The last Pokemon game I played was Y. It was largely the same game as Blue and Gold. This expands on the concept in fun, crazy ways, and it's got me intrigued.
The creature designs are similar to Pokémon but that's where it begins and ends. Palworld is a survival sandbox with creature collecting, it doesn't even have turn-based battles. It's far more similar to Ark or Rust than Pokémon.
If anyone wanted a game that "is but isn't Pokémon" they should look into TemTem or Cassette Beasts.
Different degrees of shaking up the formula. This is Pokemon-but-survival, and I've got another game in my backlog already that's Pokemon-but-metroidvania.
Yeah, but I would say that already makes it more markedly different, even compared to, say, Monster Hunter Stories. Sure, there's cutesy creatures which gives it some similar aesthetics but the gameplay experience is not even remotely similar.
Compared to Lies of P which looks and plays like Bloodborne, it's not really that close.
Heh, maybe I'm splitting hairs, but if you want a game "like Pokemon", they've been making exactly that game for 30 years, but there's only a handful of games in the ballpark of Bloodborne. If you want the fantasy of roaming a world, catching creatures, and battling with them, there are lots of ways to skin that cat that GameFreak and Nintendo haven't been doing that aren't at odds with preserving those core pieces. Likewise, I don't enjoy Monster Hunter, but some of its core pieces are present in the likes of Horizon and Mercenary Kings, and I love those games for taking the high level parts of Monster Hunter that do work for me.
I get it, but part of my point is that there are games that are very much like Pokémon for someone who wants 90% of that with a little bit of a different twist. Meanwhile I'm seeing some people looking into Palworld and going "Wait is this Minecraft? I wanted Pokémon with guns."
To be fair, those were so simple that they were barely a challenge when I was 9 years old. When I played Y as an adult, they probably wouldn't have even felt like puzzles.
Cause tendo knows they need tos tep up their game to even make a minor dent in the steam deck…Nintendo is just…meh lately. Overpriced, boring and bland.
Look, I want a Steam Deck from the deepest depths of my heart and I love what it offering... but this take just isn't it. The Steam Deck is said to have sold "multiple millions" of units, lets say generously around 10 million. The Nintendo Switch has sold 132 million units. The Steam Deck couldn't hope to begin threatening the Nintendo Switch.
Though in all fairness, I don't think it needs to. It's much more of a specialized device rather than something you give to your kids.
Doesn't come out of nowhere to my knowledge. It is quite anticipated game by many, as it was shown with trailers before on big shows. Everyone was wondering what kind of game this will be and everyone just knew it as "Pokemon with guns" where you can catch and slave other Pokemon like creatures. I'm actually surprised that so many didn't heard of the game before.
When your console is highly compatible between generations, such as x86/amd64 … maybe should just sale ‘the game’ and give users access to the older console version, and the version with any enhanced features only accessible on the newer console.
Maybe treating these console generations as though they're somehow super different is more trouble than it's worth. Meanwhile, PC games I bought 20 years ago can easily be run on new hardware at higher frame rates and resolutions than when I bought them.
Not in the rare cases when the company is owned by someone who cares about the product, who resists investor pressures. To some extent Larian, Valve and Nintendo manage it so far.
Decline through endless profit chasing only seems inevitable because profiteering investors are so thoroughly present in nearly every company.
And as far as legally playing their old games in the modern era, your options are to find an old physical copy or subscribe to a subscription service. There is no option to buy games individually. Even back when they did that, your purchases never carried over to their next console. They're awful.
They also straight up refuse to discount anything meaningfully ever. And actively harass anyone streaming gameplay of their games without their permission, and are extremely litigious about emulation that's clearly established as perfectly legal, among a bunch of other shit.
Nintendo accosting influencers who stream games is in this legal grey are. The people Vice gaming spoke about how their legal department cautioned streaming games. They said at the time there is no case law that covers this issue. And it is not known who how the courts would rule.
That's why "to some extent". Nintendo does some unsavory moves, but I'm not sure the point of it is profiteering, especially when it comes to taking things out of sale.
But you can't deny that they put out games of consistent quality, and not overly monetized.
Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you'll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products... without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.
Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I'd argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.
Caring about the product is not incompatible with making profit, but it is incompatible with maximizing profit, because then your design priorities must shift to emphasize functionality and entertainment to cutting costs and expanding monetization opportunities.
It's easy to see in gacha games. Even the best of them have to have to obstruct fun to make money, from the way they limit gameplay options so that people will gamble for them to the way that they gate progression behind repetitive daily grind so that people will keep coming back out of habit and FOMO.
Even beyond the monetization itself, great games require a willingness to take time experimenting and polishing, time which would seem like wasted wages to more money oriented companies. Sometimes it pays off, like Larian, but sometimes it doesn't, like the old Clover Studio.
I'm not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I'm sure it's much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped.. but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I'm not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.
Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I'm convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing "yet another one" in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.
Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics... but I don't believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I'd argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy...
I always just left trigger spammed to either center the camera or lock onto the monster. The claw always seemed a great way to give yourself some kind of RSI.
Unfortunately it inevitable. If a publicly traded company exists, it will have to extract more and more and more until this kind of rent-seeking model happens. And if a company is private, it will eventually go public. And even if you truly believe in a company's owner to not sell out, eventually they will die and the company will go public or get sold. Eventually, money always wins.
Epic can suck a fat cock. So can apple but at least I can choose not to buy their stuff. Epic just buys games and now I have to drop it because fuck epic or continue playing a game they’re activly destroying.
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