Palworld. It's a game I played. To be strictly accurate, it's a game I played for just over forty hours, back in 2024, when it was the new hotness. Seriously, it felt like everyone was playing it. The title of my first post about the game was "If All Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge..", in which I mentioned sales had already hit five million.
By my next post the following day that had jumped to six million. By the fourth post a couple of days after that it was eight million. After that I stopped mentioning it but a quick google tells me sales climbed to more than 25 million during Early Access, with the total number of players estimated at 40 million, the discrepancy presumably coming down to Palworld being available on other platforms as well as Steam.
I liked Palworld well enough until I got tired of it, which didn't take as long as all that. Forty hours is a decent wodge of game time but other survival titles have hooked me much harder and for much longer: Valheim 358 hours, Nightingale 166 hours, Dawnlands 105 hours...
All survival games are samey. Formulaic is perhaps a better word. Palworld, despite having a new twist on the formula in the Pals themselves, still managed to feel samier than most to me. The Pals were wacky, sure, but wackiness only takes you so far. I can hardly believe it's me saying this, given my incredibly high tweeness resistance but after a while even I kind of wanted there to be something a little more substantial beneath the primary colors and kindergarten shapes.
It's also a bit rich of me to say so, given some of the negative things I've written about the inclusion of portentous, over-complicated narratives in MMORPGs, but I do like a bit of a plot, if only to tell me which direction to go. Back when I was giving my First Impressions, I said I'd been led to believe the game did have a story of some kind but in all the time I played, I never found out what it was.
One thing that often holds me in survival games is the building but I complained that the mechanics in Palworld were a bit fiddly and I very definitely got fed up with the management-sim aspect of the whole affair. It's all very well having Pals do your work for you but it got to be so it felt as if I was spending more time looking after their needs, to keep them happy and productive, than it would have taken me to do their jobs myself.
With a couple of years now, between me and the last time I played, my memory is of a game that started out fun before becoming first a little tedious, then quite annoying and finally something of a chore. Looking back at the posts I wrote at the time, though, it seems like I was having a better time than I remember.
I published my penultimate, full length post on Palworld on Valentine's Day 2024, less than a month after the first. At that point I'd played for 35 hours so I only had about another six or seven to go, not that I knew it at the time. I was still very positive about the game but already I had my eye on a replacement:
"How long all this can go on is less than certain. The world is curated not procedurally generated. Given time, I'll have cleared all the fog from the map, captured all the Pals, learned all the recipes... or I will if I stick around long enough. That's unlikely. I'll be surprised if Nightingale doesn't nudge Palworld into the background and after Nightingale there's going to be another game and another..."
My played hours suggest Nightingale did a lot better at holding my attention. I even finished it, after a fashion. But Nightingale was a commercial failure. It's still there and it's still theoretically getting updates but it's been downgraded to a single-player, offline title and it's in effective maintenance mode.
Or maybe that should be upgraded. An awful lot of games that require you to have an internet connection to play would work just as well or even better for many people without one. Palworld, for example.
But Palworld doesn't need to retro-fit an offline mode. Palworld is a success. A big success.
After two years in Early Access, this month developers Pocketpair made things regular with a 1.0 launch and as Wilhelm reports, players came flooding back. Well, some of them. I'm absolutely certain most developers would kill for 800,000 players all playing their game on Steam at the same time, two years after a soft launch, but it's a long way short of the twenty-five million copies they sold or even the two million concurrent all-time Steam high.
And of course, as I'm sure you've guessed, one of those 800,000 players last night was me. I'd been thinking about it since I heard the game was leaving Early Access, particularly given the developers were recommending everyone start over from scratch because of how much things were going to change with the 1.0 build.
The new player experience had supposedly been extensively re-vamped and there was even talk of a proper storyline. That sounded worth looking into, if only to get a post or two out of it. I could use something to write about during Blaugust other than Neverness To Everness and AI.
What finally swayed me was knowing I could play Palworld on GeForce Now. I'm really enjoying the stability and ease of access of the service. It feels a bit like when I finally succumbed to Steam - playing games locally feels a bit clunky and awkward now, just like starting games from their own launchers began to feel slightly old-fashioned once I got used to having everything in a nice, tidy Library.
Yesterday evening, having nothing much else planned, I logged into GFN and opened Palworld on Steam. Just writing that makes the kerfuffle about physical copies over at Playstation Towers look a bit provoncial, doesn't it?
Just under an hour later I logged out. I'd started a new character and a new world as instructed and I'd played through the tutorial until I got as far as the first settlement. My new character was Level 5. She had a dog, three sheep and a penguin. And everything seemed just the same as I remembered it.
Okay, not exactly the same. New things I noticed included
- Fast Travel Towers
- Quest NPCs
Er... that's it.
Just to be sure I wasn't imagining the similarities, I went back and read through my first First Impressions posts. What I described myself doing then was pretty much what I was doing now.
Character creation didn't seem to have changed although I at least managed to avoid making a sour-faced misery-guts like last time. She started in the same place, though, and I had to stop myself putting down the crude workbench and palbox in exactly the same spot, since it was clearly the best and most obvious place to build.
That led to me picking a really dumb spot instead, just to be different. I'm going to have to change it if I plan on playing any more, something that's still in the balance. Other than having a base in the middle of a bunch of trees, next to a ten-foot drop, where I can't easily place anything, it all felt very familiar.
Supposedly some things have been made easier but I kind of messed up my own experiment there by choosing the easiest, casual setting when I made the world. Last time I played on "Normal" but with the repetitive tedium of the game still large in my mind and this only being a quick dip to test the waters, I thought I'd try and make things as painless as possible.
Consequently, I can't now tell if it's easier or not. It feels exactly like I remember it, even with the difficulty at rock-bottom. It was easy then and it's easy now. I don't remember it getting difficult until quite a bit later. I guess it can't be, though. Unless it's all so simple at the start the settings don't do anything. Wouldn't be the first time.
Also supposed to have been tweaked are the progression trees or the recipes or... something. It's meant to be smoother and faster to progress at low levels, anyway. Once again, I don't remember having much of a problem with any of that to begin with. In my posts from '24, I certainly seem happy enough with the way progression worked then.
The first thing I noticed that definitely seemed to be new were the magitech pillars with eagles on the top that you can use to teleport around the world. You still have to be at one to use the system, though. It's not instant travel via map as it is in most games nowadays.
I recall traveling being very slow and annoying back when I last played, especially when I needed to get back to places I'd been before, especially when I was jogging back to pick up all the stuff I'd dropped when I died. (I have that switched off now.) Any fast travel, even a limited version, is an improvement on that.
The second new thing was a pair of NPCs, squatting by an archway by the path at the end of the first stretch of grass. I have a vague memory of someone being there before but I don't think it was these guys. And I'm sure I didn't get a quest to deliver a pie to the settlement. What is this? Misty Thicket? The Shire?
Someone - I think it was one of those two - also told me about the World Tree, the huge tree you can see in the distance from pretty much everywhere. This, by the way, seems to be a trope of survival games. Valheim has one, Nightingale has one...
And part of the trope is that you can never get there. Not in Early Access, anyway. I seem to recall reading that in both Valheim and Palworld the way will be opened when the game officially launches. Too late for Nightingale, sadly.
There's also a huge transparent dome out to sea that I don't remember from last time but that might just be me. It certainly looks more like somewhere you might want to visit than a big-ass tree, though. Unless you're an elf, of course. Or a woodpecker.
Anyway, I didn't head off to either the tree or the dome. I went to the settlement to deliver the pie. Also to get the hell away from the awful spot I'd picked to live in.
And I got killed going there. Of course I did.
Not by a mob (Or should I say a Pal?) I saw some wolves but I steered well clear of them. It was avoiding the buggers that got me killed.
I went down a cliff into a river to get past them and from there I had to swim. I couldn't get out of the river. The sides were too steep. That was fine. Since it went right into the settlement I didn't want to get out. Not until I ran out of stamina and drowned about ten yards short of the gate, that is. Even on the easiest settings the game can still punish you for poor decisions.
I revived back at the very start because reviving in the settlement wasn't an option. Then I ported back to my pathetic base and logged out. Will I log back in again?
Well, yes. I already have. I didn't take a single screenshot last night so I had to go in just now to take some for this post. (There's a nifty photo mode now. That might also be new?)
As far as taking another real run at Palworld goes, I can't say I'm keen. Everything about the game feels far too much like it did when I gave up on it two years ago.
And the Pals are really quite annoying, aren't they? If they're supposed to be cute or endearing I'm not exactly feeling it, which is the opposite of what I felt when I first saw them a couple of years ago. Their charm wears out fast.
I might give it another session or two to see if things feel any better further in but my second first impression is that even if Palworld has changed, I don't think it's changed enough for me.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment