I can't speak to the legality of it, but a great many of Pokemon's earliest monster designs seemed to take... "incredible inspiration" from a variety of Dragon Quest enemies.<p>Plus, the best parts of Palworld are the parts that do things with the game formula that Nintendo would never do -- yes, sure, guns, but also consequential crafting, base building & defense, survival elements, automation, and such. Sure, people grow attached to the design of the various monsters, so changing them now would be hard without drawing the ire of existing customers, but the game is absolutely not "Pokemon with Guns", it's an entirely different game that has creatures that bear a resemblance to popular Pokemon.<p>(Oh, and the models are nicer with more unique animations than anything GameFreak has put out yet, too. I dunno, I find it hard to consider being a "Nintendo Loyalist" in this particular instance.)
The success of Palworld speaks volumes about Nintendo/Gamefreak's failure to produce any meaningful gameplay innovation over the past few decades
This is a pretty good video (11 minutes) where a video game IP lawyer discusses palworld vs pokemon: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkNcV0kpxvg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkNcV0kpxvg</a><p>Mostly surrounding the similarities in pokemon vs pal visual design.<p>Spoiler...it's complicated.
The most comical part to me is the moral outrage by some folks who are "against Palworld" because you can essentially force your collection of animals into slave labor.<p>Because storing them in balls and only allowing them out when you want them to fight to the death for you is such a great moral alternative.
I have such mixed feelings about this product.<p>On one hand it's an obvious rip off and that's really lame and companies should be dissuaded from doing that.<p>On the other hand these guys wanted to do some silly stuff that they knew Nintendo would <i>never</i> do (eg. what if you could shoot guns at Pokemon?) and so they made their own game to scratch that itch. That's cool.<p>I dunno I wouldn't feel bad about it if it was like a free fair use fan game, but seems worse as a for-profit product that's competing with Nintendo.
All of the pokemon enthusiasts I know have flocked to the game and are loving it. The breeding/traits in particular.<p>I have been running a dedicated server with ~10 people on it since launch and it has been incredible.<p>We'll see how it looks in a month, but massive success out of the gate.
How Nintendo is still in business is beyond me.<p>They are adversaries to their own customers, aggressively pursue meaningless IP violations, aggressively decrease the value of their own products (Wii store anyone?) and failed to innovate in decades pushing out the same trite and formulaic games over and over again.
It looks like the Palworld developers really pissed of the customers of their previous game, Craftopia:<p><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1307550/Craftopia/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1307550/Craftopia/</a><p>That one was in Steam "Early Access" for several years, with people buying it at full price expecting it to be finished and released. Except the devs used the money to create Palworld instead, abandoning their Craftopia users.<p>The recent Steam reviews for Craftopia don't paint a pretty picture at all.
ha that's so funny I just heard about this from my friends a few days ago. They are all pretty loyal Pokemon fans despite being in their 30's.<p>They were all excited for this game, and as a fan myself, I have to agree that it does look pretty cool.<p>There's already several copycat franchises that are obvious knock-offs of Pokemon, the biggest of which is probably Digimon.<p>How is this any different than Digimon?