Palworld - Everything you have ever wanted from a Pokemon game

[Brabbit Narp]

Yeah, I know now. Egg on my face. The best part is the Grizzbolt functions like a normal Pal, and can be assigned to anything a regular Grizzbolt is eligible for.
View attachment 5711039
Also have to correct myself, dark eggs do not like campfires and sunlight. +1 on heat scale is too much for them.

Spoiler

View attachment 5711044

My most recent hatch. Getting specific traits on these is becoming a bit too much of a pain in the ass, so I'm ok with settling for "good enough".

Indeed. That's my focus as well.

It's all well and good to breed good mons, but at someone you got to step back and take them out for a spin.

Sometimes, perfect is the enemy of good, and breeding is one of those occasions. I've done a bit of breeding, but I have been more or less going fine with my old standbys with little issue. To be sure, a better bred mon would kick more ass. But I like going it with my buddies. Shame I can't boost em or switch out their passive skills. Would be nice to upgrade em besides using pal souls. Hopefully something will come in the future, be it either a mod or update.

In other news, I died in my first attempt to battle and capture the Jet Dragon.

Alas, I underestimated its strength and overestimated how long my armor and assault rifle could hold up for. Both broke during battle, and I was left slamming shotgun rounds to the face of it, doing scratch damage.

I probably could have held out a little longer, if I didn't roll into a terrain feature. My mons were doing decent, if not great damage. And I had plenty of excellent quality spheres to capture the drake. But woe to me, sometimes you just roll into a bad terrain feature. Mostly my fault for not being aware enough, but shit happens. At least I got close, and still have more ammo to spare. Soon as I get things upgraded and repaired, I'll be back, and that dragon will be mine.

One more thing. I lost a damned shiny sheep to my base mons. I just lost the fight to the dragon, so I respawned at one of my bases to recoup my losses when I heard the jingle. Alas, all I had at that base were basic bitch pal balls, and the weapons I had on me were too powerful for the lamb. So I went in with my fists, and for whatever reason, there were base mons outside the damn walls.

Needless to say, they smoked the lamb before I even had the ball ready to toss. Damn rascals were too enthusiastic at their jobs.

Oh well. At least I have another shiny lamball I caught earlier in the game.

When I get back, I need to smoke the remaining three bosses from the PIDF, the Genetic Institute, and the Eternal Flame dude. I think I'll just focus on capturing them before that's patched out, then focus on beating their asses into the dirt.

 

[macrodegenerate]

Jetragon is the most insane fight. The OST for this game has no right to be this good. It just comes out of nowhere after you take that first shot.

Edit:I just realized there's barely any field music in the game outside of combat. It's just ambient sound.

 

[Male Idiot]

Okey, long time no checking in: Is it worth buying, after Kiwis had experience with it?

 

[Brabbit Narp]

Okey, long time no checking in: Is it worth buying, after Kiwis had experience with it?

I'd say for the price, it's definitely better than the triple A shlock that you will find out there. I've definitely had my fun with it thus far, putting in over 75-80 hours into the game.

That said, it isn't for everyone. If Ark with Pokemon ain't your thing, you might wish to look elsewhere. You may also wish to see Palworld's competition in the form of games like Enshrouded, another survival like game that has its own innovations unique to it. There is no reason why you can't purchase both, however, since they are roughly at the same price of around $30-35. Which means you can have *two* good games for the prices of a shitty AAA one.

I bought into the hype earlier, based both on the trailers, and a long standing desire to sate my want for some decent monster game with "pals" (Pun intended.) you could play with, seeing as Pokemon lost me all the way from Black & White onward. For once, I broke my longstanding rule of not purchasing EA games or jumping into one without any good reviews/six month wait period. Thus far, I have not regretted my purchase. But that could change if they decide to turn this into a live service game, or are bought by one of the megalith publishers that will do so anyway, so keep that in mind when making your purchase.

If you make your purchase now, your money will mostly be sent to support the devs as is.

There's a decent amount to do, and you'll be kept busy with a decent gameplay loop. With any luck, more is to come as the devs update the game.

So personally, I would say yes. Just keep in mind that Steam's two hour refund policy won't give you the full shebang for the entire experience. Watch some gameplay vids, see if it is for you, and then make your decision.

One thing's for sure, I rather my money and fun support PocketPair than whatever shit is peddled out by the big ones.

 

[Male Idiot]

I liked Conan Exiles, which was basically this, but with barbarians enslaving each other and building villages, putting the slaves to the test. This looks like the anime and guns version of it. I'm not a big fan of pokey-mans, but the guns and survival looks rather decent a combo.

Got a few questions.
How grindy is the game?
How good are the pals at defending your base, if the AI/other players attack it? Conan ones were pretty mid with only attacking enemies nearby.
Does your game progress while online? And if so, how well does crafting do in that case? Do I need to worry about my base getting raided by npcs or my Chu-s starving to death while offline?

 

[Judge Dredd]

Okey, long time no checking in: Is it worth buying, after Kiwis had experience with it?

Cop out answer. It depends on your expectations.

First thing I'll say is the game is unfinished. I won't judge it on what it can be, but what it is currently.

Memes and "controversy" aside, what you're getting is a pretty good game with a decent chunk of content. I normally hate games like this (eg 7 days to die), but I like this one, mostly. The grind that does exist can mostly be bypassed by bumping things like resource drop rates. Even with that there are distinct road blocks that you'll hit. Like the mid game ore grind.

 

[Brabbit Narp]

I liked Conan Exiles, which was basically this, but with barbarians enslaving each other and building villages, putting the slaves to the test. This looks like the anime and guns version of it. I'm not a big fan of pokey-mans, but the guns and survival looks rather decent a combo.

Got a few questions.
How grindy is the game?
How good are the pals at defending your base, if the AI/other players attack it? Conan ones were pretty mid with only attacking enemies nearby.
Does your game progress while online? And if so, how well does crafting do in that case? Do I need to worry about my base getting raided by npcs or my Chu-s starving to death while offline?

To answer your first question, it varies. The game has a surprising amount of sliders for different settings in the game, such as adjusting the amount of time it takes for breeding eggs to hatch, the amount of resources you can get per kill, how many mobs may spawn per instance, the frequency of raids, and other such settings that provide an astonishing, if welcome amount of freedom to tweak the game the way you want it to play.

I personally play on the "default" normal settings, sans a few adjustments to turning off building degradation and a few other quality of life shifts to adjust for my single player session, and otherwise to adjust for the grind.

Pals can be decent defending your base, often curbstomping enemy raiders without your input.

However, this comes with the caveat that they don't level the same as you out on the field. I notice when you conquer a tower for a certain region, you get additional raid enemies from those regions that are of the level they come from, meaning you could wind up for an unpleasant surprise when you just beat a tower boss and find yourself raided by lvl.40 dudes coming to stomp your lvl.25 workers. Adjust your defenses and abuse the pathfinding accordingly, and you'll be fine.

Beyond that, I can't speak for the multiplayer, but Dredd seems on the money otherwise based on what I have seen from gameplay multiplayer footage.

 

[Puff]

However, this comes with the caveat that they don't level the same as you out on the field. I notice when you conquer a tower for a certain region, you get additional raid enemies from those regions that are of the level they come from, meaning you could wind up for an unpleasant surprise when you just beat a tower boss and find yourself raided by lvl.40 dudes coming to stomp your lvl.25 workers. Adjust your defenses and abuse the pathfinding accordingly, and you'll be fine.

The fourth time in an hour I was getting raided by a few dozen guys with flamethrowers I decided to check if the battle simulated when you were away from base, so I fast traveled halfway across the map and waited for the raid notification to clear.
Turns out that it doesn't and this is a pretty easy way to only deal with NPC raids when you want to.

Edit: I might've accidentally had my difficulty set to "Hard".... If I just start steamrolling everything after messing with the settings, I'm going to be a bit disappointed.

 

[Noebel]

Does your game progress while online?

Only if you're playing on a dedicated server, I think. Othervise, when host unlogs, everything freezes. Howevr, even if it doesn't, food sequrity isn't a problem. Early in the game you'll learn how to build a berry field. This would be more than enough early on, and later you'll just build another one. I have two of those support a base of 15, while still slowly growing sulprus. Berries themselves aren't very nutricious, meaning your guys would take eating breaks more often, but this process can be easly automated, no input from you. They only starve to death if they get stuck on the landscape.
Raids now are only npcs, only when you are at your base. Early on those can be an opportunity to see or catch some creatures from quite afar. Experience very much depends on the surrounding landscape. They might stuck at an elevation/go on a whaky Todd Howard's pathfinding adventure, or pour down from a higher ground and start fucking shit up almost instantly, if it's not too high. An advice: don't dedicate yourself to building from wood. Just build yourself a box to start off, and wait till you unlock building from stone, which is as abundant as the wood, but won't catch on fire. Raids can be turned off in the world settings.
Another advice: turn off dropping anything on death. The menu doesn't have an option to take canadian panacea and respawn for nothing. There is a possibility to dodge-roll into a big stone or fall through the map.

 

[macrodegenerate]

I liked Conan Exiles, which was basically this, but with barbarians enslaving each other and building villages, putting the slaves to the test. This looks like the anime and guns version of it. I'm not a big fan of pokey-mans, but the guns and survival looks rather decent a combo.

Got a few questions.
How grindy is the game?
How good are the pals at defending your base, if the AI/other players attack it? Conan ones were pretty mid with only attacking enemies nearby.
Does your game progress while online? And if so, how well does crafting do in that case? Do I need to worry about my base getting raided by npcs or my Chu-s starving to death while offline?

The major theme of Palworld's gameplay is that you are not required to fully engage with gameplay mechanics to be effective;however, the amount of time and effort you spend engaging with those mechanics the more enjoyable and effortless they become.

You have the choice to grind your Pals to make combat easy, or you have the option of becoming good at combat to succeed while combat is difficult. There's not really anything like the mounted combat system in this game, and I would recommend engaging with that.

Leveling up your pals isn't a grind because experience scales with your overall level, you can also up XP rates and drop rates.

You can modify difficulty settings and drop quantities for resources. Overall difficulty is your choice and you can make it as much or as little as a grind as possible. Breeding is a grind, but on a dedicated server you can set hatch times to near instantly. You don't need breeding to win though, and I think it's only used to brag. You can also speed up manufacturing to instant.

 

[Puff]

How much ammo should I have to go for the boss towers? Just got my Assault Rifle and am tired of their shit.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

Once I got to lvl 45 and grinded the Pals in my base to 35 minimum, raids have become a breeze. Especially since the only thing any raids can do is run into a corner of the lake I built my base by and then attack from that spot, at which point any attack with a decent sized aoe effect effectively massacres the group attacking.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

How much ammo should I have to go for the boss towers? Just got my Assault Rifle and am tired of their shit.

Ideally you want to have enough rounds to go from full durability to 0, wich in AR's case is 3000 I think. I prefer the pump shotty, but that's 100% personal bias. I simply love shotguns. Plus the 28 round clip on the AR isn't doing it any favors. I prefer it even despite the fact that I found a purple AR schematic while the shotgun is blue.

Okey, long time no checking in: Is it worth buying, after Kiwis had experience with it?

It's hard to describe properly. For me, Palworld takes care of multiple itches that I could previously only scratch in other, separate games. Open world exploration from Skyrim, scavenging and base building autism from Fallout 4 and The Settlers, survival from Terraria, and item/pal hunting/tweaking & build/skill optimization from fucking Diablo 2. When you think about it, breeding and condensing is basically like testing and using recipes from the Horadric Cube. There are a lot of gripes, but they're pretty much all related to it being an alpha.
I also greatly appreciate it being a perfect singleplayer experience with no GAAS, no daily logins, no MTX and other such bullshit. The older you get, the more you acknowledge how good it feels to be able to pause and quit the game any time you want without penalties.
edit: oh yeah, currently sitting at over 120 hours. Not even DRG sucked me in this hard.

 

[I'm Really Feeling It]

Seeing Depresso actually depresso from overworking day and night has given me mini-trauma. It no longer works in our scuffed base.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

I liked Conan Exiles, which was basically this, but with barbarians enslaving each other and building villages, putting the slaves to the test. This looks like the anime and guns version of it. I'm not a big fan of pokey-mans, but the guns and survival looks rather decent a combo.

Got a few questions.
How grindy is the game?
How good are the pals at defending your base, if the AI/other players attack it? Conan ones were pretty mid with only attacking enemies nearby.
Does your game progress while online? And if so, how well does crafting do in that case? Do I need to worry about my base getting raided by npcs or my Chu-s starving to death while offline?

My friends and I have a multiplayer server and it's pretty fun. We mostly just trade stuff and give away hand-me-downs to people just starting because it's fun watching them hit above their weight. Of all the things in the game multiplayer has the most early access feel to it though.

I fall through the world way more often than I did in single player meaning that sometimes I just have to reload until the game gets it's shit together.
There's no PVP but they said that it's a priority they're working on, right now there's really nothing you can do that fucks with anyone else's shit.
Guilds seem useless and are determent to an individual player because the 3 base limit counts for the entire guild. Trading things isn't hard because anything you toss on the ground can be picked up by someone else.
The AI really struggles to fight multiple people and switches what it's attacking constantly, which is pretty funny when you get 3 or 4 people gunning for something at the same time. We had a level 34, a level 26 and a level 15 taking on level 40 stuff and everyone felt useful one way or another, even if it was just drawing an attack for a second.
On that note leveling is weird, you'd expect the guy sitting at level 15 to power level hard but it looks like experience from big kills scales to your level. Might calculate how much damage you're doing too but I'm not sure.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

Seeing Depresso actually depresso from overworking day and night has given me mini-trauma. It no longer works in our scuffed base.

View attachment 5715316

I boxed him very early because he would get unhappy, sick and tired pretty much the very moment I'd leave the base. Don't know why. He didn't have any negative traits.

 

[I'm Really Feeling It]

I boxed him very early because he would get unhappy, sick and tired pretty much the very moment I'd leave the base. Don't know why. He didn't have any negative traits.

It might be a problem with nocturnal pals. They don't know when to stop (since regular pals replenish sanity overnight). Then again I didn't have trouble with Mau in my Ranch either, so perhaps this is a Depresso feature (would make sense).

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

It might be a problem with nocturnal pals. They don't know when to stop (since regular pals replenish sanity overnight). Then again I didn't have trouble with Mau in my Ranch either, so perhaps this is a Depresso feature (would make sense).

I wouldn't be so sure. Lovanders and Killamaris work 24/7 and never complain unless they fall off a cliff the base is placed on and starve, which admittedly happens really fucking often.

On a different note, how would you lot fix the type effectiveness issue with fire being blatantly overpowered compared to everything else? Saw this proposed chart in a 4chinz thread.

Fire not affecting grass might be super counterintuitive, but it has to be brought down a peg. I also like the idea of neutral being, well, neutral. As it stands, it's the weakest both offensively (no SE vs anything) and defensively (doesn't resist anything and is weak to dark).

 

[Lurking no more]

On a different note, how would you lot fix the type effectiveness issue with fire being blatantly overpowered compared to everything else? Saw this proposed chart in a 4chinz thread.
View attachment 5715490
Fire not affecting grass might be super counterintuitive, but it has to be brought down a peg. I also like the idea of neutral being, well, neutral. As it stands, it's the weakest both offensively (no SE vs anything) and defensively (doesn't resist anything and is weak to dark).

I don't know if the type chart necessarily needs fixing. I don't think having two strengths is gamebreakingly good, and the fact that it's an obvious enough 'best pick' means that counterintuitively you'll have to be more careful to use it, as people will know to bring a counter for it. As far as replacements, this looks rather nice and simple, but I suspect that Normal would be the best typing for PvP, as normal pals can bring moves to counter other pals, but no one can bring moves to do extra damage to them.

As far as fire not effecting grass being counterintuitive, Pokemon typing is so thoroughly ingrained in my head that I always expect grass to be effective against water, or water against earth, etc., that any simple type chart will have some counterintuitive match-ups.

 

[Judge Dredd]

On a different note, how would you lot fix the type effectiveness issue with fire being blatantly overpowered compared to everything else? Saw this proposed chart in a 4chinz thread.

I didn't know fire was the meta. I thought it was just me. I remember dark being super OP until mid game. I've been told it can get insane with 4 daedreams and an owl. Then there's the zones. The volcano zone being mostly stone and fire wrecked my party and now I'm stuck with a bunch of under leveled pals for that region.

I think it's less an elemental problem, and more an attack problem. Fire, by it's nature, tends to have a lot of attacks that deal lots of tic damage. I notice those kinds of attacks tend to be good in this game. There's a grass spray attack that a lot of bigger grass types have that can kill you pretty quick. I was riding an elk for a while and it has a shotgun like attack that used to be good until it leveled past it. Electric and ice tend to really powerful because of the ability to stun lock.