Ignorance. Not Always As Blissful As It's Made Out To Be.

Tipa at Chasing Dings posted a lengthy and detailed review of Palworld yesterday. I'm sure it's both excellent and accurate, only I got about a third of the way through and had to stop because it seemed like I was reading about a completely different game to the one I'm playing. It sounded like a much better one, too.

The opening paragraphs of Tipa's post deal with the plot, backstory and lore of Palworld. It all sounds fascinating, particularly since I didn't realise Palworld had any. 

I feel kinda bad about fighting them now.

You might think the disparity in our experiences could be explained by the time we've each spent there. Tipa has put over a hundred hours into the game, while I've only racked up about forty. But forty hours is still a lot.

 Or maybe it's our relative levels. She's Level 43, while I'm only Level 26. Again, though, I'm still more than half-way to the fifty-level cap. 

You'd have thought that would be far enough to let me see the shape of the game and start filling out some of the detail. You'd certainly think that by half-way to cap, if there was a plot I'd at least know about it.

Thinking back, I suppose I was briefly aware of something going on in the background. Some kind of nominal narrative structure, at least. There was that tower fight with Zoe and Grizzbolt. At the time it seemed like both the end of a prologue and the beginning of a storyline.

Only it didn't go anywhere. I was Level 10 when I went into that tower and Level 11 when I came out and in the following three weeks and fifteen levels I haven't seen one word of any follow-up. Not a hint. Nothing.

The Tutorial ended and that was that. Since then I've just been exploring, catching Pals, building my bases and levelling. There's been no shortage of character progression but there's been no sign of a narrative of any kind.

Tipa explains there are five tower bosses, representing five human factions on the island. She describes this as being "told environmentally, by glowing slates left in interesting places." I did find a few of those right at the start of the game. They save to a Journal, which helpfully tells you there are thirty-nine altogether. 

I figured.

I was keen to collect them and read them but in my forty hours so far I've found just nine and all of those I found in my first week or so. I haven't seen a single one since. 

What's more, all but one that I have found have been part of the Castaway's Journal series, which only tells you what you, as a player, have probably already figured out, since you too are a castaway.

Even without written evidence, I had figured out there were several rival groups of humans on the island, mainly because I keep running into camps of them and they keep shooting at me. Since none of them ever say anything, though, and since there's never anything in their camps other than a single Pal in a cage, I've taken to thinking of them in much the same light as the generic bandits you find all across the Karanas in EverQuest, there to be killed and looted and not much more. 

Tipa makes their rivalry, based on entirely different and mutually opposed philosophies, sound a good deal more intriguing than that. I'd really like to know a lot more about it. Only the game doesn't seem to want to tell me anything.

I had already been thinking a good deal on the moral implications of playing Palworld, something that was made quite uncomfortable for me by having started playing the game at about the same time I began watching My Daemon. At some point I do want to get into that in a full post because, as Tipa suggests, it opens a whole can of very distateful worms.

This, I did not know.

For now, though, I think I'm going to make looking for those informational plaques more of a priority. Then again, given the amount of time I already spend exploring and the fact that I make a bee-line for anything that glitters, glows or looks remotely unusual, I'm not sure how much more I can do.

I suspect the prime reason I know so little about what's going on in Palworld is my unwillingness to look anything up, read any guides, watch any streams or do anything at all that might in any way give me more information than I stumble upon by chance by playing the game. Because of that sort of behavior, as soon as the Tutorial ended, my every successive discovery was left purely to chance. And that can be a very slow process.

Case in point: in an earlier post, I made a snarky remark in a picture caption about how you can make chairs in the game but you can't sit in them. In fact, as far as I could tell, there were no emotes in the game at all, which I thought was very odd.

What passes for dancing in Palworld, apparently.

And it would be, if it was true. Which it's not. There are emotes. Not a whole lot of them but some. 

What there's not is any obvious indication of how to access them. I stumbled across them about an hour ago, completely by chance. Here's how.

If you stand near enough to one of your Pals a kind of tool-tip appears to tell you can either press "V" to pick them up or "4" to interact with them. Pressing "4" brings up a radial menu of Pal commands. This I knew from pretty much the moment I tamed a Pal and let it loose in my base. 

What I didn't know is that if you press 4 when there's no Pal nearby, a completely different radial menu appears. This one allows you to issue battle commands to your active Pal but it also leads to a third radial menu, this time for Emotes.I only found this out by accidentally pressing 4 when I was too far away from a Pal I was trying to feed.

Once there, you can find not one but two sitting emotes; one for sitting on the ground and another for sitting in chairs. The latter is a bit of a fudge, to be honest. It puts you into a sitting position but unlike other games it doesn't automatically position you on the nearest chair. You need to edge yourself into the right spot first, then sit. Even so, the effect is pretty convincing.

Sittin' by the fire, the radio plays a little classical music...

It's not even as if this information isn't there in the game itself. There's a whole in-game Survival Guide, filled with handy tips for things you need to know. It even has a section called Radial Menu.

The thing is, I've been so strict about avoiding spoilers (Maybe stubborn would be a better word for it.)  I decided on Day One that everything in that Guide counted as a spoiler. Until today I never really looked at it. I'm beginning to think I may have been taking the whole "No Spoilers" thing a touch too seriously.

And it's an apposite time to learn that lesson. At four in the afternoon tomorrow, exactly twenty-four hours from now as I write, Nightingale will enter Early Access. It's another game about which I have made a concerted effort to know as little as possible. I want to be able to go in fresh with as few expectations and assumptions as possible, so my experience will be as organic and unmediated as it can be.

With every new day comes a new opportunity to learn.

Which all sounds very fine but there's discovering things for yourself and then there's not finding out crucial information until it's too late. I'm at the point now, forty hours and a month in, where I'm ready to start doing some research on Palworld, to make sure I'm getting as much out of the game as I can. Only problem is, I'm also probably about to take a break from the game, thanks to Nightingale.

If there's a lesson to be learned, it's probably that I need to be a tad more flexible in future. Be less shy in looking for help, advice and suggestions, when going into a new situation.

I'm not suggesting I'm going to go straight to an online guide to tell me how to play every new game from now on. I'm just saying that if the game actually comes with a guide, I probably ought at least to take a look at it. After all, when games came in boxes I was one of those people who'd read the whole manual, cover to cover, before I even logged in.

I'm not sure I want to go back to that level of nit-picking preparedness but I feel, just maybe, I might have taken winging it as far as it can go. Somewhere between the two extremes would probably be a better place to rest.. 

Now all I have to do is take my own advice. I'll get back to you on how that goes.