I mean i enjoyed palworld quite a lot. Id consider it a good game. Generally player counts come from either enjoyable gameplay or brain manipulation tactics like dailies/FOMO - palworld doesnt really have the latter from what I see. It checks lots of boxes for enjoyable gameplay - rpg elements, open world with exploration. meaningful collection, creativity options via base building, and some level of tactics/strategy in teambuilding and combat.
This looks much more egregious than palworld/pokemon. Palword has very distinct gameplay from pokemon and adds many features and gameplay elements that nintendo has never done. It’s much more similar to Ark if anything in terms of gameplay. The only thing it takes from pokemon is the fact that it’s a creature collector game and a couple of the pals look like they were generated by ai trained on a database of creatures from other games, but even that isnt conclusive. It definitely takes inspiration from Zelda, but again thats a few gameplay elements, not the whole game.
Gamers can understand this. Casinos understand this. But how do you articulate the difference to a court or actually legislate against it? FOMO is usually used in a predatory way, like with daily rewards. Paid random lootboxes are definitely predatory, but other rng systems can be genuinely fun. Not an easy problem to solve without stepping on toes.
Dailies are probably something that could be solved with targetted legislation. Harmful to player mental health just to boost stats for investors. Some games need to limit progression, but there are loads of ways to do so other than dailies.
It is missing too much to call it like factorio or even rimworld as you cant even set task priority or do much optimization, but it has the foundation and could certainly go that route with some major ai improvements.
Its easy to miss entire zones and dozens of bosses in a playthrough. You can kill an npc or make a dialogue choice and miss their entire questline in Elden Ring/dark souls. They intentionally hide these things so you could never even know you’re missing huge chunks of content.
Exactly. Calling atheism a belief just like religion is absurd. That’s like if I were to say underground lizard people control the government, then branding you a non-lizard-eist for not believing me. It’s not a belief system, it’s just the logical default when no evidence is presented.