I won’t, unless I can buy one 2nd hand AND there’s a way to jailbreak it

That VGC site has a pretty good sum up of Palworld: cynical and souless, but nonetheless a pretty fun game to play, and I fully agree. Pretty much every design up to version 0.3 was fully copied from pokemon. The more recent patch that added the big island on the south has more original-looking monster designs, though others are still pretty obvious ripoffs.

Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.

They did that on Craftopia, too, only it was to catch animals rather than monsters.

There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.

Not really. There is a criminal syndicate, a bunch of violent hypocritical hippies, a corrupt police and some Borderlands style psychos, none “competing” with you, they just want you dead. I think only the syndicate would “count as team rocket”, but they’re up for all crimes.

This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.

Palworld became a target at first because of that visual similarity but, as much as the pals obviously resemble pokemons, they’re visually different enough to be considered original and a case on those grounds alone would go nowhere. Which is why Nintendo shifted from IP to Patent bullshit.

As described in the patent, yes. You press one button, you start riding said mount. If it’s glider mount, it automatically changes to the stag once you touch the ground OR to the fish if you fall to the water.

Palworld never had this “automatic change from one mount to another”, at best it was the glider pals that you didn’t have to manually summon in order to glide and went away once you touched the ground or water. I’ve skimmed the patent a few times, but I don’t recall it having a case for going from creature-assisted-gliding to back on foot

Yes, the more you read the patent the more you just want to grab whoever approved it and force them to explain how and why it deserved it, despite lots of prior implementations.

It’s the using a creature to glide that’s the specific problem this time. Not the “using a creature” per se, but “pressing a button to instantly summon a non-player-controlled game-creature to allow for gliding, which is instantly dismissed once the player touches the ground” or something like that in the patent

Legal battles aren’t exactly cheap and they can drag on for years. Pocket Pair could end up bankrupt in the meantime from excessive legal costs, while Nintendo can keep that shit going for decades.

The first attempt to sue was over copyright. Nintendo figured it had no grounds, so it went for patent bullshit

Fuck you, Nintendo. Release a fucking decent Pokemon game instead of lawyering the competition that’s offering a more desirable product

Still doing better than DC Universe Online, who still haven’t added “report player” buttons within the game, not to mention their “5 chat messages per day” (unless you relog) attempt to stop spambots, which works as well as you can imagine.

Adding to zero’s post, you can see most of these things in Castlevania SotN. There are very few times you’re stopped to have some dialogue and it never lasts more than a minute. There is one key item to open one door, everything else you’re supposed to explore whenever you acquire the proper skill (high jump, bat form, mist form)

Don’t be afraid of putting most content “out of the way”, away from the main path. Be sure to leave a number of “you need this power/skill” places around the “main intended path”, so the player might have that “aha!” moment when they get a new skill. \

Speaking of skills, don’t make them useful only at super specific places or situations. Give many places for them to be used and abused. “But this is too OP” - just put some situations where it’s not as OP, rather than giving a nerf that makes nobody use it outside the mandatory places. Mist form in SotN makes you invulnerable, super OP, right? Have fun in this long ass corridor (where wolf form shines, instead)

Personally, I much prefer tutorials to be optional, like you have to manually select the “tutorial” menu option.

On arcades, you’d get fucked by asshole difficulty. At home, you’d get fucked by asshole difficulty and purposeful lack of information. Took me a while to put 2 and 2 together and realize how “predatory games” have been around for a very long time. Can’t sell the game twice, but you can sell information.

Sounds interesting. Reminds me somewhat of Uncharted Waters, which is a naval RPG set around 1560. You could visit ports all over Europe, Middle East and Africa, probably over India and Japan, too, doing trade runs or living a pirate’s life.

I think I have that on my GOG account, I’ll have to check later. Also currently on sale there, too, super cheap

Sounds like Antichamber

I don’t even remember “where” I got, but I do remember I got to a point I had no clue how to progress. My party was around level 46, super powerful, but I just couldn’t find the right dungeon anymore

I still think about how I managed to finish it once, then tried again 1 month later only to be completely dumbfounded as to how to get the damn yellow block upgrade again

The funny thing is that LucasArts games were done as the “antithesis” to Sierra games, as the latter were chock full of cheap deaths and “Did you remember to do some little side thing 2 hours ago? No? Progress locked, fuck you” situations

So many failed nerevarines. If only they knew they were just an exploit INTENDED FEATURE away from saving Morrowind

Blackrock Depths was fucking big, too. Later on, with the LFG tool, it was separated into 2 or 3 parts, I think. I mean, running alone back in WotLK days, where you could easily kill everything side, would still take you 2 to 3 hours to fully clear the place

Legends 1 certainly had more “exploration”, as there was nothing to point you to where you should go. Legends 2 has neat red arrows on the overworld map, so you have a decent idea of where to fuck around, though the dungeons got much more elaborate. Fuck the Nino Ruins

I think Hexen takes the cake among the “old Dooms”, since it has a hub map and you have to revisit some levels to toggle switches that became accessible after toggling another switch in another map.

Looks neat. No info on whether this is done in any of the idTech engines, which would be chef’s kiss

The first 4 Tomb Raider games on PC/PS1

Digimon World on PS1, made worse by the fact that it’s a tamagotchi roguelite RPG. I never played DW3, but I heard it can easily become a “where the fuck do I go now?” because of obtuse/asshole time sinking designs here and there

The steam reviews are a fun read, too. It’s unironically an Overwhelming Positive

Yeah yeah, what about making the EGS program not suck for customers? An overglorified browser running on top of unreal engine, no user reviews for games…

The easiest way to force players to destroy their old bases is to limit the amount of bases they can have. Make it 1 at the first levels or whatever, raise it once they’re farther away from a starting area, but never let them build as many as they want, hard caps are a must in these types of games.

As for the blocky boxes, well, what did you expect? It’s literally the easiest, fastest thing they can do, in an area they’ll probably never return to. Why bother making something more homey or intricate?

The irony is that becoming a solo dev is rarely feasible and even more rarely leads to a product that pays up more than just working elsewhere.

That immediately makes people point to success stories, like Stardew Valley. Dunno about others, but I don’t have a family + girlfriend to sustain me for 4+ years, nor am I blinded by the dream possibility of reaching millions of sales when so many games struggle to reach 10k sales.

Out of curiosity, which games with TBC have you played? I understand that the most common problem with them is that it’s just a dumb numbers game, bigger number wins, which also means lots of grinding

Plenty of people will never experience these worlds or stories due to the turn-based combat

Not an actual problem. A lot of people simply won’t try those games because they’re old, others because they only know how to play Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite.

Having that music start without “OBJECTION” being shouted first feels so weird

Poor Rock’s been languishing for ages, with Trigger being abandoned in space for 25 years now :(

I have contacted the editors at PCGamer to make it read “yeeted past the stratosphere”. They have assured me that all involved will be leashed as punishment.

“You want to check my ass? Sir, I’m not a CEO, why would I have anything up my ass?”

I don’t need nor want to download the damn files in the first place. Most games won’t allow me to delete them either

Which sucks for anyone that doesn’t have a 8GB+ GPU. I’m fine with 1024x1024 textures, I don’t need or want higher res textures, I want good framerates

I remember a similar story some time ago, of another map that was just a big arena filled to the brim with all the enemies. Part of the strategy was circle strafing the whole place while enemies killed one another, then using the ammo to deal with whatever was left. Can’t remember the map name

I find that very likely, which will be extremely on character, as Oblivion was the first single player game to sell cosmetic DLC: horse armor.

Still better than magic in Skyrim, which by level 10 wouldn’t be causing enough damage even on mudcrabs anymore

Same reason people still use Unity after the whole shitfest on “per install tax”: large community, huge knowledge base, tutorials everywhere, professional courses that focus on it.

Kinda ironic that the Unreal Tournament games (99, 2004, 3) were all incredibly optimized.

A more apt comparison would be with film reviewers. Before the internet, knowing what a movie was about, if you didn’t care about spoilers, would require either someone watching and telling you, or reading a piece on a newspaper (or, in some places, watching TV). It’s almost the same with “professional” game reviews and how they completely lost space to random dudes on the internet.

Also, watching a video usually feels more like entertainment, whereas reading a review or walkthrough feels more like doing some research.