If palworld had been called 'pokeworld' and featured the canonical Pokemon instead of pals would you still argue the target audience isn't the same? What does the name of the critters really matter?
Palworld is the RC cola of the game Pokemon fans have been wanting.
Edit: From another angle: what is it about palworld that couldn't have been delivered by a Pokemon(tm) game had Nintendo et al not been asleep at the wheel? (Costing them, so far, hundreds of millions USD)
Exactly. What I have seen from this game seems off-putting and distasteful for a universe ostensibly designed for children. I also do not buy into the Pokemon should grow up with its audience argument. There is another generation of children growing up, after all.
The violence really isn't any more graphic than the Pokemon games or TV shows. When you knock out a Mareep/Lamball, it's eyes turn into cartoony Xs and it rolls away.
I guess it's distasteful how the game doesn't sweep the slavery aspect under the rug, but that doesn't make the original IP any less problematic
If I weren’t already a Pokémon fan I wouldn’t have bothered with Palworld, because I don’t care much for Ark (the game whose loop it largely duplicates).
And the fact that Game Freak can’t seem to code a mainline Pokémon game that runs well on Switch certainly did help whet my appetite. If I’d been more satisfied with Sword/Shield or Scarlet/Violet, I probably wouldn’t have jumped on this one. Unfortunately, neither runs very well—particularly Scarlet/Violet, which was dumped rough and flat out abandoned for performance patches.
As the other commenter said, Palworld is not all that dissimilar to the open-world title Arceus, which is coded competently enough. But I like having more to do in my open world than just fulfilling challenge lists. If there’s story in Arceus, I peeled off out of boredom well before it presented itself. At least in Palworld I can build a base, etc.
So yes, my interest absolutely had something to do with the decline in Pokémon games for this latest generation.
It may surprise you to know that a) gamers cross genres on a regular basis and b) the Pokémon franchise itself is multi-genre (the card game, Snap, and Go! being big obvious examples). Genres basically just don’t matter to this equation. We’re here for the monsters.
People love the concept of pokemon and monster collection, and it hasn't really evolved beyond the same RPG formula in 20 years.
Nintendo has utterly failed to deliver different experiences in the franchise. There's clearly an appetite for it.
I don't think different genres mean a completely different target audience. Most gamers play multiple genres, and there's a massive overlap of fans of Pokemon and fans of Palworld in particular.
Nintendo is the publisher and co-owner of the franchise. They have outsourced development (e.g. Bandai Namco) or licensed to other developers (e.g. Niantic) in the past, and seemingly could have done so more often.
It's absolutely the same target audience: Pokemon fans. There's a lot of us out here that haven't played a Pokemon game since the early 2000's when we played the 3rd basically-the-same Pokemon game and gave up.
Frankly, I think Pokemon's adult sales are mostly nostalgia and that the gameplay or genre matters very little. Turn-based RPGs can be a lot of fun, but Pokemon doesn't seem to have notably changed since I played it as a kid. It also exists in a world of competition; Baldur's Gate 3 and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader are both turn-based RPG's. The Divinity series as well.
As someone who kept playing Pokemon (and who has casually played online matches since gen 4) the game did change... But not in good ways.
The mechanics and the balance got better (even if power creep is a very real thing). In fact, going back now, early pokemon titles are, mechanically, extremely weak (especially the ones before diamond/pearl).
The problem is that the single player experience is extremely lacking. The games were never hard, but as the player gained tools they became even easier. The story peaked at Black/White and then kept oscillating between forgettable and downright horrible.
The performance of the games has also steadily gotten worse, and Scarlet/Violet is the worst point in the series on that front. By a mile.
The problem for me, and for I assume many other players, is that it's sadly a one of a kind franchise. It's probably the one with the most content in its own sub-genre (there's very few catch-em-all type games that hold a candle to it), and it's also the only turn based rpg with a competitive scene on the market. I've probably collectively spent tens of thousands of hours on the franchise over a span of 16 years or so and unless something that can even get close to the experience pokemon gives me gets made, I'm kinda stuck.
I've never played Pokemon, but I have played Ark and BOTW. Palworld is like a love child of multiple games that I love and does a reasonable job at them (IMHO).
I am also an avid Ark player (Ark 2 can't come too soon), at least when I have copious quantities of time to waste haha. I kind of enjoy the grind, reminds me of a more manual and exploration focused Factorio. Get dino to enhance resource acquisition, use new resources to make new tools, use new tools to get new dino, and repeat.
To be clear, I don't think Pokemon is entirely the reason Palworld is selling. It's a reasonably well-made game for an early-access indie title, and it does pull the best parts of a lot of games.
My only gripe is that I don't love the capturing system and I wish they would re-work it a bit. Having to try to get them down to 1% HP without good control over how much damage you're dealing can be very frustrating, especially when you try to go back and capture things much lower level than you. It ironically becomes harder to capture low level things as you level up.
I prefer Ark's dual-HP system where HP going to 0 makes them die and torpor going to 0 (or max, can't remember which way it fills) makes them pass out so you can tame them. It feels like I have a lot more agency, and having to protect the dino while it tames makes it feel like a huge accomplishment to capture a high level dino.
The breeding system is also in dire need of some love, but I think that's more easily fixable. They just need to add some randomness when you're breeding two dissimilar species. I.e. you shouldn't be able to deterministically breed a level 43 boss (Anubis) out of two level 17 Pals. It's super cool that it can happen, but it should be like a 10% chance.
Just another data point: I never played or watched any pokemon but thought Palworld was neat. Just got into it because I like automation games and thought this would be that, plus pets. Stopped playing cuz the AI kept getting stuck on roofs and ignoring their assigned tasks.
Don't know anything about pokemon aside from some yellow lighting bunny and an egg that you capture him in.
That's why Pokemon is still popular, because it hasn't changed much
The day it changes will be the day it dies
Expecting an IP to change is selfish, because you want the experience to be different than the 1st time, but what you don't understand is there are new players every years who have never experienced that 1st time, that's called demography, that's what the pokemon's target audience is, they are constantly able to renew their player base, hence making it last over the decades, you are expected to play the game few times, then pass it on your kids, so they can experience the same magic too (similar to Disney)
That's not because the last game was met with performance issues that they have to reconsider the genre of their game, they still have sold millions of copies
You mention BG 3, but Larian studios did exactly that, their games haven't changed at all, it's still is the same formula, with a modern look, and it works, that's what Game Freak should keep doing
Hopefully with the Switch 2, they'll have a better time making it more modern, being held back by Tegra 1 was probably not fun for them
I'm not sure it's just that, some of their latest offerings are just really, really, really low quality. The original Pokemon games might not have been high brow adult media but they were well crafted enough that anyone could enjoy them.
To be honest, not most of them. It took until GBA era to get some decent mainline games, and the series probably peaked around DS era, both mainline and spin offs. Gen 1 and 2 have so many flaws that make them age really badly
(Something a lot of people don't know is that Mew's data actually exists in the generation 1 games and that it's technically possible to have it in the game on original hardware, sprite and all. The technical means by which one can obtain it is actually the same as the means by which one encounters the famous Missingno. I've personally done it in an emulator.)
I also see some gameplay flaws but they're mostly opinion (I'm not who you replied to, FWIW):
- Gen 1 had a single "Special" stat which was used as both Defense and Attack; this was split in Gen 2 to be Special Defense and Special Attack. This actually makes it a little fun to go back and play those games because some mons are just broken, e.g., Chansey so maybe it's not a great example. I believe this was a consequence of the memory size of the game flash cards being too small to support more numbers.
- Competitive teams from Gen 1 are determined by the 3 mons (of 6) which aren't on every single competitive team for the generation[1]. Normal is generally considered to be the best defensive type in the game for two reasons: 1) its only natural weakness is fighting, which doesn't have any good offensive moves in Gen 1, and 2) it's immune to the paralyze chance from the move Body Slam because Body Slam is a Normal-type move. The 3 mons which don't change per team are all single-type Normal.
I'm not exactly sure about the gen 2 games but I don't generally find myself drawn back to them. But I also don't find myself drawn to gen 3, for example. I do love myself a good gen 3 hack, though.
Gold and silver also had celebi hidden in the game files and it could be hacked in with a gameshark!
TBH, I don't consider the glitch list that you shared to be a list of flaws. I played the original pokemon games a lot, and heard all of the rumours about the game. Very rarely if ever did I encounter a glitch without seeking it out. Honestly the existence of missingno and the rare candy duplication glitch were enhancements to the experience when I had already played the game exhaustively.
> This actually makes it a little fun to go back and play those games because some mons are just broken
I agree! I really don't consider lack of competitive balance to be a significant flaw for the first games, since the game design was based around the single player experience. If all of the pokemon were balanced, I would consider it a detriment to the game. Half of the joy of finding new pokemon and discovering evolutions was to find these imbalances and use them to destroy the elite four, or show off to your friends.
As far as flaws, I was mostly asking from a game design or implementation perspective, because hard to replicate glitches that reveal hidden secrets and 150 monsters to uncover with some being ultra powerful was literally exactly what I wanted as a kid. It's also good game design, even if not 100% of it was intentional.
- gen 1 pokemon are very basic and probably some of the worst in the series (subjective)
- the games are extremely unbalanced, and many types have only one evolution line while others have a lot, there's no uniformity (gen 1 has only 1 dragon and 1 ghost line)
- the lack of physical special split hits many types insanely hard and they never balanced for it (i.e.: Ghastly line is a special attacker but is the only ghost type, ghost type is physical for some reason)
- gen2 is basically non linear for most of Johto, which completely destroys the levels on the gym leaders and the wild pokemon. The Kanto section has similar issues. And red is only difficult because it's insanely overlevelled compared to everything else
- gen 2 gym leaders don't have Johto pokemon (lol)
- trainer AI, especially in some instances, is very weirdly programmed (Blaine for example uses healing items on full HP pokemon for no reason)
- lack of moves means even late game, trainers have start-of-game moves ( blue has a rhydon with tail whip and leer, but no ground or rock moves. And an Exeggutor with no grass or psychic damaging moves. And he's the final boss)
To be honest I think the opinion was always generally divided. In my personal experience in the community, gen III and IV seemed to be the most popular, with significant but smaller sections of the community enjoying Gen I, V and II. I haven't met many people whose favourite is post Gen V though. (Mine is Gen IV, closely followed by Gen III and V)
I kinda think the Pokemon games are badly designed. I haven't played the last few generations, but my experience was that it was constant grinding, exploring was tiresome because you were constantly dealing with wild pokemon and trainers, the combat isn't interesting enough to carry the game, and there is no real progression. The trainers go from being total pushovers the entire game, to suddenly being quite difficult.
When I think of Pokemon I think of feeling powerful because my starter Pokemon could defeat any team in the game on it's own - to getting to the end and suddenly needing a well rounded team. It felt like a bait and switch. "You thought you were good at this game? No! You suck! Go grind forever to level the rest of your team!"
It feels like a game of rock paper scissors grafted onto a grinding simulator. It feels like they add more Pokemon and more ways to grind, but what I would want from it is keeping the same Pokemon I grew up with and am emotionally invested in, with less grind and more ways to feel like I am Ash Ketchum.
But I'm an RPG fan, so maybe these games just aren't for me, and there's a different personality which enjoys minmaxing and novel Pokemon who are the right audience. (I really liked Pokemon Stadium.)
I find it interesting that you dislike the combat in the originals but like Pokemon Stadium which only features combat (and horrid mini games).
Also I’m not really sure what exploring you’d want to do in those early games. I guess if you wanted to explore, I’d be annoyed by the constant fights, but that never occurred to me. The point of leaving a town was to get into a fight for one reason or another. That style of random fights outside of towns was also a staple of a lot of top down RPGs at the time.
I haven’t played a pokemon game in 20 years, but I think you might have been barking up the wrong tree a bit. Outside of the combat, there isn’t much to do. If you don’t like the combat, then it’s just not your game.
I mentioned exploring because I had a similar conversation a few weeks ago, and a friend mentioned they liked the exploration in the game. Maybe what I should have said was that moving around the game world was painful, but moving around the game world should be exciting and interesting (in my subjective view - again, totally possible that this just isn't the game for me, I mean no disrespect). Eg, the caves full of puzzles and such felt like a chore. But the puzzles should have felt intriguing and challenging. But I didn't feel like I was moving the pieces of a puzzle around, I felt like I was moving through molasses made of Zubats.
The fights in RPGs don't take you to another UI, play a long animation, just so you can try to run away from the fight. The wild pokemon are just constant. Way too constant to be interesting. It just felt like the game was trying to slow my progression with busy work - there's no challenge in pretty much anything expect the final fights, so why I should I bother? RPGs drop you right into the combat, so it doesn't break the flow and feels exciting.
Pokemon Stadium was more fun for two reasons. There wasn't any grind, you could get right into the combat. (I don't recall if there was a campaign and I don't recall the mini games, I just played free play.) And I wasn't fighting brain dead trainers who had no strategy, or yet another level one Pidgey; I was fighting my friends and family members. When I won it was because I played well, when I lost it was because they played well. It felt more like Smash Bros.
If there weren't so many wild pokemon and if the trainers steadily gained in strength instead of being totally flat until the difficulty rose like a brick wall, the game would be much better, in my opinion. Maybe instead of a model where you're constantly assaulted and need to be repel, you could be lightly peppered with wild pokemon unless you used an expendable to attract them.
That's just my game design criticism, if someone is enjoying Pokemon I wouldn't want to rain on their parade.
I liked Pokemon Sun and Moon and not just because I moed hard for Lusamine.
I thought it struck a good balance of story and gameplay and I like the way characters were revealed. I thought it was a huge missed opportunity that it didn’t take advantage of stereoscopy on the 3DS but I guess they didn’t want the 3DS to upstage the switch or maybe they couldn’t decide if Lusamine’s hair formed a cone or a sheet.
I have some software that works like Disney’s multi plane camera and have wanted to cut up some art from that game and make some stereo dioramas but had the excuse that I could only make lousy anaglyph images but now that I have the MQ3 I’d really better do it.
That's like saying Disney didn't mature with its primary audience. Pokemon isn't made for people in their late 20s, early 30s; it's made for and marketed to children.
I say this as a pretty massive fan of the franchise; I only skipped gens 4/5 because I didn't have the personal disposable income to buy a DS. I'm sure VGC[0] is the primary reason most adults choose to purchase the new games, among those who do.
Is there a goal to all of the surviving and crafting in Palworld? Or is it like Rust and 7 Days To Die with a good engine but no intrinsic motivation to play?
I think Windbound[0] does a decent job. Maybe not; I haven’t advanced much. But there is some compelling mystery it offers, which also seems to promise a payoff in the end. Also some clear milestones to hit in the form of “““reaching locations””” and “““activating things”””.
I never really “got into it”, as it were, but it has all the right pieces for a good survival-craft. Rogue-lite too, if I’m not mistaken.
The Pokémon RPGs are often criticized for being the same game over and over again, with only slight adjustments to the formula and more Pokémon to catch.
...
Compared to the calcified mechanics of a mainline Pokémon game, playing Palworld and enslaving a horde of adorable sheep to make assault rifles feels like a rush of freedom.
I'm a long time enormous fan of Nintendo, but it is a fair criticism that at times they can be overly conservative, and seemingly biased toward creating a very similar experience to a new generation of children rather than a new experience to existing, aging fans.
I don't much blame Nintendo for this though because it's a pretty reasonable decision. If I loved Pokemon when I was a kid, it's quite likely that a kid of this new generation that has never seen Pokemon before is also going to like it. Why not serve that new generation with a proven product?
The good thing for indie game developers here is that this opens up a gap to iterate on Nintendo's ideas for an older more seasoned audience that may be tiring of the same old.
There's huge opportunity here. We're now seeing a good example of the potential with Palworld, but before that we saw it with Stardew Valley, which brought iterative innovation into the space occupied by the overly conservative Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games.
Now Palworld itself may be fairly criticized for hemming too close to some of Nintendo's visual style here, but in general I think what they're getting at in terms of providing something new to Nintendo fans is totally fair and something that I'd love to see more indies do. There are quite a few neglected Nintendo franchises out there.
Another one that long time older players are quite dissatisfied with is Animal Crossing. We've seen a few indies try their hand at Animal Crossing clones, but none have hit the mark yet.
> The good thing for indie game developers here is that this opens up a gap to iterate on Nintendo's ideas for an older more seasoned audience that may be tiring of the same old.
Temtem[0] comes to mind. Remove power points per move, add stamina costs and reserve per pokemon; remove RNG (crits, random secondary effects); change up the type advantages, remove types, add types. The story even has a competent and reasonably threatening adversarial group! I haven't beat the main story but it's seems promising so far. It is otherwise remarkably similar to a main series pokemon games, in particular the metroidvania-like "movement ability gating", e.g., a surfboard for traveling on water.
But if one prefers Palworld to Pokemon, I'd suspect they'd also prefer Palworld to Temtem; the game play in Temtem is much more similar to main series Pokemon.
Oh, was it based on Pokemon? I thought it was based on Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna. Or Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. Funnily enough both of them released in 1987 and feature monsters fighting for you, though the actual mechanics are different enough that it's clearly just a lucky coincidence.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 77.7 ms ] thread- Open world
- Player leveling (via star rank in Arceus) to progress in the game
- Resource gathering and crafting
- Capture monsters with or without engaging in combat (stealth is a viable strategy in both as well)
Palworld is the RC cola of the game Pokemon fans have been wanting.
Edit: From another angle: what is it about palworld that couldn't have been delivered by a Pokemon(tm) game had Nintendo et al not been asleep at the wheel? (Costing them, so far, hundreds of millions USD)
An experience not bogged down by "brand safety"
Exactly. What I have seen from this game seems off-putting and distasteful for a universe ostensibly designed for children. I also do not buy into the Pokemon should grow up with its audience argument. There is another generation of children growing up, after all.
I guess it's distasteful how the game doesn't sweep the slavery aspect under the rug, but that doesn't make the original IP any less problematic
- Chinese developer with huge home audience
You get the evidence just by looking at what language people use in the reviews: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623730/Palworld/#app_rev...
- The gimmick: Pokemon with Guns
- FOMO thanks to the press attention
The biggest reason:
- Base Building Survival game
At it's root it's a survival game, that genre is nothing new and is a hit maker, just look at the popularity of games like Ark and the upcoming Ark 2
And just recently: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1326470/Sons_Of_The_Fores...
People's hatred for Nintendo makes them loose sight, nobody will buy "Palworld" plushies or movies
If I weren’t already a Pokémon fan I wouldn’t have bothered with Palworld, because I don’t care much for Ark (the game whose loop it largely duplicates).
And the fact that Game Freak can’t seem to code a mainline Pokémon game that runs well on Switch certainly did help whet my appetite. If I’d been more satisfied with Sword/Shield or Scarlet/Violet, I probably wouldn’t have jumped on this one. Unfortunately, neither runs very well—particularly Scarlet/Violet, which was dumped rough and flat out abandoned for performance patches.
As the other commenter said, Palworld is not all that dissimilar to the open-world title Arceus, which is coded competently enough. But I like having more to do in my open world than just fulfilling challenge lists. If there’s story in Arceus, I peeled off out of boredom well before it presented itself. At least in Palworld I can build a base, etc.
So yes, my interest absolutely had something to do with the decline in Pokémon games for this latest generation.
It may surprise you to know that a) gamers cross genres on a regular basis and b) the Pokémon franchise itself is multi-genre (the card game, Snap, and Go! being big obvious examples). Genres basically just don’t matter to this equation. We’re here for the monsters.
People love the concept of pokemon and monster collection, and it hasn't really evolved beyond the same RPG formula in 20 years.
Nintendo has utterly failed to deliver different experiences in the franchise. There's clearly an appetite for it.
I don't think different genres mean a completely different target audience. Most gamers play multiple genres, and there's a massive overlap of fans of Pokemon and fans of Palworld in particular.
Frankly, I think Pokemon's adult sales are mostly nostalgia and that the gameplay or genre matters very little. Turn-based RPGs can be a lot of fun, but Pokemon doesn't seem to have notably changed since I played it as a kid. It also exists in a world of competition; Baldur's Gate 3 and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader are both turn-based RPG's. The Divinity series as well.
Completed Pokemon Blue only using blastoise.
Played Sapphire as a rom
Bought Soul Silver at an airport to play on the plane to California to see a friend.
Never touched Pokemon again.
The mechanics and the balance got better (even if power creep is a very real thing). In fact, going back now, early pokemon titles are, mechanically, extremely weak (especially the ones before diamond/pearl).
The problem is that the single player experience is extremely lacking. The games were never hard, but as the player gained tools they became even easier. The story peaked at Black/White and then kept oscillating between forgettable and downright horrible.
The performance of the games has also steadily gotten worse, and Scarlet/Violet is the worst point in the series on that front. By a mile.
The problem for me, and for I assume many other players, is that it's sadly a one of a kind franchise. It's probably the one with the most content in its own sub-genre (there's very few catch-em-all type games that hold a candle to it), and it's also the only turn based rpg with a competitive scene on the market. I've probably collectively spent tens of thousands of hours on the franchise over a span of 16 years or so and unless something that can even get close to the experience pokemon gives me gets made, I'm kinda stuck.
To be clear, I don't think Pokemon is entirely the reason Palworld is selling. It's a reasonably well-made game for an early-access indie title, and it does pull the best parts of a lot of games.
My only gripe is that I don't love the capturing system and I wish they would re-work it a bit. Having to try to get them down to 1% HP without good control over how much damage you're dealing can be very frustrating, especially when you try to go back and capture things much lower level than you. It ironically becomes harder to capture low level things as you level up.
I prefer Ark's dual-HP system where HP going to 0 makes them die and torpor going to 0 (or max, can't remember which way it fills) makes them pass out so you can tame them. It feels like I have a lot more agency, and having to protect the dino while it tames makes it feel like a huge accomplishment to capture a high level dino.
The breeding system is also in dire need of some love, but I think that's more easily fixable. They just need to add some randomness when you're breeding two dissimilar species. I.e. you shouldn't be able to deterministically breed a level 43 boss (Anubis) out of two level 17 Pals. It's super cool that it can happen, but it should be like a 10% chance.
Don't know anything about pokemon aside from some yellow lighting bunny and an egg that you capture him in.
The day it changes will be the day it dies
Expecting an IP to change is selfish, because you want the experience to be different than the 1st time, but what you don't understand is there are new players every years who have never experienced that 1st time, that's called demography, that's what the pokemon's target audience is, they are constantly able to renew their player base, hence making it last over the decades, you are expected to play the game few times, then pass it on your kids, so they can experience the same magic too (similar to Disney)
Besides, they are already trying to explore different genres with multiple spinoffs: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_games#...
That's not because the last game was met with performance issues that they have to reconsider the genre of their game, they still have sold millions of copies
You mention BG 3, but Larian studios did exactly that, their games haven't changed at all, it's still is the same formula, with a modern look, and it works, that's what Game Freak should keep doing
Hopefully with the Switch 2, they'll have a better time making it more modern, being held back by Tegra 1 was probably not fun for them
(Something a lot of people don't know is that Mew's data actually exists in the generation 1 games and that it's technically possible to have it in the game on original hardware, sprite and all. The technical means by which one can obtain it is actually the same as the means by which one encounters the famous Missingno. I've personally done it in an emulator.)
I also see some gameplay flaws but they're mostly opinion (I'm not who you replied to, FWIW):
- Gen 1 had a single "Special" stat which was used as both Defense and Attack; this was split in Gen 2 to be Special Defense and Special Attack. This actually makes it a little fun to go back and play those games because some mons are just broken, e.g., Chansey so maybe it's not a great example. I believe this was a consequence of the memory size of the game flash cards being too small to support more numbers.
- Competitive teams from Gen 1 are determined by the 3 mons (of 6) which aren't on every single competitive team for the generation[1]. Normal is generally considered to be the best defensive type in the game for two reasons: 1) its only natural weakness is fighting, which doesn't have any good offensive moves in Gen 1, and 2) it's immune to the paralyze chance from the move Body Slam because Body Slam is a Normal-type move. The 3 mons which don't change per team are all single-type Normal.
I'm not exactly sure about the gen 2 games but I don't generally find myself drawn back to them. But I also don't find myself drawn to gen 3, for example. I do love myself a good gen 3 hack, though.
0: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Same-type_attack_bon...
1: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/rby-ou-sample-teams.36...
TBH, I don't consider the glitch list that you shared to be a list of flaws. I played the original pokemon games a lot, and heard all of the rumours about the game. Very rarely if ever did I encounter a glitch without seeking it out. Honestly the existence of missingno and the rare candy duplication glitch were enhancements to the experience when I had already played the game exhaustively.
> This actually makes it a little fun to go back and play those games because some mons are just broken
I agree! I really don't consider lack of competitive balance to be a significant flaw for the first games, since the game design was based around the single player experience. If all of the pokemon were balanced, I would consider it a detriment to the game. Half of the joy of finding new pokemon and discovering evolutions was to find these imbalances and use them to destroy the elite four, or show off to your friends.
As far as flaws, I was mostly asking from a game design or implementation perspective, because hard to replicate glitches that reveal hidden secrets and 150 monsters to uncover with some being ultra powerful was literally exactly what I wanted as a kid. It's also good game design, even if not 100% of it was intentional.
- gen 1 pokemon are very basic and probably some of the worst in the series (subjective)
- the games are extremely unbalanced, and many types have only one evolution line while others have a lot, there's no uniformity (gen 1 has only 1 dragon and 1 ghost line)
- the lack of physical special split hits many types insanely hard and they never balanced for it (i.e.: Ghastly line is a special attacker but is the only ghost type, ghost type is physical for some reason)
- gen2 is basically non linear for most of Johto, which completely destroys the levels on the gym leaders and the wild pokemon. The Kanto section has similar issues. And red is only difficult because it's insanely overlevelled compared to everything else
- gen 2 gym leaders don't have Johto pokemon (lol)
- trainer AI, especially in some instances, is very weirdly programmed (Blaine for example uses healing items on full HP pokemon for no reason)
- lack of moves means even late game, trainers have start-of-game moves ( blue has a rhydon with tail whip and leer, but no ground or rock moves. And an Exeggutor with no grass or psychic damaging moves. And he's the final boss)
When I think of Pokemon I think of feeling powerful because my starter Pokemon could defeat any team in the game on it's own - to getting to the end and suddenly needing a well rounded team. It felt like a bait and switch. "You thought you were good at this game? No! You suck! Go grind forever to level the rest of your team!"
It feels like a game of rock paper scissors grafted onto a grinding simulator. It feels like they add more Pokemon and more ways to grind, but what I would want from it is keeping the same Pokemon I grew up with and am emotionally invested in, with less grind and more ways to feel like I am Ash Ketchum.
But I'm an RPG fan, so maybe these games just aren't for me, and there's a different personality which enjoys minmaxing and novel Pokemon who are the right audience. (I really liked Pokemon Stadium.)
Also I’m not really sure what exploring you’d want to do in those early games. I guess if you wanted to explore, I’d be annoyed by the constant fights, but that never occurred to me. The point of leaving a town was to get into a fight for one reason or another. That style of random fights outside of towns was also a staple of a lot of top down RPGs at the time.
I haven’t played a pokemon game in 20 years, but I think you might have been barking up the wrong tree a bit. Outside of the combat, there isn’t much to do. If you don’t like the combat, then it’s just not your game.
The fights in RPGs don't take you to another UI, play a long animation, just so you can try to run away from the fight. The wild pokemon are just constant. Way too constant to be interesting. It just felt like the game was trying to slow my progression with busy work - there's no challenge in pretty much anything expect the final fights, so why I should I bother? RPGs drop you right into the combat, so it doesn't break the flow and feels exciting.
Pokemon Stadium was more fun for two reasons. There wasn't any grind, you could get right into the combat. (I don't recall if there was a campaign and I don't recall the mini games, I just played free play.) And I wasn't fighting brain dead trainers who had no strategy, or yet another level one Pidgey; I was fighting my friends and family members. When I won it was because I played well, when I lost it was because they played well. It felt more like Smash Bros.
If there weren't so many wild pokemon and if the trainers steadily gained in strength instead of being totally flat until the difficulty rose like a brick wall, the game would be much better, in my opinion. Maybe instead of a model where you're constantly assaulted and need to be repel, you could be lightly peppered with wild pokemon unless you used an expendable to attract them.
That's just my game design criticism, if someone is enjoying Pokemon I wouldn't want to rain on their parade.
I thought it struck a good balance of story and gameplay and I like the way characters were revealed. I thought it was a huge missed opportunity that it didn’t take advantage of stereoscopy on the 3DS but I guess they didn’t want the 3DS to upstage the switch or maybe they couldn’t decide if Lusamine’s hair formed a cone or a sheet.
I have some software that works like Disney’s multi plane camera and have wanted to cut up some art from that game and make some stereo dioramas but had the excuse that I could only make lousy anaglyph images but now that I have the MQ3 I’d really better do it.
I say this as a pretty massive fan of the franchise; I only skipped gens 4/5 because I didn't have the personal disposable income to buy a DS. I'm sure VGC[0] is the primary reason most adults choose to purchase the new games, among those who do.
0: https://www.pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon/pokemon-events/pokem...
I never really “got into it”, as it were, but it has all the right pieces for a good survival-craft. Rogue-lite too, if I’m not mistaken.
0: https://windboundgame.com/
...
Compared to the calcified mechanics of a mainline Pokémon game, playing Palworld and enslaving a horde of adorable sheep to make assault rifles feels like a rush of freedom.
I'm a long time enormous fan of Nintendo, but it is a fair criticism that at times they can be overly conservative, and seemingly biased toward creating a very similar experience to a new generation of children rather than a new experience to existing, aging fans.
I don't much blame Nintendo for this though because it's a pretty reasonable decision. If I loved Pokemon when I was a kid, it's quite likely that a kid of this new generation that has never seen Pokemon before is also going to like it. Why not serve that new generation with a proven product?
The good thing for indie game developers here is that this opens up a gap to iterate on Nintendo's ideas for an older more seasoned audience that may be tiring of the same old.
There's huge opportunity here. We're now seeing a good example of the potential with Palworld, but before that we saw it with Stardew Valley, which brought iterative innovation into the space occupied by the overly conservative Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games.
Now Palworld itself may be fairly criticized for hemming too close to some of Nintendo's visual style here, but in general I think what they're getting at in terms of providing something new to Nintendo fans is totally fair and something that I'd love to see more indies do. There are quite a few neglected Nintendo franchises out there.
Another one that long time older players are quite dissatisfied with is Animal Crossing. We've seen a few indies try their hand at Animal Crossing clones, but none have hit the mark yet.
Temtem[0] comes to mind. Remove power points per move, add stamina costs and reserve per pokemon; remove RNG (crits, random secondary effects); change up the type advantages, remove types, add types. The story even has a competent and reasonably threatening adversarial group! I haven't beat the main story but it's seems promising so far. It is otherwise remarkably similar to a main series pokemon games, in particular the metroidvania-like "movement ability gating", e.g., a surfboard for traveling on water.
But if one prefers Palworld to Pokemon, I'd suspect they'd also prefer Palworld to Temtem; the game play in Temtem is much more similar to main series Pokemon.
0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/745920/Temtem/ (I thought they had their own website but I think it's just a wiki now.)
I tried the game the other day and played it for 4 hours. I knew nothing coming into it besides “pokemon with guns” and I just found it to be awful
Do you like crafting / exploration games?
Describing it as "Pokemon with guns" overlooks the entire open world/survival/crafting part of the game.