MegaVel91

Yeah... this is downright ugly, no matter how creatively bankrupt Pocketpair is, unless these are resubs of previous patents, this is super sketchy and gross.

...Nah, it's gross regardless. Stuff this vague shouldn't be patent-able in the first place. Ugh.

@LadyCharlie no, it isn't? This is forcing them to admit the obvious.

The next step is pressurinthem to make ownership a reality. The only way they can try to dunk on this is malicious compliance, but it would be their own fault and choice in that case too.

@MirrorFate2 do you know what context is. Look at the game this is being put in. Then try again.

Ima be honest, this seems pretty cool.

@VoidofLight The best compromise would be to design temples or dungeons with puzzles that have one main solution, and then like 10 different ways you can achieve the same result, as with Shrines, but having the said puzzles be centralized around a theme or having to do with the dungeon or the boss.

@Dr_Lugae Everyone who wants Nintendo to lose will deliberately ignore that fact. They think the recently lackluster-ness of Pokemon games is the reason Nintendo is going after them, and because Palworld made a game that appeals to a certain edgy and childish demographic who think the ideal Pokemon game has more violence, more dark themes, and weapons.

Unironically, that's what some people were saying before it's launch on Steam.

But like you said, Pocketpair crossed a line that the other franchises didn't.

@axelhander or maybe recognizing Pocketpair's lack of merit and you being intentionally dense

@RygelXVIII stop being disingenuous, you know "bashing them for trying something new" isn't the crux of things here

@PepperMintRex The CEO themselves basically said they aren't interested in being original.

Their entire catalogue is derivative.

I'm surprised Dragon Quest Monsters is being shown off there, is it a version for other consoles?

@Arehexes An entirely disingenuous response based on ignorance, reality invalidates it.

The majority of those fan projects still require work to be done by the ones making them, whether it be coding, visual assets, sounds and more. Even stuff like AM2R and Pokemon Uranium required them to make their own code, make new sprite work, etc...

To suggest that's the same as using Generative Image Algorithms is to discount what effort was put into it, as being the same level as typing a prompt and endlessly rolling the roulette for whatever comes closest.

That's complete, over-reductive nonsense. It does not hold any water.

@FantasiaWHT entirely disingenuous. Both this and your response to me.

You've completely removed all context for why people are "screaming" about scraping. And on top of that, the tired, rotted meat of the "human nature" argument.

Neither of them work. The latter especially because your logic basically boils down to "we can't stop human behavior so nothing should be regulated"

Which isn't the point. The point is to keep it from ruining people's livelihoods in a capitalist system he have no choice in participating in.

@Smackosynthesis That statement is nonsense, cause a genie can be ordered back into the bottle.

Also, there's "no putting a genie back in the bottle" when it comes to violent crimes that include getting people killed and yet we still enact laws regarding them.

Not only that, it's a human made technology, not a force of nature like a tornado.

It can be regulated, it can be stopped, it can be destroyed.

Everyone here calling AI (read: Machine Learning) programs a tool instead of what it really is: a bunch of plagiarism machines built on stolen, very often copyrighted data, that was never given authorization for use: you're doing the the companies work for them.

You're normalizing the theft of people's work without consent, being compensated, and more.

The only things these Machine Learning programs should be being used for is stuff like stem cell research, separating the stems in music to use for analysis and remixing, any situation where a person can willingly consent to their data being used via a contractual agreement instead of being forced to behind closed doors, and that is genuinely useful.

The Spiderverse movies used an AI program to help put the comic book outlines on the characters, a process that would've taken an excruciatingly long time to do by hand. That was specially made for the task. That is a perfect example of a good use.

Unlike the Image Generation Algorithm programs (GenAI art) and similar, which has no good use case. It's only use is as a scam by people who want to make money.

@Pillowpants originality is overrated.

Darkstalkers revival pls

@GoldenBot It actually can. It took the people behind AM2R a decade to make the game, using a small team.

Then you have to take other things into account, like the pandemic, the fact these people might also working on other projects within the company, the title is considered lower priority due to the big boys pulling money into the company...

But the bottom line is, we have no real,concrete idea what's caused any kinda delay on a new game's part. We still dunno if Rockman Taisen still exists as a project in the works or not.

Assuming they have no intention to make anything doesn't help matters either.

And my whole reason for responding to Fitta was, as someone who has experienced trying to make a platformer (and failing) was to illustrate that it's not as simple as it appears. Like... 2D platformers by themselves are deceptively more complex than you'd first imagine just by how they look from a gameplay perspective.

@Fizza Platformers in general are not easy to make, I should know. I've tried to make one in GameMaker before.

There's surprisingly a lot that goes into making a 2D platformer than you'd think, and there's surprisingly even more things that can go wrong when trying to make one.

For example, if you don't properly separate the X and Y axis movement, you could end up with bugs where one axis' movement affects the other in a way you don't want it to (such as getting completely stuck inside walls and be unable to move at all or get out of it, instead of sliding down them).

You also have to account for when a character lands on a corner of a platform during movement, how does the game determine whether or not they made the jump? What about moving platforms, how do you make sure the character stays on it, unless an obstacle is in the way?

You also have to account for ceilings depending on the level design, and make sure none of the game's elements interfere with each other in buggy ways they shouldn't be.

Heck, this is true even of top-down games like Zelda. A lot of the similar considerations there.

@Ruler-Of-All-Evil The real problem is that you also have to get them to be willing to advertise it all enough to actually succeed.

@Ruler-Of-All-Evil we aren't. We know better.

Hades was probably the best inspiration they could've chosen.

@Lizuka I hope that Emerl has a role in the game itself.

Some of you in this comment section...

Lets start with addressing the nonsense. So many of you keep a refrain of "Fan stuff can still be a thing, just don't share it or profit on it"...

A couple of questions:

• Do you seriously believe every one of the fan games/project shut down by Nintendo over the years were all making any kind of profit?
• How else do you expect these fans to have others recognize their chops if they don't share what they've made?

Cause about the first one: how many of the fan games/projects that have been shut down by Nintendo over the years actually had any kind of revenue stream attached to it: I can count the number I've heard of like that on one hand, and I have been hearing about shutdowns via this website and others for years now.

Most of them have been entirely non-profit. Without even an intent to profit in any material sense.

As for the second: have any of you tried making a project similar to a fan game where you had 0 intention of sharing it with any one whatsoever? Because I seriously doubt you had none if you did. Projects like that are meant to be shared.

And then I want to address the whole "Why don't people just make their own original stuff in the first place?" bit, like Qwiff has.

Let me ask you a very simple question: If any of you doodled as a kid, and you were exposed to Nintendo's IPs, were you drawing your own completely original characters all the time, or were you doodling stuff from your favorite Nintendo IPs?

Cause that's certainly what I was doing. I drew my own original stuff too, sure, but a lot of my art over the years has been derivative of stuff I already love and have a big passion for.

And trying to come up with your own original stuff from scratch, not be cliche about it, etc. is a lot harder than you think.

Trying to make original stuff is like trying to make a collage using stuff you have laying around the house. You literally cannot avoid, in some form, using something made by someone else 90% of the time because, chances are, someone already has done it or has something similar.

That doesn't make it not worth it to do, but that means making something original takes a lot of time and care to do, something a small/solo indie dev may not want to take the time to do, because they want to focus on improving their skills making a game/fan project to begin with using whatever engine they're focusing on.

Trying to make something completely originally while trying to juggle learning how to work a game engine or do programming can be really overwhelming.

That's the reason you see a lot of devs that explicitly riff the gameplay styles and systems of stuff that already exists: it's simply easier to take something that already exists and try to make your own spin on it, no matter how derivative it turns out. That's especially so with stuff that explicitly uses existing IP.

As an artist myself, I know this is true. I've tried making my own concepts before. My own original stories and characters. Even have attempted game dev before.

Complete originality is entirely overrated. It's like the concept of perfection: so many try to aim for it, but more often than not, it's better for your sanity to aim lower and allow yourself to draw from stuff you like.

@_Figo_ o you and me both

@JohnnyMind not equivalent. At all.

And AI can be stopped.

It's programs and data on a server. Not some mystical force.

It's physical. it can be destroyed.

@JohnnyMind I am categorically against it because in order to even have it function as intended, billions of images, had to be taken without authorization by their owners, without consent asked or given, to be stolen in order for them to even barely function at first.

That has never changed. It never will.

To even use them means using the collective labor of millions, that none are entitled to. Unethical and immoral.

On top of that, to use says you have no budget. Like a fake designer bag that's obvious to see.

@JohnnyMind that doesn't apply. The default assets fir RPG Maker were made by an artist. There is no comparison here. Apples to oranges. That's making excuses to use a system built on stolen data.

@JohnnyMind you can make the time.

You dont need to spend hours on end drawing to start learning and improving. You don't need to be working at it to the point you get burnt out.

And at no point did I say or imply they should just give up. That's why you learn. That's part of not giving up. You admitted defeat and gave up the instant you resort to GenAI. You admitted that you think learning to draw isn't worth your time, energy, or effort to hone.

Visuals are second only to mechanics and gameplay in terms of importance. By resirting to GenAI, you're basically saying the visuals aren't important to you. Cause they'll lack consistency, still have visual errors, and worse, will be visually distinctive only by the fact it looks like whatever AI model you used.

Someone else's expression, averaged out with millions of others, with no distinctive voice of it's own.

The stunning visuals some indie games have are entirely because they had artists who helped develop that visual identity, or because the developer had someone else doing the coding while they do the visuals.

Point is: you never would've gotten Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Steamworkd games, Ori and the Blind Forest, and so many more, if they had used AI.

No matter what way you spin it, you cannot escape that fact.

@JohnnyMind No dude. There can be no leniency here.

The problems with LLMs like ChatGPT is they are BSers. They are, as a program, completely incapable of being concerned with the truth. Likewise, they also have no capabilities of logic outside of predicting the most likely next word in a string in a response to a prompt. That's why they "hallucinate". Since they can't care about truth, and can't objectively discern it, especially in current state of things, they're far more likely to give you wrong answers to things.

That programming one asked it to spit out? May not function at all. And if someone has it do all their coding, they'll spend months cleaning up and debugging it instead of focusing on other important tasks. Cause they tried to use a Segway instead walking or running to learn how to do either.

Same with visual GenAI. Using it just shows one has no budget, no confidence in themselves or their ideas, and no willingness to learn the skills to gain said confidence, or make anything cohesive that stands out as their own.

That's part of the point of learning any of it: the satisfaction of knowing you can do it, you are doing it, and that you can and likely will with the proper time, improve.

And if one has no want at all for learning anything about the crafts or the skills? What one has proven at that point is that they don't want to create anything, they want a machine to maje something they can consume.

A vending machine with a slot machine attached to it that provides no guarantee of the outcome.

When you could've done the learning, and while it would take more time than the machine:

You would at least have gotten closer to what you wanted than the machine ever will. It doesn't know you, it can't know you, nor does it know your ideas. Any instance of it getting it "right" is blind luck.

@JohnnyMind The problem is that most use cases being pushed by the AI companies are a net negative and instead of taking care of tedious tasks (i.e. the lines on the characters in the Spiderverse movies), things that actually make sense, their whole snake oil is the idea "now you too can be an artist without any skills or learning! Just type in a word or 3 and you're already on your way to producing masterpieces!"

Without mentioning the obvious that you'll be just as skilled at art as you were when you started after you stop using it. Or the massive energy and computing costs.

@marcelominucelli yu cappin with half of that

@ZeldaLord "exact copy" doing back breaking lifts there

@Truegamer79 My theory is the HD Remaster was a test run for the engine.

@RupeeClock ey, nice mention.

Spiritual succesr to Goemon is welcome in my book.

@shoeses No, not with 5 people controlling one character. I understood it fine.

@shoeses No?

@shoeses 2D Fighting game style.

@Kestrel Which is why we need stuff like Medabots or Robopon back, or stuff inspired by them.

Everytime one of these comes up, out of the woodwork comes:

"Why are they wasting their talent on this instead of sending their resume to Nintendo??"

Good grief. Can half of you spare some of your mental energy to actually think beyond that notion, and maybe come up with some of the -frankly- obvious answers yourselves?

And no not "they're piggybacking off Nintendo's IP". Maybe something along the lines of "they made it cause they live X IP"?

Every time, it's the same thing. Not to mention actually making something original takes massive amounts of work. It's not the kind of thing you do to cut your teeth on. It's something you do when you already have a good grasp on what you're doing.

It's like complaining why someone is using training wheels when they're learning to ride a bike. Or similar.

Now I want them to remake the original game before making any new sequels.

Seriously. The original has aged awesomely for an N64 game, but I would like to see how it would change up with the TTYD remake's level of polish.

I love how on every single article there's at least several people who think it's about defending a corporation cause of X reason. It's hilariously without nuance, and something thrown just to make Pokemon fans collectively look rabid and brainless so they can feel good belittling them.

Nevermind the fact it was never about defending Game Freak's honor, or whatever, or defending TPC, and was actually just about the fact designs and whole shapes of Pokemon were copied/modeled over. Y'know having artistic integrity, or some semblance of it?

Which I am sure someone will handwave with "well everybody takes from everyone in this industry" or similar.

Well, there's the thing:

Most indie devs go the extra mile to try to make whatever type of game they're aiming, even monster tamer/collector games and their creature designs look distinct from Pokemon precisely to avoid any issues.

If Palworld had gone to the lengths Cassette Beasts did, or Coromon, or some other notable examples of Indie monster tamer/collector games with their Pal designs overall, we wouldn't even be here talking about it. Cause it wouldn't have caused nearly as much of a stink.

Heck. Most other indie titles in the genre or adjacent to it have never gotten into any controversy on grounds of the designs or anything. Because they never did anything like literally taking Lucario's head and sticking it on a quadrupedal body with Raichu's tail with an extra prong, and making a literal Lucario ripoff (Anubis). And those are the only two I'm mentioning just for brevity's sake.

The most that a lot of indies end up doing, you need to squint hard and tilt your head pretty hard to see a passing resemblance. Not the case with Palworld.

@Browny One problem: you are blatantly ignoring the oodles of monster collector games out there who manage to not blatantly rip designs just fine.

Even with over 500-1000 Pokemon out there, they still managed to do better than Palworld has done. Just look at the creature designs of Nexomon and Coromon, as examples. And there's plenty more games who manage to too.

Palworld has no excuses.

@CJD87 Pokemon literally has had competition.in the genre, for ages. Repeatedly. Yokai Watch, Digimon, SMT, Dragon Quest Monsters,and plenty of indie titles all over Steam.

Yet nobody gave any of those any intense attention or support. There has been plenty of games and franchises that could've been supported. **For years on end.**

And yet it took literally crossing Ark:SE and Pokemon to find a hill for people to die on? Really? This is one of the reasons I'm disgusted by the whole thing.

@sixrings That's usually because despite whatever graphics they have, you rarely have a Nintendo game that straight up isn't a good game, even if the graphics end up lackluster. And that's regardless of who under their umbrella develops it.

It's very much once in a very rare blue moon, you encounter a Nintendo game that is all around bad along with the graphics.

@samuelvictor I got the reference too hehe!

@Samalik Believe it when I see it.

@PixelSprixie They're going to reach a breaking point, and I have a hard time believing they don't know that.

@Dragnoran Battle Revolution wasn't even made by Game Freak. It was made by Genius Sonority. So you don't have much of a leg to stand on that.

They do need to take more time though.