide or walk off its surface.”
Many of us have experienced the joy that can be a really stellar VR experience, but there are always certain limitations to the immersion that comes with it. While it’s great to be able to visit The Black Spire Outpost on the planet of Batuu in Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge in VR, you also run the risk of being pulled back to Earth when you bump into your couch and can only move a few feet here and there.
With the HoloTile floor, Disney appears to be envisioning a future where those limitations are no more and we can explore wide environments and feel that we are actually walking or running through them despite us staying mostly in one place. For those Star Trek fans out there, this sounds a lot like the promise of the Holodeck, a smallish-room that could virtually take our favorite crews wherever they wanted for some fun and relaxation between missions when it wasn’t malfunctioning and trying to murder them.
The HoloTile floor can do more than just let people walk on it, as it can also move objects around. In the video, we see an object being moved around the floor and an arm extending at the corner of the screen, as if they were using the Force to move an object. Yes, the possibilities of this are making a Star Wars fan like myself VERY happy.
The applications of the HoloTile floor also extend beyond virtual reality, as Disney notes “The HoloTile floor can also be an insert in a theatrical stage, allowing performers to move and dance in new ways, or stage props and structures to move around or appear to set themselves up.”
However, it’s important not to get too excited yet as Smoot notes “we don’t know yet where that will be used.” So, while we may have to wait a while to see what this tech could become, its an exciting glimpse into the future that could hopefully one day change how we experience our favorite universes in Disney Parks, our homes, and beyond.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Palworld – the brand new, sort-of-Pokémon, open-world, third-person, shooting, action adventure, crafting, survival, animal collecting, and other popular buzzwords – game launched on Steam and Xbox on January 19. It immediately blew up, selling six million copies in four days and instantly becoming a force to be reckoned with while simultaneously opening the floodgates of discourse surrounding intellectual property theft in video games. Since being revealed two years ago, Palworld – created by a developer named Pocketpair – has been commonly referred to as “Pokémon with guns” by anyone who has looked at it for more than three seconds. But as people dig deeper, they are discovering that Palworld is both a game that does enough to distance itself from Pokémon mechanically while also being a little too close for comfort to Pokémon artistically. So let’s dig into this controversy and figure out exactly what’s happening with Palworld.
Palworld is a hit for completely obvious reasons: it kitbashes a bunch of tremendously successful genres and previously proven gameplay mechanics under a warm and inviting art style for all ages. It’s got the third-person gunplay from Fortnite, the crafting and survival of Ark, and a ton of extremely Pokémon-looking — but not quite exactly Pokémon — animals from Game Freak’s beloved series. It also satisfies the lifelong dream of anyone who wanted to see Pokémon fire machine guns. It’s the game equivalent of a cooking video where a mom puts McDonalds french fries, Kraft Mac and Cheese, and Ore-Ida Tater Tots into a bunch of Old El Paso soft tortilla shells before serving it to her kids. It’s crowd pleasing junk food, but it’s also comfort food and it doesn’t really matter how innovative or original it all is if the end result sort of tastes good.
There are several less obvious reasons why Palworld is such a huge success. For one, on PC, where Palworld is seeing the overwhelming bulk of its sales, you can’t legally purchase and play a Pokémon game. You can boot up an ancient rom or jump through some hoops and emulate a modern Pokémon game, but Pokémon simply has no presence on the Steam store or similar platforms since the Pokémon Company has opted instead to only release Pokémon games on Nintendo platforms and mobile devices. There are similar games, like Cassette Beasts and TemTem, but there’s still a massive, largely untapped market for Pokémon games on PC that isn’t being frequently served and that market is clearly hungry for a thing they can’t have. And honestly, most of those people simply don’t care that Palworld features some especially derivative Pokémon designs – they simply want a Pokémon-ish experience on PC that the Pokémon company won’t give to them, so another company did. Palworld serves that audience while also throwing in a bunch of other gameplay ideas and themes that are already super popular on PC so it’s not hard to see why it was an instant hit.
Then there’s the more cynical explanation that accounts for a smaller but still valid group: Pokémon fans that are helping Palworld become a hit because they think the Pokémon Company has a modern history of shipping Pokémon games that haven’t evolved on the formula, run poorly on the Switch, and don’t get the patches and updates they need to improve. After all, competition breeds innovation and while Palworld being a huge hit won’t immediately force the Pokémon Company to add assault rifles to the next Pokémon game, finally having a big competitor on its turf may inspire it to innovate on a series that many fans believe has grown stale and occasionally phoned-in over the years. That’s what this group hopes, at least.
But even pushing all of those factors aside, one of the big reasons that Palworld keeps selling more and more is because people love it. As of the time of writing there are nearly 45,000 reviews for Palworld on Steam and 93% of them are positive. That means Palworld is a great game in the eyes of players and confident word of mouth around games like this goes a really long way. Countless established and popular game franchises have launched on PC, riddled with technical or networking issues that take weeks or even months to be fixed, and had their user scores tanked by frustrated audiences who couldn’t properly play a product they paid for. Palworld has its own share of launch issues, of course, but it’s also an early access game and the audience seems to be forgiving of them in favor of the larger experience which is generally well received so far.
Finally, there’s a much tinier but not insignificant factor I also wanna throw in here: people think that since Palworld is so similar to Pokémon it could get legally removed from the internet at any given moment. Pushed by that perceived ticking clock, they wanna get in while they still can. People want what they can’t have or might not be able to have soon, a concept you’ll be familiar with if you tried to buy toilet paper in April of 2020. Given its success, close approximation to Pokémon, Pokémon’s corporate connection to Nintendo, and Nintendo’s long history of cease and desisting anything and everything remotely related to their intellectual properties, you probably wouldn’t be unwarranted to expect Palworld to go the way of the Doduo bird by the end of the month. That was a bad joke and I am sorry but I had to get it out of my system…
Anyway, Nintendo is a powerfully litigious and thoroughly protective company when it comes to its characters and games. It owns a third of the Pokémon Company and they’ve spent decades working together on projects, leading many to wonder when Nintendo will drop a massive lawsuit or cease and desist on the creators of Palworld and shut down the game for good. However, Palworld is in a uniquely different spot than the typical fan made game that Nintendo tends to pull down from the internet the second it hears about it. Nintendo regularly takes legal action against projects that use original Nintendo game assets or even things like names, logos, and characters. It takes down unlicensed PC ports, HD remakes it didn’t create itself, sues rom distribution sites, fan art pages, and more, to the point that it’s become a running joke that “Nintendo Ninjas” will strike and destroy every time any remotely interesting but definitely unlicensed Nintendo fan project pops up. Just last month it got a PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening pulled from the internet for infringing on Nintendo’s properties, and that wasn’t even a game you could legally buy on Steam. Given that history and Palworld’s success, you might be justified in expecting the ninjas to show up and start slashing throats at any given moment.
But Palworld doesn’t use Pokémon sprites or models ripped directly from Pokémon games, or music or sounds or characters or menus, right? It mostly just uses a bunch of stuff that feels really, really close – like, dangerously close – to Pokémon without actually being Pokémon. Seeing them side by side it’s pretty undeniable how much they have in common, like seeing a box of Fruit Rounds cereal next to a box of Fruit Loops. Both are loops, or, uh, rounds, and the weird bird mascot character looks infinitely more depressed than the one on the Fruit Loops box. But if your store only has Fruit Rounds and you’re really craving a bowl of small, colorful breakfast circles being championed by an exotic bird on a bright red box (super specific craving, by the way) what are you gonna do, buy Cheerios? Or Tasteeos? Nah, you’re probably going home with the Fruit Rounds. Palworld is an amalgamation of ideas, none of which are wholly original, but none of them are directly dragged and dropped from a Pokémon game’s engine. And so, it’s hard to say if Nintendo and the Pokémon company have a legal leg to stand on here, even if they wanted to.
After all, is making a video game clearly inspired by other video games a crime? If it were, we’d have to throw a lot of video games in the garbage.
Knowing and coming to terms with the fact that no idea is original when interacting with art means you can recognize the two major branching paths these things tend to go down: did this product improve or evolve on the idea that inspired it, or did it just replicate it, often shamelessly? If you’ve played a game on a mobile phone in the last 15 years you’re probably familiar with a company named Gameloft. Gameloft made knockoffs of popular console games for a mobile audience who otherwise couldn’t play them on their phones. Games like Gangstar, a Grand Theft Auto clone; Modern Combat, a Modern Warfare clone; Nova, a Halo-slash-Crysis clone; and Shadow Guardian, an Uncharted clone. (That last one is particularly shameless.) It’s really no different than what the straight-to-home-video ‘mockbuster’ studios like The Asylum has been doing with popular movies for ages now. This weekend, why not unwind with a classic movie like Transmorphers, Snakes on a Train, Alien vs Hunter, or Jurassic Domination? Or maybe even check in on everyone’s favorite globetrotting treasure hunter Alan Quartermain and the Spear(..?) of Destiny.
Is there a huge difference between Alan Quartermain, Gameloft’s Shadow Guardian, and Naughty Dog’s original Uncharted series? Not really. They all heavily lift large chunks of inspiration and source material from the original Indiana Jones movies. Uncharted wouldn’t exist without those films, or at the very least it wouldn’t exist without Tomb Raider, which also wouldn’t exist without those films. But Indiana Jones wouldn’t exist without being inspired by old pulp comics, the Doc Savage novel series, and (ironically) the original Alan Quartermain books, to name a few. So you can realistically trace almost everything back to an idea that came before it and the lines frequently start to blur.
As for the games Pocketpair made before Palworld, the studio’s entire history can be summed up with the “we have blank at home” meme. One of its biggest games before Palworld is called Craftopia, an open-world action adventure and crafting game where an elf-ish character fights bootleg Moblins, Bokoblins, and other various enemies that look remarkably similar to Zelda enemies while also paragliding, building vehicles and contraptions, and doing the signature run up the mountain as the camera pans over the whole kingdom thing from Breath of the Wild. Craftopia does do a few things differently to set itself apart, but it’s all pretty shameless stuff on the surface. The paraglider specifically feels almost identical to Breath of the Wild.
Then there’s the upcoming Pocketpair title Nevergrave, which seems heavily inspired by the smash hit Metroidvania game Hollow Knight, right down to the color palette, combat, and traversal. Again, it adds enough new gameplay elements into the mix to kind of stand on its own, but if there’s an argument that Palworld deserves to copy Pokémon because Pokémon games are becoming stale and phoned in every year, can the same really be said for the Hollow Night and Zelda franchises? Not quite.
While describing Palworld’s similarities to Pokémon, I find myself talking about how such similarities are“on the surface”. Most of the controversy is around what people can immediately see and recognize as being something that looks like Pokémon. Looking at both Pokémon and Palworld designs as they’re running in their respective games reveals some similarities but nothing that feels like a specific one to one copy. But some folks have started to look under the surface at Palworld’s creature designs – specifically the way its 3D models are built – and that’s where a bunch of smoking guns start to show up. Twitter user byofrog took several 3D models from Palworld and overlapped them with 3D models from Pokémon and found a bunch with proportions that line up directly. The results are – at least on the surface – pretty damning. Now, this could all be a huge coincidence, but coming from a studio with a history of borrowing visuals, gameplay mechanics, and more from already established franchises, the benefit of the doubt starts to diminish rapidly.
Pocketpair’s CEO Takuro Mizobe issued a response to the accusations, saying “While we have received various opinions about Palworld, it is important to note that the supervision of all materials related to Palworld is conducted by a team, including myself. I bear the responsibility for the produced materials.” That’s a fairly empty, nebulous statement that is mostly just saying “we look at everything before we put it in our game”, which doesn’t exactly confirm the accusations or deny them. It’s saying that several humans are involved in the art asset approval process before they become interactive elements in a product you can purchase and play, but it’s not saying anything about the creative process that gets them to the approval table to begin with.
As of right this second, there’s certainly a lot of smoke but not necessarily a fire. But as people continue to dig deeper into Palworld, who knows what kind of stuff they’ll dredge up. We’re sort of in uncharted territory here (or Alan Quartermain territory if you prefer) but we’ve also seen this kind of thing happen tons of times before in the great medium of video games. We know how Nintendo and Pokémon’s legal team operate, but we know that it’s totally feasible to create and sell a Pokémon-inspired game legally without getting cease and desisted to death.
Riot Games have announced that they will shortly fire “about 530” people, or 11 per cent of their global workforce, so as to “create focus and move us towards a more sustainable future”, in the words of CEO Dylan Jadeja. The “biggest impact” will be felt outside of core development, though they’ll affect at least one major internal team – the developers of Legends Of Runeterra. Riot are also binning off the Riot Forge publishing label, under which third-party developers create smaller-scale games based on Riot’s own intellectual properties.
Solid Snake from the Metal Gear franchise is now available in Fortnite.
Fortnite’s V28.10 update introduces the iconic character into Epic’s widely popular free-to-play battle royale game. Players who own a battle pass subscription will be rewarded with the skin after they complete Snake’s quests. Snake is equipped with all his well-known gear, including his iconic cardboard boxes, allowing him to evade enemies.
If you complete all the Page 2 Quests, you’ll unlock Solid Snake’s Old Snake style. (The Quests will remain available until March 8, 2024, at 2 AM ET.)
Prior to Snake being playable in Fortnite, many were quick to criticize his design. Specifically players were criticizing the character’s lack of plump to his rear end. Yet, his design was not the only one to catch the eye, as Peter Griffin, another licensed character that made his way into Fortnite recently, raised eyebrows due to having a more muscular body than what fans of Family Guy are used to. However, Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane told us Epic apparently “didn’t have the budget to create his actual body.”
Meanwhile, Epic detailed additional changes coming to Fortnite with the V28.10 update, such as the return of the Anvil Rocket Launcher weapon and some gameplay balance tweaks. Here are the patch notes:
We’ve been closely monitoring Battle Royale gameplay data and community feedback and agreed that some balance adjustments needed to be made. Please see below for a list of balance changes that are included in the v28.10 update:
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
