Palworld Catch-All

There's been so much talk about Palworld in multiple threads, so I figured there might as well be a separate thread for all things Palworld.

I've been playing what I would probably say is far too much Palworld lately, significantly to the detriment of my sleep

At this point I think I'm 25+ hours in and I'll admit I'm starting to wonder if I'm reaching my time with the game though. I certainly haven't caught all the Pals, battles all the bosses or explored the entire map but I think the hook is starting to lose me slightly. The start of the game feels very open and explorative with the technology tree and discovering new Pals and environments. There's a lot of fun in the discovery aspect of how Pals work, how your base functions and the general systems and how they interact.

I now think I'm heading into linear territory though (currently level 30) where the breath of mechanics have largely been explored and now it's "instead of low level resource X you now need mid level resource Y" and "instead of low level production building X you need mid level production building Y". At the moment I'm finding that is taking some of the excitement out of the game; I'm curious if that feeling changes with some of the next set of unlocks or if upgrades are pretty linear at this point.

Don't get me wrong though, I've been having a blast and the game has been well worth the price of admission. I love how its taken most of the rough edges off of the survival genre and just lets you focus on immediately having fun. It's awesome.

I'm also really hoping the developers are able to keep momentum going on this game because there's a crazy amount of potential on top of what's already there.

I'm at 45 hours and still having a fine time with it.

Frost is at 60:

"Pals with fire powers are more dominant than Pals with firepower."

Playing this with my daughter on a friends dedicated server. I certainly like the game and hope they continue to expand it. We're sitting around level 32 and it's challenging enough at base settings but doesn't feel like a total grind. I have really enjoyed exploring the world. It's is MUCH larger than I expected and being able to fly around on Pals is really fun.

I assume this is on pc right?
I think at this point Pokemon and pokemon clones are a no go for me

Darkhaund wrote:

I assume this is on pc right?
I think at this point Pokemon and pokemon clones are a no go for me

It's PC and XBox (Steam and GamePass)

Does anyone want to play this together?

I set up a server and put a password on it if anyone wants to join.
51.222.154.35:25569
password is g w j (without spaces)

Hockosi wrote:

Does anyone want to play this together?

I set up a server and put a password on it if anyone wants to join.
51.222.154.35:25569
password is g w j (without spaces)

Might be late, but I'll join up!

No you have plenty of time. I just started a base and am level 10 or so in the beginner area. The server just went up yesterday.

Hockosi wrote:

No you have plenty of time. I just started a base and am level 10 or so in the beginner area. The server just went up yesterday.

Thanks ! I'm somewhat busy this week. So maybe this week-end If I got time.

I'll let you know. Add me on steam, you can see my link just under the like button.

Palworld has been a godsend while I've been on medical leave for a herniated disc (got a shiny new titanium one last Monday). So far I've created three characters/worlds on Xbox One X, mostly to re-imagine and re-purpose what I do with bases. Right now I've got the farm/breeding base, the coal/ore/production base, and the money making base.

I've had to re-think the money one since the latest patch made it to Xbox, though thankfully I had the PC patch as warning and made a super crap ton of nails. Experimenting now with honey/high quality cloth/various cooked foods for sale for a steady income stream.

So it turns out that if you want to *host* an Xbox game with a friend, you have to have an Xbox Series X. And it also turns out that the Xbox One S doesn't quite have the memory/processing speed to handle the current memory leaks or not-so-efficient stuff of the beta, as when my daughter plays Palworld on the One S, it does crash sometimes. So far, no crashes on One X, just had to reload the game at times if I traveled quickly between all three bases, because at one of the bases, all of the Pals would get stuck. Turning it off and on fixed it, no losses. This patch seems to have fixed all that. So when I started having Anubis after Anubis go on strike, I realized the temperamental boogers want four big baths to splash around in, not two, in order to keep working.

I haven't gone past level 45 content, which I'm re-reaching now, so I haven't gotten any of the level 50 legendary pals, nor defeated any main bosses past the third.

I love about this game what I love about Terraria and Valheim, though. I can play completely different games depending on my mood and current brain power (which has been pretty low throughout my medical stuff). Maybe just explore and fight. Maybe just futz around my bases. Maybe give myself giant projects to complete. Maybe a mix. Maybe find new stuff. Maybe just make fricking nails for hours when I'm brain dead, needed serious distraction from the pain I was in, and couldn't really follow tv shows all that well. That turned into stopping ranching anything but honey, making 1000s of nails, buying milk, eggs, wheat, and even berries once, and making an f-ton of cakes for breeding. Cause why not.

I'll probably start a new play through soon, with entirely different ideas for location and purposes of bases. Like it was very weird in this third run through to find a giant flat circular space without a single resource apart from one rockpile that i built over. For the farm/breeding pens/ranches/castle obviously. Raised the limit of Pals to 19 which seems to run fine on the One X, so that I can have the full production farm/ranch going with 15 pals, and add one or two breeding pairs. I did also raise and then lower the egg time in hours, which makes them hatch instantly. So much no brain fun on super casual.

Maybe once I've fully recovered I'll try one on hard. Why not?

And I haven't even tried co-op yet.

The inevitable has happened: Pokémon has sued PocketPair

sometimesdee wrote:

The inevitable has happened: Pokémon has sued PocketPair

For patent infringement though, not copyright - which is what all the haters were calling for.

I’m on work travel right now and just started checking it out on PC Gamepass a few days ago. I’ve been really happy with it so far and already planned to buy it, but was intending to wait until full release. I wish it was going to go in the pockets of the devs and not their lawyers and/or Nintendo, but this drove me to making my purchase immediately after I got home from work today.

vypre wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

The inevitable has happened: Pokémon has sued PocketPair

For patent infringement though, not copyright - which is what all the haters were calling for.

Yeah, Polygon is speculating (due to Pokemon's patents) that it's more about game mechanics and less about the Pokemon/Pals' design.

I thought that the accepted wisdom was that game mechanics weren't patentable? Otherwise pretty much the entire industry would have long been sued out of existence by the shambling corpse of Atari.

Unrelated question - I have a theory that this news will result in a significant bump in Palworld's sales, as a way of giving the middle finger to Nintendo. Anyone know a way I can verify that?

Jonman wrote:

I thought that the accepted wisdom was that game mechanics weren't patentable? Otherwise pretty much the entire industry would have long been sued out of existence by the shambling corpse of Atari.

Unrelated question - I have a theory that this news will result in a significant bump in Palworld's sales, as a way of giving the middle finger to Nintendo. Anyone know a way I can verify that?

This does a decent job of explaining the patent angle. Also, one thing to keep in mind is that this lawsuit is happening in Japan, not in the US.

Behind a paywall, but yeah, I don't do a lot of work on patents (more of my recent work has focused on copyright and trademark disputes) though it seems game mechanics may be patented and one of the most referenced examples is Warner Bros and the Nemesis system from the Mordor game.

I would assume that Palword's developers have already repatriated as much profits out of the company as possible so that even if they sue them and shut it down, they can't get the funds back practically. So good luck to Nintendo, yes they may ultimately succeed in forcing Palworld's devs to pay a royalty for any patent infringement they succeed in proving (subject to whatever's left in the company at that point in time), but at the same time, it will illuminate what more clearly what can and cannot be done for future works which are substantially inspired by existing works.

Jonman wrote:

I thought that the accepted wisdom was that game mechanics weren't patentable? Otherwise pretty much the entire industry would have long been sued out of existence by the shambling corpse of Atari.

Game mechanics can be patented, but it is extremely hard to do. It has to be something that has literally never been seen before.

MtGs "tapping" mechanic got patented (in Canada at least) because it introduced a new game mechanic that had never been seen (or anything resembling it) in card games previously.