Had a friend unironically trying to convince me that Palworld is evil because it brainwashes people into liking human enslavement and shooting at civilians.

His favourite game is Pokémon, a game where you bond with your fire lizard by pitting it against other animals in a government-sanctioned tournament.

Of course he's also one of those people who spends hours lamenting the state of current Pokémon games, while also buying both versions of each game at day 1.

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Pokemon is famous for being the first game to employ child psychologists in its development Team, to analyse what young boys like the most, and to feed that to them.

Your friend, is playing, due to corporate manipulation, when they were young, which triggered all the things in them, they wanted to trigger.

Dark, but true. I'll try and find a source on this later, when I have some time.

[–] BlindFrog@lemmy.world -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Ah, yes, when a man takes inspiration from insect-collecting in his childhood, he becomes the world's first child psychologist in directing and developing video games

Edit to clarify: you kept making downvoted assumptions in this thread about an existing source on Pokemon creators having targeted the young boys audience. It's only natural to think you could be misremembering all the articles that came out about Satoshi Tajiri's inspiration for the OG games coming from bug collecting as a young boy.

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 months ago

You linked to the director, not the psychologists they onboarded for the project.

[–] BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I really like palworld and never cared about pokemon at all. After playing palworld for some times, i looked up what pokemon is even up to, after over 20 years of experience. And apparently they released the absolutely most laughable pokemon game on the swith last year.

[–] PlantJam@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've also been playing palworld and have never played or been interested in any Pokémon games. For me, the "catching pals" aspect detracts from the survival crafting aspects. Base automation is also in a weird place where stuff is mostly automated, but you can't really automate everything like you can in a game like Factorio.

Despite all this I've put about ten hours into the game and loved every minute of it. I'm just a little off the mark of the game's target audience, which makes the early access lack of polish a little harder to put up with. I would still absolutely recommend the game, though.

[–] Death_Equity@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

I think that version 1.0 will have pals taking things out of furnaces and such and putting them in chests. With endgame you will just order stuff up on a terminal and you will see the pals scramble around to get everything together and alert you to lacking resources that you will have to sort out.

With the current version 0.1x, it feels like 75% of the game is missing. I think they have released what they released because they didn't have the rest of the game planned out. They are saying "This is what we have, what do you think we should do with it?" The community will speak up and actually add meat to the bones of the game with their suggestions/comments/wishes/etc.

I think back to Minecraft alpha and how much the community and modders influenced the end product and can't help but see a similar thing developing with Palworld.

[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 7 points 5 months ago

it brainwashes people into liking human enslavement and shooting at civilians.

Neither of those things are actually encouraged by the game. Attacking civilians causes guards to come after you, and nothing in the UI indicates you can capture humans (you don't get a catch % when holding a ball and targeting them like you do with monsters). It's only when you do throw a ball at them that you find out it is possible, but the catch rate sucks and they're not worth using.

Meanwhile it's made abundantly clear that Pokemon are sentient, so the brainwashing and dogfighting rings aren't any more ethical if you want to argue that way.

Alternately, it's a game. I'm against war but I play plenty of war games.

[–] Sabata11792@kbin.social 3 points 5 months ago

Palworld is evil because it brainwashes people into liking human enslavement and shooting at civilians.

Those are the headlining features that make the game unique.