Some of them seem pretty bad. I feel like the example image with the eyes and the teeth is quite a damning stylistic choice, compared to some of their other monsters which look more like a palette swap and animal change with some model variations. Save for the few that straight up have the same attack, like the Deciduueye example, I think it's reasonable enough to use them for inspiration, although not necessarily the best option. It's a shame they felt the need to rely on something that is popular I think it hurt them a bit by not having as uniform a vision.
That said, even if I do think it's pretty obvious I don't want them to lose this if anything comes of it, Pokemon is just as bad and they have nothing to gain from ruining this persons work other than asserting dominance.
I do hope they use this as a learning opportunity for next time and maybe stop being so goddamn blatant in their "homage". I would have been much more inclined to the game if it felt like the monsters had some rationale behind them because the game is pretty solid overall. All I can say is that I hope the game continues to exist but maybe gets a more original in-world bestiary and not Pokemon Gen 15
Calling this one image damning feels like corporatized media has become so dominant, people don't really get anymore how similar things need to be for it to be an actual legal issue.
Superhero comics have a lot of characters that are obvious ripoffs of characters from other publishers and yet they are still legally distinct enough that they can get away with it. Comes to mind also how Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse to replace Oswald the Lucky Rabbit which, even though he also created, was owned by Universal. Both were rubber hose-styled. black-bodied, white-faced, big-eared animal characters wearing shorts, and yet that was also legally distinct enough for his ownership of the character to be established.
It would take far more than a similar face for Palworld to be liable of anything. Sure, it's enough for people to tell they have tried to imitate it, but by itself that's not grounds for legal action.
There are some claims of copying or tracing meshes going around on social media that could be an actual issue, but the validity of those is still questionable. The Pokémon Company needs to either point out a near identical design, and I do emphasize, near identical, or to prove that stolen assets were used in the game's creation.
I'd argue against the example image being damning in the first place because it's fairly obvious they're both derived from the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, which is well passed the point of being public domain
Not only that but they have entirely different body shapes and color schemes. I doubt a face by itself could be copyrighted. If that was the case a lot of anime would have issues.
For the thumbnail image, they took meoth face, purugly body and that's it
These designs are not "inspired" they simply imported the assets from a pokemon game on blender or something, used "copy and paste" for different body parts and that's it, job done that's their completely original creature, totally not copied
One thing that a lot of people don't seem to realize in this whole discussion is that, whatever you may think of it as far as artistic integrity goes, Pokémon only owns the full complete design of their characters and the actual game files, but not every possible independently produced variation or recombination of those traits. They own Wooloo but they don't own every possible roundish sheep-like creature.
To be fair it's obvious that Palworld's company Pocket Pair doesn't care about originality. But whether the are literally infringing on the Pokémon property is unclear, and a lot of people are making serious but baseless accusations out of snowballing social media outrage.
If there's any actual, real issue that warrants a lawsuit, you can be sure that the Pokémon Company's lawyers will find it out. It's not like they need anyone to defend them, we are literally talking about the biggest media brand in the world.
Last year after I showed off my brother the Steam Deck, he decided to sell most of his CS:GO skins and purchase with the money the Steam Deck (but 64gb model). It was one of his best decisions, because he was thinking of getting a cheap laptop to play simple games and do simple web browsing.
Me either, although a few years ago I sold some weapon skins and loot boxes that I received from playing CS Go when it first came out for enough Valve bucks or whatever to buy a couple of new games!
As much as I like Valve, Valve is one of the major player bringing and normalizing Lootboxes into games. Even before the Lootboxes was a thing on smartphones, let alone before they arrived on other AAA games as well. I think this is the worst contribution of Valve to videogames. And this statement comes from someone who usually defends this company.
I'm more than happy about the Xbox version of Persona 3 Reloaded...It shocked me that Xbox was getting some more Atlus love! If anything, I would hope Atlus saves the effort for a successor to the Nintendo Switch, which seems to be in the hands of some dev studios (based on rumors).
If it's optional, I don't mind if multiplayer is being considered. However, I want them to focus fully on making a rich single-player experience (my personal preference for games) as a lot of games that just shoehorned in multiplayer were lacking in the single-player experience. My interest is always diminished by the mention of multiplayer, I will take a wait and see approach when this sequel is released and reviewed before forming a real opinion.
I think even the more compelling games I've played used fast travel...Not as an excuse to reduce exposure to a tedious world, but to respect a gamer's time! I prefer fast travel to hubs and allowing me to make a short journey to wherever my next objective is. No Man's Sky has my favorite system for fast travel: Teleportation Portals which you can use to create a network of fast travel spots. It makes exploring previously settled planets a lot easier but still encourages the player to explore their unique universe. It's limited, but in an elegant way which I find to be pleasing.
I can only think of one game that made travel boring: Skyrim. The main reason is that once you've experienced one random event...You've seen them all as there's no flavor to those random on the road events. Fast Travel to any point on the map was designed to hide the blandness of Skyrim.
Even Hideaki must realize that travelling the same road repeatedly will become dull because one can only pack so many random events in a game...I hope that he makes for an option to even avoid that level of tedium in the extremely late/post-game. Else his game will become the very thing he's critiquing.
This isn't a necessity for Riot; the American Gaming Corporations are addicted to layoffs because it's a naked display of their power. If they were made to take responsibility for their bad financial decisions, CEOs and other corporate leeches would have their unnecessarily high pay cut.
It's a fair point. I completely forgot fast travel was a thing when I played Spider-man because I enjoyed swinging around. I think teleportation is often used as a crutch to get around the fact that travel does tend to be boring (hello Bethesda).
In this instance, we can see ray-tracing versions of Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and Half-Life 2, complete with higher definition assets.
So if you take old games and put in high def models and textures, and use raytracing, they look better? Who woulda thunk.. at least if modders are involved, the'll probably do a better job than official software houses.
Open world games need two types of fast travel. The first is your standard type, which is pretty much a teleportation ability. That should be greatly limited. At most, just for cases where you need to travel across the entire map, and should be hidden behind some kind of in-game explanation like "you're taking a boat/plane/subway" or whatever.
The other one should be some way of moving really fast across the map so previously explored areas aren't a chore to move across. Literally fast travel, and not teleportation. And no, conventional solutions like horses or cars is still not fast enough. It's still minutes of mindlessly moving from point A to B in most cases. It needs to be truly fast. Spiderman 2 actually did explore this concept pretty well, with ideas like catapulting yourself or using a wingsuit to glide long distances. Other games need to come up with someway of allow players to cross huge distances in in a few seconds.
No, it’s success is because it’s extremely addicting. Especially for people with ADHD because there’s so many small and easily achieveable dopamine hits that’s easy to get lost for hours.
I’d be incredibly happy if that were true, but it isn’t. We’ve had proper Pokemon alternatives since before Pokemon even existed and they haven’t slowed that shitty franchise one bit. Megaten is still niche, Digimon is still niche, cassette beasts (the actual goty) has an even smaller audience than those games, if this was major discontent with Pokemon cassette beasts at least would be in a much better place (since it literally released last year, perfect to take advantage of Pokemon’s unending failures). Gotta nip that unwarranted optimism in the bud, gamefreak sucks and will never improve, their fans suck and will never improve.
100% agree, lots of open world games these days make the only reason to explore so that you can find the fast travel beacon so you never have to explore the “open world” again.
It hides shitty and half assed world building though so I guess devs got that going for them.
I think it is more of a gameplay issue than a world building issue.
Fast travel solves a problem the developers create, needing to be in specific locations regularly to accomplish specific tasks. If you don't need to be anywhere in particular to offload collected items or to craft stuff, or return to someone to turn in quests to level, then you can just spend the time exploring at whatever pace you want.
Game design that makes repetitive travel necessary is when fast travel becomes necessary to avoid tedium.
gaming
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.