Palworld, discourse, and finding your identity in design.
Seize the Means of Palduction.
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It’s been a heck of a week, huh?
To be fair, it’s been a fairly wild time in the gaming scene since the release of Pocket Pair’s new weird Frankenstein monster of a video game. Palword, first introduced about two years ago and given a major spotlight only last year during Summer Games Fest, is a game that doesn’t defy labels so much as it coats itself in labels like armor.
It’s a monster collecting game like Pokemon. It’s a survival crafting game like Ark. It’s a defensive base-building game like Rust. It’s a 3rd person exploration game like Genshin Impact, but with guns and summoned buddies. It has a half dozen art styles mashed together with almost no cohesion. It has four-player multiplayer and no story or any endgame to speak of, and some of those designs look awfully familar…
And it all just works, apparently, as the game has sold over eight million units as of this writing and has become the second most played game on Steam of all time, only placed behind PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds, which began the Battle Royale genre that is still popular today. It even overshadowed the release of The Last of Us 2 Remaster, which…okay, I don’t think anyone was really excited for that one, but it’s still funny.
One thing I also noticed is that, from the perspective of developers talking about the game, it’s surprisingly polished for a game that is in Steam’s Early Access program, a place known for their unfinished and incomplete projects. And when I say ‘incomplete’, I mean there are games in Early Access that have areas missing textures, characters missing animations, game-breaking bugs and issues that would demand immediate refunds. One of the worst games of last year, The Day Before, only came out because of the Steam Early Access program. And then it died in four days.
So, everything is good, right?
If it was, do you think I’d be here writing about it?
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Yeah, ‘AI’ discourse is here again, goddamnit.
If you’re familiar with my other work, you might know about my prior words speaking out about the use of Machine Learning algorithms as ‘AI creative’ tools, and how their current use is a sort of false advertisement. ML voice engines don’t actually provide voices, they provide amalgamations of stolen voice clips to make digital mimics of a voice. ML image creators don’t actually make art, they use thousands upon thousands of stolen images to create approximations, based on keyword inputs, of what the algorithm interprets the prompt to want.
Despite what some of their defenders may say, these are not ‘intelligent’ systems. They don’t interpret, infer or understand the things they are using for their inputs. They follow a set of rules put down in code, and release a set of outputs to attempt to come to that conclusion. There’s no feeling or creativity in the process, there’s no interpretation or adaptation, there is the code and the dataset. It’s not, by definition and spirit, ‘art’.
The reason I point this out is because Pocket Pair have been one of the companies that have jumped onto the trend of using those ML tools for profit. One of their releases, AI: Art Impostor, is a game based around a ML image generator where three people are given a theme, and one person has to guess. They use the prompter to generate images, and then try to guess who didn’t get the theme (the imposter) depending on how far off the mark their image is. If the Imposter can guess the theme before they are found out, they win the game. Aside from the Steam page, I only found a TechRaptor article reviewing the game, and given how little it actually talks about it I don’t know if the reviewer actually played it with anyone.
(Note: I have been researching this game, but I haven’t found WHAT dataset the game uses for it’s AI art, or if said dataset would contain stolen or copyrighted works. If anyone has any info about how AI: Art Imposter works, please reach out.)
This, and several public statements from the CEO of Pocket Pair, have placed a looming specter of ML generation over the release of Palworld in public consciousness. Adding that several of the Pal designs seem very heavily inspired, if not straight copied from Pokemon, there comes the idea that the game was designed with the use of ML image generation as a part of their design, using Pokemon as the dataset they pulled from.
I want to point this out here: As of the time of this writing, There is no reliable information to suggest that ‘AI’ has been used in the creation of Palworld. If we were to judge the use of AI in Palworld over the prior use in another title and the statements of the CEO, then we would need to worry about the use of AI in games like Final Fantasy XIV given SquareEnix’s use of MidJourney in FoamStars. Game development, even in a studio like Pocket Pair, is a segmented and complicated process. And even the CEO, Takuro Mizobe, made zero mention of its use during a release interview translated by gaming news site Automaton, which is odd given his normal enthusiasm for the technology.
If they were proud of using AI before, why not advertise it now? Especially since AI: Art Impostor was basically unknown before the Palworld discourse.
Even if ‘AI’ wasn’t used in the designs, there have been people digging into the files to find several examples of Pal designs that come close, if not exact matches, to parts from Pokemon that seem almost intentional. As if the designers took the concept of a knock-off to a logical extreme and dared The Pokemon Company to do something about it. Which they have, issuing an official statement ‘looking into’ the matter.
Which brings us to the polarization about the game: On one side, a lot of copies of an eclectic mess of a game on a notably unreliable platform have sold well above expectation. On the other, there are claims of immoral technology and outright infringement being used for profit and setting a terrible precedent, leading the way for even more theft to be brought into the space.
So, what is Palworld?
Personally, I find it simple: Palworld is what we wanted Pokemon Legends: Arceus to be.
I get to talk about how much I loved Legends: Arceus
When Pokemon Legends: Arceus first came out, I had recently finished my run on Pokemon Shield, whereas my wife had given up her run on Sword. To put it simply, it was just Pokemon yet again. And after decades of playing the same game, she didn’t have the same heart for it.
I got into the series late: my first game was Y, then Sun, then Shield. And I could already feel the similarity settling in. So when The Pokemon Company revealed that there would be a new, open-world game that moved away from the idea of routes and gyms and rivals and a championship, then it caught our interest. And while the Switch was starting to show some of it’s hardware limits, we still were excited for a game that offered something new for the series.
And then it came out and we got…some of that.
The open world were open zones, which were much more fun and interesting to explore than the routes but still didn’t quite give the sense of exploration that other games from years prior had done. Finding and catching Pokemon was now done on the overworld rather than exclusively in battles, but your Pokemon only really interact through the world through turn-based battle. You only interact with Pokemon through catching, battling, and riding, and the riding is limited to select mons on a specific wheel, gated to tightly defined points in the story.
For everything new that Legends did, it also leaned back onto older traditions, never quite confident enough to venture out on its own and be something new. And it didn’t take us long to see why: that same year, later on, TPC would be putting out another game: Scarlet and Violet.
Legends: Arceus turned out to be a tech demo, a display piece for the real sequel later on in the year. It received one major update a month after release, and then was promptly forgotten. For a game that only lost to Elden Ring in sales during that quarter, had over 14 million sales in one year and was nominated for RPG of the Year. Abandoned for a game that got worse reviews and was derided for multiple technical issues on launch, advertised with multiplayer that was flawed and systems that didn’t work. And while later patches and DLC have improved the game’s reputation, the resulting backlash in the fanbase was still felt.
People wanted something new, TPC tried it once and then abandoned it. It makes sense that when a company arrived with something new, people would see what they were doing.
Of course, this brings up another topic: how Pokemon tends to take the air out of the room around other titles in the monster collection genre. Let’s have a small list from the past few years:
Cassette Beasts. TemTem. Digimon. Ooblets. Yo-Kai Watch. Monster Hunter Stories. Shin Megami Tensei. Dragon Quest Monsters. Fossil Fighters. Beastieball. Nexomon. Monster Sanctuary. Coromon. Fossil Fighters. Even the upcoming Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and the Sujimon mechanic.
From massive studios with animation projects and decades of legacy to dedicated small indie teams, the monster collection genre is alive and vibrant and wonderful to play. There are excellent titles outside the sphere of Pokemon that deserve your attention and notice that might not get it because of how large TPC can be, and how the discussion centers around ‘Pokemon clones’ being a derisive word. These games deserve more, and deserve better.
And almost all of them, aside from Monster Sanctuary, are turn-based role playing games where you collect monsters, build a team with specific attacks, stats and types, and battle other similar teams.
Palworld is, at the very core, not that sort of experience at all.
And a lot of the people who were tired of having to deal with the standard formula of Pokemon and the other monster collection titles notice this as well, which speaks to some of the success. One of the things that I love is when titles like this can be mentioned and lifted up and given notice, but they are absolutely not the same thing and not a substitute for the experience that Palword is offering people.
I love that people are hyping up Cassette Beasts. I don’t like that people are suggesting it as an alternative to a 3rd person survival game.
So, what sort of experience IS Palworld once you get into it?
Once you create your world and your character, you have an opening cutscene of waking up on a beach. You’ve washed ashore on an island. A weird datapad tells you the Tree is the Truth and the Towers are the Key. Then you start. The tutorial in the corner is simple and straightforward: craft these items, catch these things, make a base. Once you gain a level, invest your stat point into a stat and invest your tech points into tech. Then go out and do some more.
It follows the old open-world design philosophy of ‘pick a direction and find a thing to visit’, usually being one of the glowing waypoints or mossy ruins dotted about the map. On the way, you beat up and capture Pals, get more resources for your base, head back home to deposit and invest more time into crafting better gear to go further into the world. The loop is a familiar one: survive, build, grow, expand, repeat.
As you grow in power and your Pals get stronger, you can start tackling dungeons, bosses, and towers for Ancient tech points, rarer items and the chance to catch even more elusive Pals. The higher risk and more dangerous area, the better rewards in store, incentivizing that slow, steady drip-feed of success that the genre is built on. And as things grow more complex and take more time, your Pals become part of the crafting process as well, helping you to automate your base. Now instead of waiting out in a daycare or sitting at a PC, you can put your Pals to work helping to manage your base and defend it against attacks, or craft items while you go out into the world.
The use of Pals as part of the growth curve is most likely the standout feature of the game: rather than a specific tool for a specific job (bypassing a roadblock or being used in battle), Pals can be multi-purpose. A cat that roams near the first area is alright at attacking enemies, but works great as a helper at the base, being useful even into the mid-game stages for crafting and sorting items. The giant fire dragon boss you captured can not only serve as a damaging ally, but can help you cook or smelt ore for ingots, or can be ridden and flown around the map during exploration. The boars that you hunt for meat become one of the best early-game mining Pals, which is vital when you need stone to craft fortifications and spheres and arrows and work stations. And as some folks have discovered, how you treat your Pals also factors in as well: Being kind, petting them and meeting their needs will make them self-sufficient and less prone to slacking off or being injured, but overworking them will get things done much faster, but force you to micromanage and deal with injury and illness more often.
Once you reach a certain level, you gain the ability to research and craft special gear for your Pals that allows you to access their unique ability and passive skill. One of the strongest early-game combat upgrades is the Lifmunk Recoil ability, where your little leafy friend sits on your shoulder and proceeds to use an MP5 on anything in your crosshairs. There are items that keep your Pal out in passive mode, either attacking by your side or collecting items for you. Others allow you to ride them for flying, gliding or running mounts, and come for a wide selection of Pals for every level range. Nothing feels too out of reach for your characters but it gives you enough of an incentive to keep building up, keep leveling, and keep catching to find out what the next hidden item and hidden skill in the tree is.
Though the loop is fairly tried and tested in a lot of ways, it also serves to explore its greatest flaw.
Palworld feels empty.
Not in the sense that it’s lacking life, as you can find Pals and even settlements and bandit camps around. But it feels as if the collection of islands is just there for no reason.
So, when I first got into Pokemon Y and the Kalos region, I knew a little about the series. I didn’t grow up with the cartoon outside a couple random episodes here and there, I knew some of the memes, but overall I knew that the world of Pokemon was a World. There were people, notable events, places and things. There was a culture and a presence there, and even though there were disconnects and questions (is there meat? Where does it come from?), those were results of having a world that felt like a world. Kanto, Johto, Sinnoh, those were places with history and connections. Even if I had never seen them, they still built into the world I was in during my time in Kalos. People lived there. It’s a place that could exist.
In Palworld, in a lot of ways, that sort of worldbuilding and cohesion is nonexistent. Not just in the fact that it isn’t there, as you can find logs scattered around the islands that tell some of the history (which are then hidden in the options menu for some reason) but in how nothing feels like it has any sort of lasting impact or character. For example, one of the first places you are going to visit is the Syndicate Tower, as it’s often the last Tutorial task you’ll complete. Once you are there, you face against a girl called Zoe, and her giant Totoro-Electabuzz with a Gatling Gun, Grizzbolt. You either win, or you die. Either way, you can come back to the tower for a rematch.
But, why? What is Zoe doing there, and why did it instantly start a fight? Why do we even care? What is the goal of the syndicate? Can we join? Do they exist outside the islands? We know Pals don’t exist outside the islands, one of the first NPCs we meet says as much, and you can’t escape once you are there. Also, why are the settlements so scattered? How come there are no roads, but there is a dedicated Army to hunt you down if you misclick the attack button in a town? Why do some people have crossbows and others have DOOM 2016 plasma launchers? Why is the Protection of Pals group locking up Pals in cages and shooting them with sticky bomb arrows?
At least Team Rocket had an ethos.
One of the hardest things to do, one of the first things you must do, and one of the most important things you do when you want to start a new piece of fiction is this: You need to ensure you audience is invested in the setting. Otherwise it is going to become difficult to keep them following the characters of that world, which only becomes harder the more you ask them to invest in it. Whether it’s writing a short story about a haunted house, making a game about a demon-slaying bounty hunter, or directing a movie about a giant monster. The more people are drawn to your world, the easier it is to get them invested in the characters and the stakes. The less they are drawn to the world, the harder it is for them to care.
With the ongoing arguments over Palworld’s designs as compared to Pokemon, Richmond Lee, a game designer and artist who routinely talks about art direction in video games, made an observation that I think really speaks to the main issue: Palworld doesn’t have a visual identity of it’s own:
To add to that, I don’t think Palworld really has any identity that is its own.
As I pointed out above, the systems and game presentation of Palworld are taken from a lot of places, but there’s a difference between inspired by and taken from that I think needs distinction. One could say that games like Ark and Terraria were inspired by Minecraft, but they wanted to be their own distinct sort of experience. But when elements are near 1–1 approximations of systems from the games that proceeded them, like here:
That’s taken from.
And Palworld, to its great detriment, is filled with examples like this to the point that groups I’ve played with use those game’s shorthand for elements inside Palworld. Jails refer to Elden Ring’s Evergaols, circular portals leading into a boss arena that allow for easy retries upon defeat, being one of the main ones. ‘Shrines’ for the Fast Travel markers, as the symbols and discovery sound they make upon being activated are almost exactly copied from Breath of the Wild, being another.
These things are not specifically illegal, or even actionable, but they hurt Palworld in ways that we don’t see during the initial hype cycles. By having these elements taken from other games, it cheats itself out of making way for it’s own unique setpieces and elements. By taking the easy way out with how it treats its design and creation, it hurts its own chances of staying memorable in the same way that the things that inspired it did. Though it is easier in the short term, it takes away from the game in the long term.
I described Palworld as an ‘interactive shitpost’ before release, and I still think that description stands. The idea of ‘Pokemon with Guns’ is, in and of itself, kind of silly. The game feels like the answer you would give to someone who asked ‘Hey, if a world has singing and dancing animals, where do we get hamburgers from?’, and it feels self-aware enough to know that’s what it is meant to be. It’s not something that takes itself seriously. Don’t think about it too much. Just give the chipmunk a full clip and let the God Tree sort it out.
But when you have a multi-year roadmap, over 8 million units sold and a new fanbase of players with expectations, then perhaps you should start thinking about things a bit more seriously. The ‘don’t think about it’ defense works as a joke when people are in on the joke, and for a lot of folks, they weren’t in on it. To them, it just looks like a cop-out from doing the hard work of making it their own creation rather than the stitched-together madness that it is.
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And as we come to a week from release, the questions about where Palword goes from here continue to mount.
And the answer is uncertain.
Pocket Pair has an issue with finishing their games, but they’ve never had a game that has become this successful before, with millions of people now expecting more from them and all the good and bad that expectation brings. Debates continue on about the use of 3D models, and if the ones that were ‘copied’ were actually copied, or resized and edited in order to prove a point that didn’t exist. And there is no indication that any of the debate is going to slow down as it touches into several cultural hot spots that will only continue to grow, as more layoffs in the industry are announced, technology continues to advance and more releases loom on the horizon.
One thing is for certain, Palworld has definitely passed the first bar of success in the gaming world: getting noticed. Now all that remains is what they do with the notoriety, and if they can build something more unique on the well-worn bones that have brought them here.
Now I need to go find out how to catch my own My Neighbor Heavy Weapons Guy. I just learned how to make sandwiches.
Another year, another insane rambling article. Thanks for reading this far! If you would like to hear more of my ramblings, feel free to look through my Medium, find me on Bluesky, Tumblr, Cohost and Twitter, or just reach out at realsquidradio@gmail.com if you have any questions or comments.
Be safe and be happy.
