HeyListenWatchOut

  • 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • I think that’s a pretty generous interpretation.

    It’s like you are trying to pretend that character does not look like a Pokemon because their appearance WAS technically different… even though it uses identical parts from several actual characters from the IP.

    So it should be counted as non-infringing because they simply re-arranged / mixed and matched those character parts like they were a Mr. Potato-head-esque / ransom note magazine assembly / amalgamation of interchangeable similar puzzle pieces?

    And I just grabbed one of the first results from when you search Pokemon Palworld similarities… I’m not familiar enough with every single one to find a more egregious example, but again - let’s be honest. This is the IP equivalent of saying “I’m not touching you” while a sibling holds their finger right next to your eye as if to poke it.


  • I’m a little torn on this.

    On the one hand, let’s be real - clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP. The illustrations, modeling, and just visual style overall matches in many ways almost perfectly for many of the creatures. They are like off-brand versions of Pokemon with the exact same eyes, mouth types, etc. in many cases as if they were illustrated by Ken Sugimori himself.

    Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.

    There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.

    But on the OTHER hand, the leveling up, breeding, base-building, the various ability tech-trees, item crafting, and just overall engine complexity is VASTLY superior to what appears to now be an almost EMBARRASSINGLY behind set of game design mechanics in the actual Pokemon games… it’s sort of a Saints Row vs GTA IV situation here where they were an obvious copy off, but improved in enough ways that ended up being a fun game in itself.

    Copying off exact art asset styles is one thing you shouldn’t do… but taking Nintendo’s gameplay ideas and expanding upon them vastly and being told to remove said mechanics as if they stole code is asinine and sets a bad precedent.

    Every time there’s been a popular game, there are a thousand copies off them that twist and evolve those mechanics until something else comes along.

    Nintendo came along with platformers after Pitfall on Atari. Sonic copied 2D platforming basics from Mario like running to the right and jumping on enemies but changed so much. Final Fantasy copied off Dragon Quest, which itself was a digital idea based off of Dungeons & Dragons. Doom to games like GoldenEye to Halo to Call of Duty to PUBG to Fortnite to APEX Legends…

    This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.

    Really embarrassing for Nintendo to be doing this, when clearly what Nintendo should be doing is doing like what Fortnite did when APEX came along and added location / enemy / weapon call outs and just STEALING the mechanics they weren’t clever enough to think of on their own and implement better versions in their own games… but clearly they’d just rather have a monopoly and continue lackluster work.








  • Nintendo is competent at exactly 1 thing - designing great video games.

    They are run by the equivalent of dwarven master blacksmiths… They’re one of the few gaming companies with employees on staff with more than 40 years experience of game dev (and whom have ONLY ever worked at Nintendo their entire careers) in charge of things.

    That’s great if you like Zelda and Mario games… but because they’re run by a bunch of old-school grandpas… they’re not good at much else.

    Terrible store, multiplayer, ancillary modern network-driven services like voice chat and partying up, little to no 3rd-party support (whether it’s games, media apps, or even tech integrations with formats like Dolby ATMOS), and - as a benefit - really terrible device security so it’s usually pretty easy for folks to reverse engineer, run custom boot-loaders / jailbreak / scrape their store servers / etc. - stuff that companies like Sony and Microsoft either never had issues with - or have taken seriously long enough that they have locked down.

    The only reason they’re still in business is that they still do the one thing that matters most the best - design really great game-play mechanics for IP that is beloved by multiple generations of gamers who will overlook everything else.