Palworld is a new release on Steam in Early Access from Pocketpair. A fusion of Pokémon with monster catching, farming, building and much more. It is Steam Deck Playable and does work on Desktop Linux too. Note: personal purchase.
What has often been referred to as Pokémon with guns, it's already proving to be a big hit with a current peak player count of 250,553 294,826 (it keeps going up every refresh) on Steam and a Very Positive user rating. So it seems like it might be the first big indie hit of 2024. So it's great news that it works right away!
Valve has already put it through Deck Verified and gave it a Steam Deck Playable rating, and Valve set Proton Experimental for it by default on Steam Deck, so for best experience on Desktop Linux make sure you set Proton Experimental in the Properties -> Compatibility menu.
Pictured: Palworld on Kubuntu 23.10. Click them to enlarge.
For Steam Deck the performance does have some issues and Valve noted various problems in their testing including: small text, graphics needing to be configured manually, you need to manually bring up the on-screen keyboard and some functionality may not be accessible with the default controller configuration.
It was designed as a multiplayer game clearly in many ways with support for 4 player co-op and 32 players on dedicated servers. You can play solo without issues though.
In my own testing on a Steam Deck OLED I've been using these settings:
So far, this has given a somewhat acceptable performance level. It ranges from 25-45 FPS depending on what I am doing which is very playable - most of the time above 30FPS. Some spots in the open world I've seen bring it down to 25FPS, especially during bigger combat sections. However, one clear problem is the menu system. Some of the in-game menus bring the performance down pretty hard to around 20FPS but it will come back up when you close the menus.
Text is definitely small too, I've had to pull the Steam Deck closer to my face to actually read some of the on-screen details, so it's quite annoying. It's going to need some text scaling quite urgently as it's really not comfortable to read a lot of it. The icons are tiny too.
Pictured - Palworld on Steam Deck. Click them to enlarge.
For battery life on the Steam Deck OLED, you're looking at around ~2 hours from a full charge with a 60FPS frame limit.
Meanwhile on Desktop Linux (Kubuntu 23.10) with an AMD Ryzen 5800X and Radeon 6800XT the experience has been overall pretty great. Testing on the highest possible graphics settings it's always been above 60FPS so far. Most of the time between 80-120FPS depending on where I am in the open world and what I'm doing. For a big open world game in Early Access running through Proton, that's actually pretty good.
This is only an early preliminary test as i haven't had too long with it, so keep that in mind. It's also Early Access, so everything is subject to change but it's an incredibly promising start for Palworld.
One thing I will address directly, since this always comes up in comments whenever there's a new monster catching game, the elephant in the room — Nintendo. They don't (and can't) own the rights to an entire genre, but Pokémon is obviously popular and so there's always comparisons but Nintendo can't just go after developers of other similar games. However, in this case, plenty of the creatures do have a striking similarity to various Pokémon designs and some even look like colour-flips with a few tweaks. So it will be very interesting to see what happens for this one specifically.
Something else that needs noting, is that the developer still has other games in Early Access while launching this also into Early Access. Craftopia, for example, looks largely similar. Like they took their own game, and added these creatures into it to make it a different game.
To sum up what I've seen of it so far it feels very much like a blending of ARK Survival Evolved, Pokémon and Zelda: Breath of the Wild mechanically. One or two sounds even seemed like they were right out of Zelda (very close at least). It's very derivative. But then so are a lot of survival games. The small human of mine is going to freak when they see it. I can definitely see why people are enjoying it so much already and I fear it's going to take over my life for a while.
You can buy Palworld on Steam.
Original Early Access trailer below:
Direct Link
Update 21/01/24: the article originally said Palworld had an internet requirement for single-player, as Valve state it on their Deck Verified rating. Valve's notice is incorrect so the article text was updated. Additionally here's a new Steam Deck video of the game and some quick thoughts:
Direct Link
Quoting: EWGMeh. All these monsters mimic animals, plants, fungi, and objects IRL. There's bound to be a certain level of overlap.
So long as they don't have any major stars that are too similar to Pikachu, the starters, or other famous pokémon then I don't think The Pokémon Company or Nintendo have water to bathe in or whatever that expression is.
That being said, I imagine the aforementioned companies need to have their diapers changed at the looming success of this upcoming game. 🤭
If only Nintendo would play fair and embrace F/LOSS and hackers....
They can't beat 'em!
This will definitely tip a few sales towards thr Deck over the Switch.
That being said, we need major competitors versus the conglomerates that are sony & μshaft.
You're way too optimistic.
The total value of the sales of this game will probably disappear within the rounding margin of error of Nintendo and the amount of switch consoles sold won't even budge.
Part of the reason they won't notice this is, because they've locked themselves mostly out of the influence of F/LOSS and hackers, with their self controlled store this game won't get in.
That doesn't mean it won't be a success.
It will sell millions of licenses. Get ported to mobile, Xbox and Playstation attract hundreds of players to the SteamDeck.
It's just that Nintendo sells billions of licenses for a higher price and more merchandise and ports their games to "wherever they desire".
Oh and marketing deals with Nintendo are worth more, because they target more vulnerable demographics.
Last edited by LoudTechie on 21 January 2024 at 6:51 pm UTC
Quoting: LoudTechieIt's just that Nintendo sells billions of licensesWhat are you basing that on? There's limited info available publicly, but seems like the highest selling Switch games published by Nintendo, for example, have reached about 50-60 million copies sold based on Nintendo's own quarterly reports.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 21 January 2024 at 8:53 pm UTC
Quoting: tuubiQuoting: LoudTechieIt's just that Nintendo sells billions of licensesWhat are you basing that on? There's limited info available publicly, but seems like the highest selling Switch games published by Nintendo, for example, have reached about 50-60 million copies sold based on Nintendo's own quarterly reports.
Truly nothing except my ideas of how big some of these companies are, but here is an afterwards justification.
Nintendo sold 123million+ switches. They would've to sell around 9 game licenses to the average customer to get on the billions list. According to the "how big is your game library" thread Valve has a chance of achieving this(most of these people achieve hundreds of games a year). If Valve can do it Nintendo can do it.
That having said their own quartily reports are a lot more trustworthy, so I'm wrong.
Quoting: tuubiWhat are you basing that on? There's limited info available publicly, but seems like the highest selling Switch games published by Nintendo, for example, have reached about 50-60 million copies sold based on Nintendo's own quarterly reports.Well, they've sold billions since they entered the video games industry - that much is well-recorded, at least. Last year (projected in February and later achieved in May), the Switch's library alone hit the milestone of accounting for 1 billion of the company's lifetime 5.5 billion software units sold.
Quoting: PenglingGAAH.Quoting: tuubiWhat are you basing that on? There's limited info available publicly, but seems like the highest selling Switch games published by Nintendo, for example, have reached about 50-60 million copies sold based on Nintendo's own quarterly reports.Well, they've sold billions since they entered the video games industry - that much is well-recorded, at least. Last year (projected in February and later achieved in May), the Switch's library alone hit the milestone of accounting for 1 billion of the company's lifetime 5.5 billion software units sold.
I knew Nintendo was old, but that they predated the modern computer nearly half a century is new to me.
This explains to me how a mere game company managed to amass so much power.
{LoudTechie freezes and their eyes turn black and flashy}
Quoting: LoudTechieGAAH.Yeah, Coca-Cola had only existed for three years when Nintendo was founded!
I knew Nintendo was old, but that they predated the modern computer nearly half a century is new to me.
And in some form or another, they've always been connected to entertainment somehow for all that time.Quoting: LoudTechieThis explains to me how a mere game company managed to amass so much power.They're actually not a very powerful company and have no real protections in Japan as a result - that's why they have to be so litigious, because basically their IPs are all they have and they're in trouble if they lose their grip on that. There's a really good ~30-minute video-documentary on that here - give it a watch.
{LoudTechie freezes and their eyes turn black and flashy}
Quoting: PenglingQuoting: LoudTechieGAAH.Yeah, Coca-Cola had only existed for three years when Nintendo was founded!
I knew Nintendo was old, but that they predated the modern computer nearly half a century is new to me.
Quoting: LoudTechieThis explains to me how a mere game company managed to amass so much power.They're actually not a very powerful company and have no real protections in Japan as a result - that's why they have to be so litigious, because basically their IPs are all they have and they're in trouble if they lose their grip on that. There's a really good ~30-minute video-documentary on that here - give it a watch.
{LoudTechie freezes and their eyes turn black and flashy}
I was refering to them controlling their own hardware empire.
The Nintendo consoles.
That having said, it's indeed an interesting watch.
Last edited by LoudTechie on 22 January 2024 at 9:55 am UTC
TheRiddick Jan 22
Quoting: LoudTechieI was refering to them controlling their own hardware empire.My apologies for misunderstanding! I wouldn't personally qualify a company having licensing rules as them amassing power, personally.
The Nintendo consoles.
That having said, it's indeed an interesting watch.
But yes, it's info that's well worth knowing - it explains a lot!
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