I hope Game Freak sees this as a wake up call. People will kill for a Pokemon game with a little innovation.
Why would they? It takes effort to make something innovative. They can make buckets of money by doing nothing. They might make more, but it's going to cost a lot more too.
This game literally cost 6 million though, that's nothing to the Pokemon company.
Pokemon Arceus had a little innovation. The thing is: a little innovation after decades of doing the same thing is like a textbook example of "too little, too late".
I don't think that GameFreak will see this as a wake up call. And even if it does, it might not do the necessary changes to Pokémon main series.
The stagnation runs deeper. It is partially caused by inertia ("we're selling well, why bother innovating?"), but also by GF's insistence on making the main series story-driven instead of gameplay-driven. Even if story-driven Pokémon goes a lot against the franchise's biggest strength - a wide, unique, and immersive universe to explore.
Except Palworld is insanely popular with essentially no story...
That's the point. Pokemon could be successful in the same way but they're saying Game Freak doesn't want to change how they do things.
Omg I'm an idiot, I completely misread what they were saying, I thought they were saying gf needed to focus more on story and the gameplay being stagnant doesn't help. I'll chalk that up to morning brain.
Because it's gameplay-driven.
There's no Rotom bossing you around. No "sit down you player, as we tell you what's supposed to be your story". No unnecessary broken bridges forcing story linearity. The story that you see in this sort of game is the one that you build as you interact with the game, not the one that the developer wants you to watch.
More importantly: The Pokemon Company is a separate entity from Game Freak and Nintendo, with a third company also participating, Creatures Inc.
Pokemon games exist solely to drive people, especially the current younger generation, into the franchise. Licensed merchandise is THE money printer for them. In 2022, they reported 11.6 billion dollars in revenue just from that. They're at a point where they can literally ask "Why even bother with games?"
Yeah really goes to show just how massive this market is, and how horribly game freak has whiffed here
or just one available on pc
It's actually pretty good. there's a little jank but a lot of heart. I was surprised to see that Every pal had battle, working, eating, and petting animations.
There's a glitch where you can tame the bosses too - and even those have animations.
You can butcher any pal........
You can butcher anything that goes in a pal ball.
The syndicate thug gave me gold and ammo when butchered
Why would you butcher that cute little fella
But at the same time, you do not need to butcher anything. I did find it amusing how the animation for butchering has heavy mosaic censoring though.
and this doesn't even include any of the GamePass players, right?
The game wouldn't run for me on GamePass, crashes every 15 seconds... so I guess I'll on Steam.
I think it's only steam.
It runs on steam, i host a server and sometimes got some big old frame drops. Otherwise it runs pretty well for me.
No it's on Gamepass. I downloaded but haven't played yet
It's about the statistics from this post. And these only consider the steam players. :)
I've been playing it for a while now, quite fun. It reminded me of tech modpacks that incorporated Pixelmon in Minecraft, although this is much more refined. It has much less of a Pokemon vibe as people give it credit for. Other than mounts, you have no control of what abilities your pal uses, and it is much less focused on rock-paper-scissors and more on the terrain and damage delivery because of its real-time FPS nature.
I wonder if it runs good on the steam deck
30fps on lows from what I remember seeing others post. Allegedly there is a mod to help performance on Deck, too
Friend of mine joined my server from his steam deck, and was using the deck dock to a 52" TV, said it was running beautifully.
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