Palworld Becomes the 7th Game Ever to Reach 1 Million Concurrent Players on Steam
"Palworld is now one of only seven games that have seen over 1 million concurrent players on Steam – the others include: PUBG (3.2 mil), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.8 mil), Counter-Strike 2 (1.4 mil), Lost Ark (1.3 mil), Dota 2 (1.2 mil), and Cyberpunk 2077 (1 mil)."
This game gives me weird vibes. The studio already had 2 other games in early access before this one, both of which are seemingly abandoned or at a standstill development wise. The gameplay itself just kind of looks like a generic base building game but with Pokémon and guns. Most of the steam reviews are just making jokes about the knockoff elements, guns, animal cruelty, etc.
I honestly can't tell if this game is actually good or if it's just a brief trend.
I've played it on PC Game Pass, and IMO, it's mostly shock and hype. After a short while, it becomes the same thing over and over. Capture or kill a lot of pals to level up and improve your strength. Then do it again on new pals for more strength. The base stuff changes a little, but it's still basically the same.
This feels like new world and lost ark all over again. Huge hype while twitch bounties are up and then the player base will tank. Hopefully I'm wrong since it's always nice to see small dev companies win.
When you boil down any game like that, they don't sound very fun. It's about the experience as a whole.
I see 2 games, Overdungeon (which seems finished or at least out of EA with positive review scores) and Craftopia which is still receiving updates and was also pretty well reviewed until people started giving it bad ones when palworld released.
I haven't tried it yet but it seems like a more polished Ark and that game is a massive hit despite the developers being just outright terrible.
They released a patch for craftopia Monday, Jan 2024, the then 3 patches in December and at least one a month before that. I wouldn't call it abandoned.
It's amazing. I'm loving the game.
I've got 14hrs played so far and I am enjoying it still. I am currently level 21 and have beaten the first story boss.
TL;DR Jack of all trades, master of none, but does a good job of mixing things together. 8.5/10 so far.
Palworld is kind of like fortnite imo: it didn't invent the monster capturing, exploration, crafting, or building, but it is one of the first games to mix them and it doesn't run like complete ass. The building is kind of basic, the exploration isn't too in depth but there is always something going on( you can find fast travel beacons, area 'boss' monsters, story bosses, dungeons, and there are pokemon throughout all of this), the monsters have some variety but they all feel like a mix of different asset grabs, and the crafting is simple (BUT, you can use your monsters to craft for you and take care of your base).
I'd say individually each of these things are rated 7/10 or 8/10, but when you put them all together it's pretty great. The crafting and the base building are there, but I just come back, build some things up, and then the monsters do all that for me while I go back to exploring. Last week I went through and beat Raft and Palworld is a breath of fresh air: I'm not spending hours grinding resources and crafting shit, instead I'm wandering around finding new monsters and locations and I come back and stuff is built. The crafting and resource finding isn't the entire game but it's a nice accessory. Similar to fortnites building + battle Royale, I didn't think monster capturing + base building would be that fun, but they have done a great job of mixing the 2. I find myself looking for certain monsters so that I can have them do certain tasks at base, and that's a win-win in a way.
The game is kind of janky in parts: I've had monsters fall through floors, some areas feel like they were ripped right out of other games (I swear some of the old, broken down churches look like they were stolen from elden ring), and the climbing mechanic isn't fully polished, but unlike other early access games it runs pretty well so far performance wise. I've gotten so used to games like valheim, cyberpunk, and starfield where the game comes out and just runs like complete ass (30fps or less) for the first few weeks. Hell, we were playing Raft last week and our host told us to stop building the boat more b/c he was scared the game would crash. I'm not running Palworld like I ran CS:GO, but it feels like a steady 60fps+ at all times which is really great. As a counter to that though, hosting a dedicated server is okay at best so far. There is a memory leak that has the game go from taking 2-4gb of ram up to 8gb+. After 8gb gets used the computer I have hosting it tends to crash and then I have to manually turn it off and on again to get things going.
In the end, I know I'm going to get my money's worth out of it (30+ hrs), maybe even double that(we'll see) and I'm happy with that. I'm not expecting this to be the next Skyrim/baldurs gate/fallout, I don't expect to play this for thousands of hours non-stop, and that's fine b/c there is other stuff out there I'd like to play anyways. Similar to Valheim (I have 58.2hrs of playtime as of writing this), I expect to play through palworld, shelve it, and if there are any updates in the future I might come back to it.
Usually i get bored really quick with games like that. I get annoyed when your character is always hungry, and when you're not hungry you're thirsty, and it takes 9 steps and 4 hours to plant one potato. Or you need a wiki page open on the second monitor at all times to even play the game. Palworld is really good at just being a good middle ground. I played for the weekend with a friend and we burned like 25 hours. Which usually doesn't happen to me. The game is really relaxing, because there aren't any stakes, the game doesn't make itself artificially hard for no reason. Fuck it, teleport with your materials, who cares. No, your animals can't die unless you make a knife and kill them. You don't lise anything when you die. So far i haven't have to look up anything. Sure i made mistakes but all i really wasted was some time, becuse figuring out game mechanics is fun in itself. It's really hard to rate a game like that. For me it's a 9/10, every problem i have is pretty minor and most likely due to early access. 8/10 is very fair.
Valheim still has 2 FPS on the 5700G (~ equivalent to GT 1030), while stuff like AC Valhalla, Satisfactory, runs well with low to medium graphics @3k.
This game will be dead in 6 months.
And there’s nothing wrong with that
Starfield was dead on arrival and was a 80 dollar game. I have a lot of fun but i won't play the game in a month and probably come back when it's don or they add something. Why does every game has to be a forever game? Imagine playing super mario on the nintendo and your annoying friend comes over to tell you: you know that you will only play this game for 600 hours and then it's boring?
We might very well see Palworld plushies sitting between Minecraft Lego sets, Fortnite lunch boxes and Pokemon Amiibos in the game merch section of online shops 3 years from now. And we‘d just shrug it off as normal because it made it‘s way into gaming culture.
It won't have the lasting power of Minecraft but what does? It is fun for what it is.
Idk, it seems like the type of game that'll have a small-midsize community after the initial hype dies down.
After a year though, who knows.
As is the case for most streamer-bait games like this. Know anybody who's still playing Only Up?
You mean not available? They renamed the game on Steam back in October I want to say when they took it off the Steam Market because the developer no longer wanted the stress of having a big game title
Man, people really do hear a phrase and slap it on anything they walk past
Yeah,just like the previous Titels of the dev
On the one hand it's kind of disgusting, but it's also heartening: this is a studio that had done nothing but asset flips. Their artists didn't even know what a rig was. They were completely out of their depth.
And while the game is the most cynical thing I've ever seen, its creature designs are blatant mash-ups of Pokemon, and its media hype is absolutely bewildering and somewhat suspicious... but by all accounts it's decently good fun and looks decent visually too.
So, a studio with no idea what they were doing managed to poop out a moderately good game and smash it out of the park in terms of success.
That should be heartening. That should say "maybe I can do it too" to all the hopeful indie devs out there. That should be a massive endorsement of the tooling that the industry has developed, that a completely unqualified group of guys can make a fun and successful online multiplayer action game.
I've played a night so far and prob got my $26 of value in the next few days.
It's fun and think I can spend some time on it. What else is there to ask?
Also, you know there's going to be mods to add licensed chars to the game so that should add another level of fun when you can ride Thomas the train to run over legally distinct pikachus
Thomas the Tank Engine.
I keep seeing that yellow Totoro everywhere.
I'ma call him Totoraichu.
Wartotoraichu
He is a bastard.
Me and my wife played Ark, and this is like Ark....but better. It's everything that I wish Ark was and everything I wish Pokemon was. It's a fantastic starting point, and I'm really hoping they put some love into it.
I don't know, for some reason I find the addition of guns to this type of game upsetting. But I also want to try it.... I don't know.
i played for about 3 hours, and afaik you don't have to make/use the guns. pals don't even have death animations they just get anime KO swirly eyes and you get whatever their drops are in your inventory, so you could even easily convince yourself youre just knocking them out like in Pokemon.
IMO the only reason not to buy it is the lack of depth beyond being a base-building survival game. I thought there would be some big story and grand questline, but nope. youre just dropped in the world and guided through base building and pal catching.
I've played it: Pretty fun for $26 and better than Pokemon games I've paid more than twice that for.
Can’t help but feel like this is the market that exists for anything Pokémon adjacent because Pokémon has sucked ass for like a decade.
Off the top of my head we've had Digimon, Monster Hunter: Stories, Yo-Kai Watch, Dragon Quest Monsters, Cassette Beasts, TemTem, Ooblets and Monster Crown. The only one that really hit it pretty big was TemTem and it was nowhere near the success of this.
temtem screwed up by adding micro transactions. and a paid battle pass. like, I've already bought the game and now you want me to spend more money like it's a f2p piece of junk?
I'd like to add Anode Heart and Monster Sanctuary to that fine list.
Coromon too
Its weird because except for the looks and taming mechanic it has nothing to do with pokemon. But yeah it probably helps to get people interested in the first place.
I get that direct comparisons to Pokémon might seem too surface level to someone who has played both. But let’s not beat around the bush: People have been begging GameFreak for something like this for years now. And I don‘t mean the guns, but everything else, really. There‘s a reason so many Pokémon mods are made for these type of games anyway. Really, players couldn‘t have been more obvious about what they wanted all these years.