PC Gaming

I'm really conflicted about this game. I really love the idea from game design standpoint, it's a perfect mix of genres, while also serves as an amazing case study in how theming is really important for games. Craftopia apparently had exactly the same capture mechanics, but with real animals instead of monsters, and you could also use the animals to work on your base. No one really cared about it too much.

But reskinning it from animals to fantasy monsters/pokemon, suddenly entirely changed the feel of the mechanic and made it much better. And that is a really simple change, but with such a great impact, and a really important lesson in game and theme design.

I also kind of understand that they have given up on Craftopia and started pursuing this project instead - while it sucks for people who enjoyed Craftopia, the idea of mixing monster collecting game with a survival game is genius, and works really, really well. It makes so many simple mechanics much more fun to interact with, once you're doing it with your Pokemon instead of by yourself (or through an automation machine). But implementing it into Craftopia would not be feasible, and I don't really fault them that much for deciding to start mostly from scratch.

I also don't really mind that they've decided to use the Pokemon aesthetics - it's a look that fits this genre well, and it's kind of OK to just go with it - I mean, almost every souls-like game tries to look like Dark Souls and give the same vibe, because it just fits so well with the overall theme. So, IMO going for the same look that has been proven is fine. But, and this is why I'm conflicted about it, it's really really not good when you have members of your team tweeting how you've figured out a way how to bypass copyrights using AI, giving example on pictures of Pokemon, boasting how they look different yet you probably won't be able to tell which ones are original, and which are generated.

And now that I've seen this video, it's way worse than I thought. I literally couldn't tell the difference between the game I've spent playing last two days, and the Pokemon mod. The monsters look almost exactly the same, making it seem like they really did just go with "lets feed Pokemon into AI". And that sucks.

On the other hand, I think the developers are getting too much flak for liking AI in games. I've seen them being criticized for their other game, that is a party game where you give prompts to AI to generate pictures, and then vote which of the players didn't know what theme the pictures should be about. That's a pretty funny and great idea, and I don't see why it's shown around as a proof that this developer is evil.

Are they? I don't know. The game designer in me hopes that they got excited for the Palworld idea, cut some corners (which is suspicious and pretty sad), but abandoned Craftophia just so they can work on a project that's amazing idea that wasn't done before, and that they will focus on it in the future. Unfortunately, it's starting to look more and more that it's really just a quick cash-grab, where they just asset-flipped their game to make a quick buck, and will forget about it once the hype dies down.

I hope that's not the case, and that they really do enjoy working for the game, and are as excited as I am about the potential of the concept. I guess we'll see in the follwing months and years.