I intended to refer to minecraft as the mainstream start of this kind of game, but I only had limited time when I wrote this. I'm not saying it's a new genre, there are plenty examples, like Rust, Ark or Vallheim. The article just happened to be about Palworld.
I don't think the genre will replace the others, but it might become dominant, just like how we once saw FPS games overtake 3D platformers.
Not sure about Palworld but one thing about my nephew's that kinda disturbs me is that they have zero patience and cannot even be bothered read a paragraph of dialogue if it stops them for 1 microsecond. They flit between multiple games within minutes and can never make any progress because of it.
I just watched a bit Palworld's gameplay. I like the dark humor it has. 
gamingeek said:Not sure about Palworld but one thing about my nephew's that kinda disturbs me is that they have zero patience and cannot even be bothered read a paragraph of dialogue if it stops them for 1 microsecond. They flit between multiple games within minutes and can never make any progress because of it.
Same, they want to skip any cutscene, drives me mad.
Excellent OP supreme, that is exactly it. Kids don't seem to care about anything except can I just mess around with this. I feel for us old people the OG NES games gave us an appreciation for level design, gameplay challenges and just overall balance a game could have. It was really easy to tell the difference in quality from a Mega Man and a Total Recall. We learned the rules of what a great game should be. But with phones and trash games just feeding a sort of endless feedback loop of rewards with gatcha style nonsense, kids don't really care.
I can't imagine my nephew's living in an era like we had. 4 tv channels and 1 game to last 3 months or till the next Christmas or birthday.
The only way we played more games was by lending to friends, physically.
gamingeek said:I can't imagine my nephew's living in an era like we had. 4 tv channels and 1 game to last 3 months or till the next Christmas or birthday.
The only way we played more games was by lending to friends, physically.
Yes, and that allure of they have something new and different than I have was massive. You wanted to try new things cause you played the same damn game 100 times already. Now every kid has access to all the same stuff instantly, there is none of that allure of the different game covers in your friends collection.
They seem to want instant gratification, them 5 minutes later a different game that needs to entertain them INSTANTLY. God knows how RPGs are going to fare in the next 20 years.
gamingeek said:They seem to want instant gratification, them 5 minutes later a different game that needs to entertain them INSTANTLY. God knows how RPGs are going to fare in the next 20 years.
Sounds like 70s,80s and 90s arcade games in nutshell. My childhood.
Ravenprose said:Sounds like 70s,80s and 90s arcade games in nutshell. My childhood.
And boy did that all go downhill from there.
I was reading the Eurogamer article "Is Palworld actually any good? Of course not", in which the author pointed out that it was all rather generic and uninspired, just a bunch of systems lifted from other games and thrown together, with barely an interesting element of design to be found. A lot of readers posited that this was just a case of a type of game Eurogamer didn't enjoy, that there was fun and value to be had. And perhaps there is truth in this. Perhaps these endless survival games, in which progress doesn't lead to an end goal, where quests are optional and in the end subordinate to just being in the game world, just don't mesh with what our generation of gamers expects from games. We've come accustomed to games that take us along for the ride, as is the case with books and movies. Where there is a clear starting point and end goal with a story sculpted by the developers. Sure, we'll moan about the gameplay being bland and uninspired, but we'll lap it up regardless.
To us, something like Palworld is strange. We don't get how it can sell millions in mere days. There's no real plot. There's a lot to do, but not much in the way as to why to do it. It's a game that doesn't care much about originality, happily stealing from whatever source it feels it can benefit from. It's rough around the edges... It's a game for a new generation. A generation who is used to everything being free and available, who care little for authorship and ownership. A generation of gamers who don't care for top down curated experiences, but who want to play however they themselves want. In a way, and despite it not being a style of gaming I care for, I admire how it seems to lean closer to what games really are: a form of play.
I've written before about how games in the 8-bit days used to be challenging, because technical limitations meant that making games hard was the only way you could keep poeple entertained for longer to justify the cost of the game. When technology matured, games could be saved and as a result became grander in scope. All of a sudden story was needed to tie everything together, to give gamers a reason to keep playing. As that concept grew over time, the balance between gameplay and story shifted, where gameplay couldn't be too challenging, lest it prevent gamers from fully experiencing the story. But this relience on story, on curated content, doesn't seem to attract younger gamers anymore. These people have grown up watching youtube and playing simple F2P games on tablets, their parents wilfully relinquishing control over what their kids were doing for the sake of convenience. They're less concerned about where their actions in game are taking them than that they are with the question wether they're having a good time right now. They just want to be entertained. They want to play. In a way it seems as if games have circled back to their origin.