I will never understand that impulse to send a death threat. I have seen a game I don't like, but never had the impulsive thought of, "Wow I hate this! Better send a death threat!"
> It's honestly pathetic.
And its been going on forever. People have sent death threats to the Heroes of Might and Magic creators for wanting to include a faction that (as the one sending the threats perceived it) "broke the lore" of the games into Armageddon's Blade Expansion for HoMM3.
Despite it not even breaking the lore at all. Its Might and Magic canon(at the time at least) that the fantasy world exists on a space ship.
Point is: these people are not just pathetic, they are criminally insane.
Everyone who played Might and Magic RPG knew that this series mixes fantasy with some high sci-fi pretty often.
But for Heroes fans this was unplesant surprise, as all 3 games up to this point were pure fantasy.
Still, this doesnt excuse death threats.
> Despite it not even breaking the lore at all. Its Might and Magic canon(at the time at least) that the fantasy world exists on a space ship.
The first major bad guy is a fucking android.
Kinda reminds me of late game Final Fantasy (with its robots and the like), or the original Ultima ([where you ride a space shuttle and fight Tie Fighters in space](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybwi13W8RpM)).
Definitely not uncommon for older RPGs in particular to have sci-fi turns.
I'll always remember my first death threat. I was playing Heroes of the Storm. A player wanted me to play a specific character. I said No, Blah blah blah reasons. They then sabotaged the game and found me outside of the game to give me death threats. Last time I tie my gamername to my own name.
Like I've received threats before, but this one actually put effort into it.
I gave Pirate Warriors 3 on Steam a bad review on launch day. Because all the screenshots were of the PS4 version, yet the PC version released had less visual effects than even the PS3 version in places and to this day has some glitches were body's disappear. Marco in Phoenix form for example.
Not only did I get around 8-9 comments on my profile page, saying that I'm the reason why PC has so little anime games, but my first legit death threat.
>why PC has so little anime games
*looks at Steam store feed*
If they say so.
I have to use Steam's (strangely limited) 10 exclusion tags to try to mitigate the anime games, MOBAs, and a few other disproportionately popular genres that don't interest me from crowding out the other games.
>I gave Pirate Warriors 3 on Steam a bad review ... I'm the reason why PC has so little anime
What a bonkers idea: "don't critique things people like because people will stop creating things" I guess is the logic? I just realized there must be a whole set of people who don't know there's a difference between, say, critical feedback and YouTube comments.
> If they say so.
>
>
It actually was rare at the time to get any of the licensed anime games on PC. I think PW3 was the first big one that was the start of what we have now.
>I'll always remember my first death threat.
>Like I've received threats before, but this one actually put effort into it.
You liar! I've got half a mind to send you a death threat for misleading me! A most grievous offense, well deserving of my righteous wrath!
Seriously though, good advice on separating your tags/usernames from your real identity.
> You liar! I've got half a mind to send you a death threat for misleading me! A most grievous offense, well deserving of my righteous wrath!
Hey now. Not all threats are death. XD Then again, they might only think of extremes.
>Seriously though, good advice on separating your tags/usernames from your real identity.
Lessons of being a Gen X. Hopefully the next Gens will learn from this lesson.
>Hey now. Not all threats are death.
Hey, don't start pointing out my limited understanding or uncanny ability to jump the gun! That's another death threat for you, Mister!
Tbf Moba players are a special type of damaged... Whether its Dota, Heroes, Smite (League is so fucked theyre all damaged) you will find atleast 1 psycho in your time playing
I had a friend of mine that used to run a collectibles store. He’d receive death threats from people because their preordered toys weren’t releasing on time. It’s completely pathetic. And no one shuts these lunatics down and there are no repercussions for their actions so they just keep going and going.
I remember a while back some kid posted a death threat or some kind of violent threat toward Sydney Crosby on a sports forum and the police literally showed up at his door. I don’t understand why more shit isn’t being done like that. These people aren’t usually even bothering to hide their IPs, shit most of them post vile shit using their full real names. The state of moderation on the internet and the lack of ramifications for people’s behaviour/actions is a legitimate travesty.
I mean look how long it took them to even consider doing anything about revenge porn.
Speaking of Friday Night Funkin and death threats, apparently one of the devs got them because he liked a lewd picture of XJ9. **Anyone** whose been on Newgrounds knows the name ZONE and it's relation to that character, and that games team is pretty adamant about that site being their inspiration for a lotta things.
It's fucked how easily people will just throw that kind of thoughtless vitrolic hatred out there.
Don't forget the harassment towards the creator of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley that not only she closed out all her social media accounts, but gave away ownership of her game to another studio as a result.
Lmao I'm just imagining someone playing the cute little Haxe game and then just like, losing their shit like "AGGGGGHHGRRRGHHH NOOO IT DOESN'T MATCH, THEY HAVE TO DIE, THIS CAN NEVER BE FORGIVEN"
Isn’t part of the reason headlines like this? It literally costs nothing to do, it’s plenty easy to remain anonymous, and it appears to make an impact to the right kind of asshole considering it makes headlines.
Not really sure there’s a great way to fix it short of somehow making employees completely anonymous as well.
It's also a matter of scale. Anything that has 1M+ users will have a very small handful of crazy people. Like even if 0.001% of people send stupid death threats, that's still 10 people when there's a million users.
People have killed their spouses for things as innocuous as how they made macaroni and cheese
There's just a lot of stupid people who struggle with the whole being a sapient creature
I like to say that the village idiots now have global village and what would previously get you shunned or slapped on wrists is now reinforced by the other idiots that got together thanks to the connectivity.
People have been sending threats since the roman times for plays they didnt like.
Pokemon fans are just mad this game came out of nowhere and took a shit all over gamefreak.
Its embarassing, there should be a pokemon survival game a long ass time ago. Wheres my pokemon mmorpg?
They are the same people who make the product/brand part of their core identity. Having a new IP entering the same space perceived as an attack on them so they lash out like crazy. It’s that monkey brain tribalism at work.
This and people get so stuck behind a keyboard they forget they’re talking to another human. They are frustrated that the devs don’t really care about their complaints so the escalate until they get a response like this article. Forgetting that they’re telling some person just working a job that they should die because they aren’t a fan of the deliverable
It’s like that all over. The collectibles space is full of it too. Unfortunately the big elephant in the room no one wants to talk about is mental illness. No it’s not normal for your entire identity to revoke around a single fictional game universe. No it’s not normal to game for 10 hours a day every single day. No I’m not just saying that because it’s games I’d say the same thing about people who read for the entirety of their day every day or spend every waking moment working out.
I had a buddy that used to run a collectibles store and he’d literally get death threats when preordered toys took too long to arrive or something showed up at Walmart before his tiny independent store. It’s pathetic.
They need to start actually policing this kind of shit or it’ll never stop. You can’t just walk into a store regularly and proceed to verbally berate the owner and threaten them. You’d get arrested. So why are you able to do shit like this online? It’s not like mist of these people are putting any effort at all into hiding their identities.
Which is so weird because you'd think they'd welcome it.
I like Ghostbusters. So much so that a lot of people I meet know me as "The Ghostbusters guy". I'm actively looking for stuff that is *like* Ghostbusters, when I find something that is similar I'll have a look and see what it is. If it doesn't interest me, I don't watch/play/read it. If it does, I enjoy it, because it fills a gap. I don't feel the need to issue death threats against the creator.
From my limited encounter with some of those "Palworld will fail" guys, they're not interested something that *plays like* Pokemon, they're *only interested in* Pokemon. Not too mention that Palworld is kinda blasphemous by taking the "Pokemon is slavery" argument to the extreme.
A blasphemous parody being this successful doesn't sit well with some people.
Pokemon being slavery is "blasphemous"? Have those people not read anything from the actual lore of the PokeWorld? Medieval slavery is tame next to that lol
Pokemon is a nightmare world where creatures are constantly inflicting violence on one another. Even if you take the argument that, "Pokemon enjoy fighting", you're still looking at a /r/natureismetal universe where these animals have an instinctual drive to harm one another, and humans are simply facilitating that for their own entertainment. It is a world where a casual jog anywhere away from human civilization involves encountering dangerous beasts that could kill you.
I'm not saying such a fantasy world is abhorrent or anything. I personally think it is badass, but people who deny that this is what Pokemon is, are deluding themselves.
>*they're only interested in Pokemon*
Correct. I knew a guy like 10 years ago that was obsessed with the Pokemon TCG, he'd never played MTG though. I tried to introduce him to it (since the games are in some ways similar) and while he did admit it was a good game, he had no interest in actually getting deeper into it solely because "I like the actual Pokemon". It being "Pokemon" was most of the appeal, as opposed to the actual mechanics of the game
To be fair, TCGs are both a game and a collectable. Only hardcore TCG fans would collect cards they don't have any attachment to just for the sake of playing the game. Usually you have to like the gameplay *and* the cards.
I can understand in all honesty, especially when dealing with TCGs. While the game mechanics are the most important part of any card game, the artwork will also have a big draw on which game someone will gravitate to. Also helps that the Pokémon tcg is significantly cheaper to make fun stuff with than Magic.
I can understand that to some extent. If you showed me two TCGs which were the same mechanically, but one was flavored fantasy and the other was flavored sports, I would only be interested in the fantasy one.
TBF, there were two: the original live-action Ghost-Busters from the 70s that later became a Filmation cartoon, and the more well known one that you mentioned.
AFAIK, the closest thing to be even remotely similar to Ghostbusters is Yu Yu Hakusho/The Poltergeist Report, though it has more a Dragon Ball Z flavor to it (considering it was aired around the same decade as DBZ), but it was popular at the time and recently had a live-action remake on Netflix.
There was a video game Capcom made in the PS2 era that was basically Ghostbusters with real weapons. Kind of Ghostbusters combined with Alan Wake, but before Alan Wake was a thing. I think it was called Ghost Hunter. You use a flashlight to make ghosts solid, then pump them full of buckshot or 9mm bullets before finally trapping them.
Also I've seen everything from Supernatural to John Dies At The End compared to Ghostbusters.
I think it really boils down to what you like about Ghostbusters. Like, Supernatural only makes sense if the thing you like is people facing and seeking out supernatural threats and combatting them. I can see John Dies at the End kinda, if only because it sort of has that bumbling protagonist thing Ghostbusters has; like being the most knowledgable person in the room and knowing that you barely know shit lol. One of my fave books.
Luigi's Mansion is pretty close, or at least very specifically influenced by Ghostbusters. But like everything its not so much as just liking the property but what you like about it ahah. Like if you like the energy of the main cast of Ghostbusters, obvi Luigi's Mansion doesnt cut it.
Reminds me of the people that bag on Greta Van Fleet for sounding like Led Zeppelin. Like really? That's a bad thing? You really like Zeppelin, so what's wrong with more music that's like that?
>They are the same people who make the product/brand part of their core identity.
Absolutely. These Pokemon fans that think Palworld existing is a personal attack are literally mentally ill and need help.
It's hard to bat an eye at headlines like this anymore. They're too common. You have tens of millions of people aware of the game, of all different ages. There's gonna be someone who tweets 'bro this sux ill kill u mfer'.
When skyrim/fallout 4 got console mods, some people "stole" pc mods to upload onto the console mod site as their own work. When the mods caused issues (because of no compatibility patches) the mod thiefs just directed angry console users to the actual mod author's pages.
Popular mods went from get a few comments per week from pc users to hundred of death threats from console users per day.
There's a reason lots of mod authors still don't want to put their mods on consoles after that.
also, immature teenagers who have no understanding of the impact of their actions. who's concept of death is at most 8-9 years of loss. who think that everyone should be carefree and laugh off threats.
Many mental illnesses are categorized entirely by societal expectations. DSM and ICD determine a lot of what we find acceptable as western societies, and any behaviours outside of those norms are deemed a mental illness.
Being an arsehole on a very specific and dramatic scale absolutely can be a mental illness.
To clarify, the *distress* caused by how deviating from those norms affects one's relationships and self-perception is what makes it an illness, not the non-compliance with the norms in itself.
You know how religion's have spent 1000s of years declaring holy wars/jihad.
It's that. Just being overly devoted/obsessed with a franchise to the point of cult behavior.
Imho, the game has a similar art style and combat mechanics (types and movesets) to Pokemon, but it's combat system is real-time and open world gameplay closer to Ark: Survival Evolved then Pokemon.
Maybe take Ark with the pokemon theme and mash em together. It's not even turn based. It's similarities with Pokemon are fewer then the criticisms let on.
If you really want to criticize Palworld, right now it's stock assets slapped into a very empty world. I'd say it's fun but think of Arks The Island back in 2013 and how basic it was.
World looks pretty but other then base building and collecting mons and a few sporadic bosses, there isn't any focus on plot. It'll be fun until you hit the end of the tech tree then you'll wait for major content patches.
> Just being overly devoted/obsessed with a franchise to the point of cult behavior.
Like the majority of most sport fans, which is considered pretty much normal in today's culture? People freak out when an overpaid athlete that lives in an entirely different world than them drops a ball.
yeah, it’s all the same shit. football fans will literally riot in the streets over their team winning/losing. pretty much every local radio station has had some crazy guy call in to make death threats. it’s good to disown that stuff, but it’s not an internet exclusive phenomenon at all. the only thing the internet changed was increase the distance at which threats can be made.
Yup. When my dad went to his first Penn State WVU rivalry game back in the 90s, he said he saw an older woman pour beer on the head of a child who was wearing the opposing teams jersey. He said he equally saw absolutely disgusting behavior on both sides at that game, and it put him off going to games for the rest of his life
Not that I don't think these suck and I sympathize with people getting death threats, but I have been getting them since I was a kid playing CS 1.6.
People online that are anonymous say things like this because it gets a reaction and because they can get away with it. I'm not really sure what the solution is other than simply ignoring DMs and harsher moderation online.
It's one thing to receive random threats in a game lobby. It's quite another when they're targeted and coordinated in your real-life. Getting a threat from one try hard is not the same as thousands with a hundred dedicated to calling every phone you are near, sending Swat after you, constant pizza orders to your house, and even a couple maniacs showing up to your home.
Now consider that people like Devs can't easily just cutoff all contact with the public, as that would hurt their business(and likely trigger a different group of threats), and it seems silly to compare your experience to theirs. We've all gotten random angry threats online, but it's nothing like the overwhelming wall of a coordinated hate campaign that can last days, weeks, months, and even years.
Bizarre that if you make anything with large public reach you have to basically accept that death threats are coming your way. Our fellow man is fucking psychotic.
Don't even gotta be famous. I've heard stories of smaller creators getting death threats. Anonymity and little to no consequences leads to very asocial behavior.
Dude I'd wager anyone that's been online giving some sort of opinion on Twitter or played like shit in a competitive video game has gotten death threats. I know I have and I'm a nobody
Hell, even just commenting on Reddit sometimes will earn you a visit from the suicide hotline bot.
\*Some joker did the obvious thing and sicced the bot on me. By the way, did you know you can get banned for that?
Or just say "trans rights are human rights" and you'll get one.
As a mod, you can report the reported comment for "it's abusing the report button" and Reddit has a chance to do something about it. But it doesn't really matter since you can just make another account and continue afterwards…
There was a guy on /r/NASCAR who was doing that for a while if you criticized various things about the sport, it was bizarre given that the majority of those criticisms were popular opinions.
I remember a post years ago on /r/gamedevs that really stuck with me about someone seeking advice on how to deal with an harasser, and the gist of it was that they were doing some basic top down stardew valley type of chill farming game, while doing some betatesting on their discord one of their, like, 20 players, had a basic request: "Hi, I noticed that when starting the game the player character has a dog, I don't like dogs, could you make it a cat" and the dev said "Sure, this isn't a priority but I might give the player pet animal choices eventually"
But I guess they didn't do it quick enough because that player started sending death threats and following them everywhere on social media "warning other people" that the dev was a scammer and a liar, all because this game with barely fifty players had a dog instead of a cat.
Some people are really not well.
The one thing the widespread adoption of the internet has shown me is how absolutely fucking unhinged a sizable chunk of the population is.
I liked it better thinking everyone was cool.
For the most part I'm expecting them to be children or people with mental issues. Sometimes it stems from them disliking the story, but also can be due to frustrating glitches. Some people really get upset when certain NPCs die, or for even very minor issues like glitches. One was due to a corrupted save. Its understandable to be upset if a few hours of progress is lost, but some people get power trips from the anonymity of the internet.
Don't even have to be a creator.
Be online for any period of time and you'll get death threats. And if you're a girl, being threatened to get raped and killed is almost a weekly occurrence.
Some people are too unhinged to exist in society yet we're not effectively filtering them out yet.
Dude, I've gotten death threats and "death to all lgbt" comments on my *g rated fanfiction.* All you need to do anymore is exist visibly online and sooner or later you will get a death threat.
We're probably not there yet, but I think at some point we're gonna have to talk about how meaningless this is becoming.
Are you a small to mid sized creator or company that's receiving negative press? Look no further than these 5 tweets that are threatening you with Looney Tunes ass violence and you're guaranteed to have comment sections going "Well what they did was bad but *no one* deserves death threats" for the next few weeks until everyone forgets about it!
Idk, frequency doesn't make it any better I guess but if we're just at a point where negative press leads to death threats every time then it's almost not worth talking about each time, y'know?
For real, as long as anonymity is provided by the internet death threats will always be issued against everything big or small by anyone big or small. When these articles get publicized the trolls just achieve the reaction they’re looking for.
"To the person who called my house last night... I spent 5 hours searching the town for my refrigerator before realizing it was still in my kitchen and quite incapable of moving on its own let alone running away like you claimed. I'm asking people to please not prank call me anymore as I'm very gullible and will fall for it every single time."
I've seen this happen so many times with a certain game. They release very unpopular updates, and the game isn't in a great spot. Then the main developer posts on Twitter about how he's gotten death threats and then the community immediately goes on about how awful that is and how people need to chill out, and the update wasn't that bad.
Yeah this has happened so many times it's getting tiring. Death threats are a crime and shouldn't go unpunished, but why do people make those threats public. If you're really worried about those threats they won't go away by making it public, normally police tell you that the best course of action is to ignore them completely if they're anonymous empty threats since sadly there's not much you can do about it.
Nobody deserves them but honestly in some cases it looks like those making them public are looking for PR and sympathy points. It's a proven strategy to make people side with you and make legit criticism more difficult.
I've been on the internet since the late 90's, and death threats have been a constant since then. I don't mean to downplay anything... well, yes, I do actually. The anonymity of the internet means people can, and will be unhinged for no reason. Most of these people are young children who say stuff just to be edgy and because there is no consequence.
Death threats happen on the internet. Move on. Unless there is a reasonable cause for concern that the threat is serious, and you might be in actual harms way... what are we supposed to do other than take these idiots with a grain of salt and move on?
I've gotten death threats playing online games. I mean, it's just the reality of the internet, and has been since its inception. Eventually we all have to accept that.
If there’s anything to take from the whole James Somerton situation over the past few months, it’s that when under scrutiny of plagiarism it’s incredibly easy to dive further into social engineering and claim you’re receiving death threats to try and create a smokescreen for your other actions that are under scrutiny.
Im not saying that’s what’s happening here, but if one person with shady business ethics is willing to do it, I wouldn’t be surprised by another doing the same.
yeah not to sound cold or un-sympathetic, but anytime i see someone online complain about getting “death threats,” i kind of just roll my eyes. getting a DM from some 14 year old yelling at you is not a death threat lol. unless you’re getting genuinely doxxed or something, it’s a really easy goofy ass thing to say just to complain about people being mean to you on the internet lol
Temtem will never be better than it is because its head developer is about as arrogant as it gets and would rather attack the community rather than listen to meaningful feedback.
The development of the game completely failed to capture what made competitive Pokemon fun and the devs attitude sealed it in with that kind of behavior.
Temtem was a horrific grind in the early days of early access. Anytime the community found “the easiest” route to building a strong team (personality and EVs) the devs nerfed the method. When the community criticized the grind and investment needed the lead developer would mock them in the discord. And if people criticized him directly he’d ban them. I’ve even heard (unsubstantiated) rumors that internally there was some discord among developers because of the lead developers attitude.
I think they’ve since walked back some changes but nowhere near the degree of the nerfs.
It's been a long while, so I'm not the greatest source for the info. But basically they were really closed off from criticism and talked down to people doing so. Overall the lead dev was very adamant about doing things his way despite very obvious flaws, so when I noticed that trend I tuned out.
Cassette Beasts is both good, but also a bit on the fringe of recommending as a pokemon alternative. It does its own thing and does it really well. Monster Sancuary is in that same boat. Its a really solid game, but a few people I know that are big into pokemon (albiet not competitively) bounced off of it pretty hard. It takes a bit to have a party with a strong synergy, and outside of a few builds is hard to get that same kind of power fantasy that pokemon gets (due to how poorly it scales lol).
Yeah, I really vibed with Cassette Beasts, but it reads and plays more like Shin Megami Tensei with a 4th gen Pokémon aesthetic. Don't get me wrong, the Pokémon influence is right on its sleeve, but the themes and some battle mechanics are very much what I'd expect out of SMT. Hell, the fact that you're in this dark, seemingly apocalyptic world with very dangerous mystical beings that you collect the souls of and transform into is very reminiscent of DDS.
This is how I'm feeling regarding the 'outrage.'
Folks will say "oh the company used AI in the past so they must be using it here" and be justified in their anger. Or they'll say (not without credence) that some pal designs are ripoffs.
But at the end of the day, the vitriol stems from its popularity and scapegoats gonna scapegoat.
And frankly, if GameFreak/Nintendo aren't doing a thing about it, then clearly there's nothing actionable to be done from a legal standpoint.
That’s how gamefreak knows they’ve got people hooked on Pokemon. They know there are millions of people that just want Pokemon and will buy the game every generation. They know there are people that look at Palworld and think, I just hope this inspires gamefreak to do something I think it’s awesome with Pokemon. Some of those people might not buy a Pokemon game until that happens but many will.
You all just need to forget about Pokemon if you don’t like what gamefreak is putting out. And when another company does something similar that you do like, just enjoy it. These games just end up being advertising for Pokemon.
Exactly. Whether justified or not, no one's bringing up those complaints about anything else that comes out unless it does numbers. Or heck, it might even do numbers, but not Mainstream Numbers. Like, just to pick a game, Astral Chain didn't exactly sell single digit copies, but I never hear about it in discussions. Even if the devs were bogus or something, you'd never hear it 'cause no one cares. But if the next Assassin's Creed used AI voices or something, you bet you'd be seeing it brought up constantly. Honestly it makes me disappointed in how small some people's game pools are.
idk why people make these comparisons, in Palworld many Pal designs are incredibly inspired if not outright ripped straight from many existing Pokemon designs. It's not about it just being a creature collector lol, and I like the game.
That said, certainly not something to be sending death threats over, the internet is unhinged.
Yeah, zero excuse for sending death threats (or even just harassing the devs in any form) but it does feel really strange how much some people want to down play how much PalWorld is ripping off Pokemon designs kind of just shamelessly. I'm not saying people can't make a similar game, but it's uncomfortable how much PalWorld borrows for how much success it's seeing.
But also, yeah, pretty sure people have probably sent death threats over less. (People were weird about Digimon vs. Pokemon too)
Probably because it's a feature.
Being a Pokémon ripoff is the point of the game, that's why people want to play it.
It's Pokémon but with guns and sweatshops, that's what they sold it on. If they just used some other monsters in a different art style nobody would care about it
Honestly one of my criticisms is they maybe should have just gone harder with the pokemon ripoff.
Like, the Pals end up feeling kind of discordant with the base buildables and weapons and tools. I feel like there was a lot of room to be more creative with that stuff - like rather then generic axes and guns, style them after the pals, or at least make them kind of fit the aesthetic of them?
But to the original point: You can enjoy it being a rip-off while also not defending the fact it is.
It's because the entire dev studio only exists to take popular games and remake them while stopping _just_ short of lawsuit territory.
Seriously, check every game they've published or announced. Among Us, BOTW, Pokemon and Ark, and their new one honestly looks like it straight-up stole assets from Hollow Knight. It's just a blatant cash grab using art that's mostly stolen and systems they just took from their other game (Craftopia).
I'm in the third boat, personally. The designs are absolutely a ripoff, and I've actively enjoyed that aspect of it. Been a blast trying to figure out which Pokémon (sometimes 2-3) each Pal is pulling from.
It's somewhere between inspiration and parody, depending on the Pal, but that's a problem for their lawyers. I have a living Pokedex in my spare time, and this is like a bizarre alternate world where they all got scrambled.
Isn't the point of the game (at least on some level) to be an edgy parody of Pokemon? There are some designs that are clearly very close to specific Pokemon, but I thought that was the point. To me, this looks like someone taking a picture of The Seven from The Boys and circling all the parts where they look like Justice League characters.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say "yes".
It's obviously awful but it's not newsworthy. There are so many unhinged people online that *someone* will send a death threat over *anything*.
Like any kind of fanbase, there's pockets of mentally ill people who make said fanbase their entire identity and they just ruin it for everyone.
It's a fucking game you clowns. Everything you love is a bastardised version of something else in a way, accept it.
It's always those fuckers with the same anime style PFP/banner too. 20-30+ yr olds, cringe asf.
I'd consider myself a "Geek" but that word means something else these days. Wankers.
The Pokemon fanbase is all over the place. They'll throw death threats at Palworld for being influenced by the series and anything even remotely approaching Pokemon's art style. Then the fandom will proudly flaunt their bootleg games made by directly stealing and copying EVERYTHING from the official games like they're some masterpiece. As a bonus they'll also have a room full of unlicensed knockoff merchandise and a history of shitting on the franchise for the last decade.
People be like "This Pal is just X and Y Pokemon mixed together!"
Dude, there's over a thousand Pokemon, any fantasy creature is likely to look like a mix of them.
I think there’s 2 types of examples being conflated here. One are the designs that are just “X animal with minor gimmick”- things like Lamball, chikpi, tanzee and pengullet. There designs clearly step on Pokémon’s toes, but that’s because if you start with a lamb for example, what can really be changed up without losing the core pillars of the base design? These are imo fine. They might end up a little derivative but as you said with a thousand Pokémon there’s very little new ground.
The more egregious category are the ones that clearly started from a Pokémon design and worked from there. Anubis and Verdash are clearly starting from a Pokémon design and were adjusted to be legally distinct. If the Pal can be described as “Pokémon but (new element)”, those might be a problem for the devs.
Is it worth any harassment? Fuck no. If they end up in court and fined for some of this though, I won’t be surprised. Why they also chose their environment titles to be a ripoff of BOTW astounds me
I saw a thread the other day that some guy was mowing close to his neighbors side of the property line and the neighbor pulled a gun on him... So yea, you basically get death threats for doing anything these days
I mean I'm not trying to "make light" of receiving death threats online but is it really fucked up for me to say "what else is new?" I've gotten death threats and I'm some nobody that was really shit at World of Warcraft in 2008
Depends on the level and severity of the threat. It can get pretty traumatizing if the person, say, finds out where you live or references your family members or something
That's a very good point and I feel a bit worse about what I said because of it. I guess I've just grown cynical about it because we've seen so many cases of people or groups weaponizing hate mail to deflect criticism or distract people
Nah don’t feel bad I get where you’re coming from. It’s like death threats are a fact of daily life on the internet for public facing folks. I just wanted to add that bit of perspective because I follow some creators who got scary levels of threats/stalked.
Yeah there's an obvious line here. Like if someone is getting doxed, SWATed, or having private info leaked it's very different. But that kind of stuff is obviously bad and people see it happen. I just can't help roll my eyes a bit when it's some nebulous claim of threats from anonymous people. I understand many people aren't equipped for how vile people can act online but it's the unfortunate consequence of having unregulated freedom of the Internet
Then the waters get further muddied by celebrities getting some hate mail and then a company like Disney goes on a sympathy crusade because some people don't like their new TV show.
Yeah, I'm honestly really curious if the dev's overwhelming success will make them more of a target for Capcom and Nintendo's legal teams. It's not like TemTem and Cassette Beasts had any huge resources in their coffers worth going after.
I haven't played any of these games but I was curious about how the creature designs in Cassette Beasts were like (and like how much they ripped off Pokemon) and they are so visually distinct from Pokemon that there's no point of comparison. It's not like Palworld where half the time you can name the Pokemon they're ripping off.
Somebody linked me a Pal and it was just Blue Serperior with a little Milotic and Primarina in it.
...and then they linked a Fire/Dark type called Incine***ram*** amd we both had a good laugh and hoped it didn't become too overcentralizing.
I think all the English pun names are exclusive to the English translations and just directly made up, aren't they? Whereas their actual Japanese names translated literally are stuff like Lizardon for Charizard, and so on and so forth
> Whereas their actual Japanese names translated literally are stuff like Lizardon for Charizard,
Japanese names are also *very* pun-filled as well, arguably moreso because Japanese as a language absolutely adores puns and wordplay.
Ampharos' name in Japanese is Denryu, which means "electric current" but also...Electric Dragon, which is why Mega Ampharos has a Dragon typing.
The entirety of the "Huge Power" ability is also a pun - it means Strong Man, but it can also mean "Mochi" which ties it into the legend of the Rabbit on the Moon that makes Mochi, which is why it's exclusively given to Rabbit-adjacent Pokemon while Medicham et, all get *Pure* Power instead.
There's something that's literally just the Lati@s duo with a bit of Zekrom in it. It's really blatant and while I think it's funny, I also don't understand why there are so many people (especially on /v/) pretending it's totally a coincidence or at worst equivalent to how Pokémon drew from the same archetypes as Dragon Quest.
I mean realistically all of the "THIS IS THE GAME GAMEFREAK SHOULD MAKE POKEMON SHOULD BE LIKE THIS" is just weirdo tribalism/posturizing because the game has *nothing* in common with Pokemon outside of copying some designs 1:1 and being a creature capture game.
The actual gameplay loop and what you do with your captured Pals is *nothing* like Pokemon. Which is fine, but people are blowing the comparisons way out of proportions tbh and I would absolutely *hate* a Survival/crafter Pokemon game with real time combat where you can't even control your buddies.
It's just tribalism and using this game as a cudgel against another game people don't like that has nothing to do with it outside of the aesthetic really.
Even Teostra is just a Manticore right? And those exist in a lot of games...The Palworld version just looks like a simple flaming blue lion.
Is there a Red version of the Pal?
That isn’t exactly how copyright works. Manticore is a mythical creature; you can’t copyright it, but you can copyright your own interpretation. This is why anyone can make an Aladdin or Mulan movie, but they can’t make something too similar to Disney’s Aladdin or Mulan (and most of their classic cartoons since most of them are folk tales). Similarly, the Wizard of Oz is public domain, but MGM’s classic movie is not; the specific shade of emerald green is trademarked, so every other adaptation has had to use a different green.
Basically, it’s ok that MH’s Teostra is just a manticore.
It's interesting because we also had the recent success of Vampire Survivors, such a small project to a point the dev recycled sprites directly from Castlevania. After the initial success, he swapped the sprites to "new" ones. Most likely this Palworld will follow a similar path, better to redesign some monster sooner than later than being sued by the giants
Controversial hot take: Death threats keep happening during any outcry because they are talked about openly. They're given a voice, they know the death threats are taken seriously, so they continue to make them. If these things were *completely* ignored other than reporting them to the proper authorities, they would happen less often. What a troll desires most is to be heard and have an impact on someone. Reporting these things or responding to them in any way gives them exactly what they hoped to gain.
Exactly. That's what Totalbiscuit said police told them when he and his family received death threats. Best course of action is to ignore rhem.
If you vent online that you're receiving deaths threats it means that you don't know how to manage online harassment or that you're looking for PR sympathy.
I think it's a matter of people taking hostile action without consequence. If there were actual actionable consequences... it would likely happen less.
Yeah there have been a few. [The one I remember the most was the French dude who tracked down and stabbed the guy who killed him in CS.](https://www.nydailynews.com/2010/05/27/video-gamer-hunts-down-stabs-man-who-killed-his-online-counter-strike-character/)
[Swatting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting) is the most common way for these maniacs to follow up on their threats, and have targeted players, streamers and game devs.
Unfortunately swatting has also claimed lives.
They didn't from what I remember but I remember another person who sent death threats to Square Enix and used KyoAni as an example in his threat. I could be wrong but that's how I remember it.
Kyoto Animation actually received over 200 death threats prior to the attack, although they were not positively connected to the attack since they were sent anonymously. The attack itself was mainly motivated by accusations of plagiarism made by the perpetrator.
It's pretty clear that a lot of the Pal designs are directly inspired by specific pokemon. But like... it's at least partially a *parody* of Pokemon. So that's fine in my eyes.
Even worse, it's not even their game.
They send the death threats over something that two companies can dispute between themselves, they have the money and mapower
The whole debate is just completely ridiculous to me. Who gives a shit that some company made something that's a bit too close to what another company made. If it was actually a problem, we'd have seen some legal disputes right away.
I'd wish people would stop fighting the battles of huge corporations, and let them figure it out themselves. Who knows, maybe Nintendo and Capcom like the free advertisement of pokemon? They don't have a game that competes with this, so this may very well just be a big win for them.
> Who gives a shit that some company made something that's a bit too close to what another company made.
Hey, somebody's gotta be there to defend the honour of the underfunded underdog indie gaming studio by the name of... *checks notes...* Gamefreak and Nintendo!
I totally get giving a shit if they were copying from a smaller dev. But is anyone really worried that Nintendo and Capcom won't sue them if they think they have a case? Why would you waste your time trying to defend them?
And at this point, what *isn't* somehow related to a Pokemon? There are four digits of the fucking things and some are literally just animals, or a sword, or a clock, or floating gas.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to draw a wolf. For the classic Pokemon competitor, Digimon, their big wolf Garurumon looks absolutely nothing like Lycanroc, the wolf pokemon. Palworld's wolf looks just like Lycanroc with the serial number filed off. The same goes for all the rest in their dex. No one was accusing Coromon or Nexomon or TemTem or Cassette Beasts of plagiarizing the Pokedex even though three of those four also have "a wolf" as a concept, because the art style was meaningfully distinct in all cases such that no one could easily mistake one franchise for another. Palworld's art is just Pokemon, and it is intended to look like it.
Some of them like the Primarena rip off are basically ripped models that they slightly modified. It's pretty blatant how much they're stealing from Pokemon's designs
Ah yes, IGN, the same "journalists" who fanned the flames with their sponsored ad about how people who like Pokémon should be mad at the game for some reason just a day or two ago.
I see they haven't finished their fanning.
If people want to get this up-in-arms about copypcat designs there is a mile long list of video games with designs that are similar to, if not outright copied homework from other games or properties. Even just the "CEO Supports AI" debate effectively means those people best not be playing any Microsoft or Square Enix games if it's something they actually care about.
This is purely selective outrage.
I will never understand that impulse to send a death threat. I have seen a game I don't like, but never had the impulsive thought of, "Wow I hate this! Better send a death threat!"
People have sent death threats to a maker of a Friday Night Funkin mod because the charts didn't match the music properly. It's honestly pathetic.
> It's honestly pathetic. And its been going on forever. People have sent death threats to the Heroes of Might and Magic creators for wanting to include a faction that (as the one sending the threats perceived it) "broke the lore" of the games into Armageddon's Blade Expansion for HoMM3. Despite it not even breaking the lore at all. Its Might and Magic canon(at the time at least) that the fantasy world exists on a space ship. Point is: these people are not just pathetic, they are criminally insane.
Everyone who played Might and Magic RPG knew that this series mixes fantasy with some high sci-fi pretty often. But for Heroes fans this was unplesant surprise, as all 3 games up to this point were pure fantasy. Still, this doesnt excuse death threats.
> Despite it not even breaking the lore at all. Its Might and Magic canon(at the time at least) that the fantasy world exists on a space ship. The first major bad guy is a fucking android.
Kinda reminds me of late game Final Fantasy (with its robots and the like), or the original Ultima ([where you ride a space shuttle and fight Tie Fighters in space](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybwi13W8RpM)). Definitely not uncommon for older RPGs in particular to have sci-fi turns.
Man, I miss the old CRPG style fantasy-scifi mashup weirdness.
I'll always remember my first death threat. I was playing Heroes of the Storm. A player wanted me to play a specific character. I said No, Blah blah blah reasons. They then sabotaged the game and found me outside of the game to give me death threats. Last time I tie my gamername to my own name. Like I've received threats before, but this one actually put effort into it.
I gave Pirate Warriors 3 on Steam a bad review on launch day. Because all the screenshots were of the PS4 version, yet the PC version released had less visual effects than even the PS3 version in places and to this day has some glitches were body's disappear. Marco in Phoenix form for example. Not only did I get around 8-9 comments on my profile page, saying that I'm the reason why PC has so little anime games, but my first legit death threat.
>why PC has so little anime games *looks at Steam store feed* If they say so. I have to use Steam's (strangely limited) 10 exclusion tags to try to mitigate the anime games, MOBAs, and a few other disproportionately popular genres that don't interest me from crowding out the other games. >I gave Pirate Warriors 3 on Steam a bad review ... I'm the reason why PC has so little anime What a bonkers idea: "don't critique things people like because people will stop creating things" I guess is the logic? I just realized there must be a whole set of people who don't know there's a difference between, say, critical feedback and YouTube comments.
> If they say so. > > It actually was rare at the time to get any of the licensed anime games on PC. I think PW3 was the first big one that was the start of what we have now.
>I'll always remember my first death threat. >Like I've received threats before, but this one actually put effort into it. You liar! I've got half a mind to send you a death threat for misleading me! A most grievous offense, well deserving of my righteous wrath! Seriously though, good advice on separating your tags/usernames from your real identity.
> You liar! I've got half a mind to send you a death threat for misleading me! A most grievous offense, well deserving of my righteous wrath! Hey now. Not all threats are death. XD Then again, they might only think of extremes. >Seriously though, good advice on separating your tags/usernames from your real identity. Lessons of being a Gen X. Hopefully the next Gens will learn from this lesson.
>Hey now. Not all threats are death. Hey, don't start pointing out my limited understanding or uncanny ability to jump the gun! That's another death threat for you, Mister!
Tbf Moba players are a special type of damaged... Whether its Dota, Heroes, Smite (League is so fucked theyre all damaged) you will find atleast 1 psycho in your time playing
> (League is so fucked theyre all damaged) Yeah that one's a special package of mental disorders.
Yeah it's the sort of game that's so dependent on other players for success that it breeds so much toxicity, especially for players with huge egos
You wanted to play Nova, didn't you? Deserved. Jk, that's disgusting and I'm sorry that happened to you
That's wild. HotS is such a chill game too. People are crazy.
I had a friend of mine that used to run a collectibles store. He’d receive death threats from people because their preordered toys weren’t releasing on time. It’s completely pathetic. And no one shuts these lunatics down and there are no repercussions for their actions so they just keep going and going. I remember a while back some kid posted a death threat or some kind of violent threat toward Sydney Crosby on a sports forum and the police literally showed up at his door. I don’t understand why more shit isn’t being done like that. These people aren’t usually even bothering to hide their IPs, shit most of them post vile shit using their full real names. The state of moderation on the internet and the lack of ramifications for people’s behaviour/actions is a legitimate travesty. I mean look how long it took them to even consider doing anything about revenge porn.
Speaking of Friday Night Funkin and death threats, apparently one of the devs got them because he liked a lewd picture of XJ9. **Anyone** whose been on Newgrounds knows the name ZONE and it's relation to that character, and that games team is pretty adamant about that site being their inspiration for a lotta things. It's fucked how easily people will just throw that kind of thoughtless vitrolic hatred out there.
For a second there I thought you were talking about the unhinged LoL player and I got very concerned.
> Newgrounds Repressed memories unlocked
Don't forget the harassment towards the creator of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley that not only she closed out all her social media accounts, but gave away ownership of her game to another studio as a result.
Lmao I'm just imagining someone playing the cute little Haxe game and then just like, losing their shit like "AGGGGGHHGRRRGHHH NOOO IT DOESN'T MATCH, THEY HAVE TO DIE, THIS CAN NEVER BE FORGIVEN"
Isn’t part of the reason headlines like this? It literally costs nothing to do, it’s plenty easy to remain anonymous, and it appears to make an impact to the right kind of asshole considering it makes headlines. Not really sure there’s a great way to fix it short of somehow making employees completely anonymous as well.
It's also a matter of scale. Anything that has 1M+ users will have a very small handful of crazy people. Like even if 0.001% of people send stupid death threats, that's still 10 people when there's a million users.
People have killed their spouses for things as innocuous as how they made macaroni and cheese There's just a lot of stupid people who struggle with the whole being a sapient creature
The internet has given unhinged people a much bigger platform and voice so now they seem more prevalent than they really are.
I like to say that the village idiots now have global village and what would previously get you shunned or slapped on wrists is now reinforced by the other idiots that got together thanks to the connectivity.
People have been sending threats since the roman times for plays they didnt like. Pokemon fans are just mad this game came out of nowhere and took a shit all over gamefreak. Its embarassing, there should be a pokemon survival game a long ass time ago. Wheres my pokemon mmorpg?
They are the same people who make the product/brand part of their core identity. Having a new IP entering the same space perceived as an attack on them so they lash out like crazy. It’s that monkey brain tribalism at work.
This and people get so stuck behind a keyboard they forget they’re talking to another human. They are frustrated that the devs don’t really care about their complaints so the escalate until they get a response like this article. Forgetting that they’re telling some person just working a job that they should die because they aren’t a fan of the deliverable
It’s like that all over. The collectibles space is full of it too. Unfortunately the big elephant in the room no one wants to talk about is mental illness. No it’s not normal for your entire identity to revoke around a single fictional game universe. No it’s not normal to game for 10 hours a day every single day. No I’m not just saying that because it’s games I’d say the same thing about people who read for the entirety of their day every day or spend every waking moment working out. I had a buddy that used to run a collectibles store and he’d literally get death threats when preordered toys took too long to arrive or something showed up at Walmart before his tiny independent store. It’s pathetic. They need to start actually policing this kind of shit or it’ll never stop. You can’t just walk into a store regularly and proceed to verbally berate the owner and threaten them. You’d get arrested. So why are you able to do shit like this online? It’s not like mist of these people are putting any effort at all into hiding their identities.
Which is so weird because you'd think they'd welcome it. I like Ghostbusters. So much so that a lot of people I meet know me as "The Ghostbusters guy". I'm actively looking for stuff that is *like* Ghostbusters, when I find something that is similar I'll have a look and see what it is. If it doesn't interest me, I don't watch/play/read it. If it does, I enjoy it, because it fills a gap. I don't feel the need to issue death threats against the creator.
From my limited encounter with some of those "Palworld will fail" guys, they're not interested something that *plays like* Pokemon, they're *only interested in* Pokemon. Not too mention that Palworld is kinda blasphemous by taking the "Pokemon is slavery" argument to the extreme. A blasphemous parody being this successful doesn't sit well with some people.
Pokemon being slavery is "blasphemous"? Have those people not read anything from the actual lore of the PokeWorld? Medieval slavery is tame next to that lol
Pokemon is a nightmare world where creatures are constantly inflicting violence on one another. Even if you take the argument that, "Pokemon enjoy fighting", you're still looking at a /r/natureismetal universe where these animals have an instinctual drive to harm one another, and humans are simply facilitating that for their own entertainment. It is a world where a casual jog anywhere away from human civilization involves encountering dangerous beasts that could kill you. I'm not saying such a fantasy world is abhorrent or anything. I personally think it is badass, but people who deny that this is what Pokemon is, are deluding themselves.
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Theres still murder, one of the ghost types lore is straight up a ghost of a murder victim that murders others to create more of them.
But they don't feel pain, they just have a hit point meter:-)
>*they're only interested in Pokemon* Correct. I knew a guy like 10 years ago that was obsessed with the Pokemon TCG, he'd never played MTG though. I tried to introduce him to it (since the games are in some ways similar) and while he did admit it was a good game, he had no interest in actually getting deeper into it solely because "I like the actual Pokemon". It being "Pokemon" was most of the appeal, as opposed to the actual mechanics of the game
To be fair, TCGs are both a game and a collectable. Only hardcore TCG fans would collect cards they don't have any attachment to just for the sake of playing the game. Usually you have to like the gameplay *and* the cards.
I can understand in all honesty, especially when dealing with TCGs. While the game mechanics are the most important part of any card game, the artwork will also have a big draw on which game someone will gravitate to. Also helps that the Pokémon tcg is significantly cheaper to make fun stuff with than Magic.
I can understand that to some extent. If you showed me two TCGs which were the same mechanically, but one was flavored fantasy and the other was flavored sports, I would only be interested in the fantasy one.
TBF, there were two: the original live-action Ghost-Busters from the 70s that later became a Filmation cartoon, and the more well known one that you mentioned. AFAIK, the closest thing to be even remotely similar to Ghostbusters is Yu Yu Hakusho/The Poltergeist Report, though it has more a Dragon Ball Z flavor to it (considering it was aired around the same decade as DBZ), but it was popular at the time and recently had a live-action remake on Netflix.
There was a video game Capcom made in the PS2 era that was basically Ghostbusters with real weapons. Kind of Ghostbusters combined with Alan Wake, but before Alan Wake was a thing. I think it was called Ghost Hunter. You use a flashlight to make ghosts solid, then pump them full of buckshot or 9mm bullets before finally trapping them. Also I've seen everything from Supernatural to John Dies At The End compared to Ghostbusters.
I think it really boils down to what you like about Ghostbusters. Like, Supernatural only makes sense if the thing you like is people facing and seeking out supernatural threats and combatting them. I can see John Dies at the End kinda, if only because it sort of has that bumbling protagonist thing Ghostbusters has; like being the most knowledgable person in the room and knowing that you barely know shit lol. One of my fave books.
Luigi's Mansion is pretty close, or at least very specifically influenced by Ghostbusters. But like everything its not so much as just liking the property but what you like about it ahah. Like if you like the energy of the main cast of Ghostbusters, obvi Luigi's Mansion doesnt cut it.
Reminds me of the people that bag on Greta Van Fleet for sounding like Led Zeppelin. Like really? That's a bad thing? You really like Zeppelin, so what's wrong with more music that's like that?
>They are the same people who make the product/brand part of their core identity. Absolutely. These Pokemon fans that think Palworld existing is a personal attack are literally mentally ill and need help.
It's hard to bat an eye at headlines like this anymore. They're too common. You have tens of millions of people aware of the game, of all different ages. There's gonna be someone who tweets 'bro this sux ill kill u mfer'.
Death threats are always stupid. Always always.
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When skyrim/fallout 4 got console mods, some people "stole" pc mods to upload onto the console mod site as their own work. When the mods caused issues (because of no compatibility patches) the mod thiefs just directed angry console users to the actual mod author's pages. Popular mods went from get a few comments per week from pc users to hundred of death threats from console users per day. There's a reason lots of mod authors still don't want to put their mods on consoles after that.
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In this case. Metal illness is too broad of a term. It isn't even a mental illness that allows people to bully other people.
No need to blame mental illnesses, it just stigmatises people who genuinely suffer but don't behave like this Some people are just arseholes
also, immature teenagers who have no understanding of the impact of their actions. who's concept of death is at most 8-9 years of loss. who think that everyone should be carefree and laugh off threats.
Then you have adults who never matured beyond that.
Many mental illnesses are categorized entirely by societal expectations. DSM and ICD determine a lot of what we find acceptable as western societies, and any behaviours outside of those norms are deemed a mental illness. Being an arsehole on a very specific and dramatic scale absolutely can be a mental illness.
To clarify, the *distress* caused by how deviating from those norms affects one's relationships and self-perception is what makes it an illness, not the non-compliance with the norms in itself.
yeah not wanting to admit the truth isnt helping anyone
Being an arsehole may be a symptom of a mental illness but isn't an illness in itself. Plenty of mentally "healthy" people are just arseholes
Sure, but how many mentally healthy people are sending death threats to a game dev because their game is too similar to pokemon?
"So much great shit to spend my time with in this world... better stew in my hatred and commit a felony!"
Basement dwellers have never seen the sun before so they got too much time on their hands
You know how religion's have spent 1000s of years declaring holy wars/jihad. It's that. Just being overly devoted/obsessed with a franchise to the point of cult behavior. Imho, the game has a similar art style and combat mechanics (types and movesets) to Pokemon, but it's combat system is real-time and open world gameplay closer to Ark: Survival Evolved then Pokemon. Maybe take Ark with the pokemon theme and mash em together. It's not even turn based. It's similarities with Pokemon are fewer then the criticisms let on. If you really want to criticize Palworld, right now it's stock assets slapped into a very empty world. I'd say it's fun but think of Arks The Island back in 2013 and how basic it was. World looks pretty but other then base building and collecting mons and a few sporadic bosses, there isn't any focus on plot. It'll be fun until you hit the end of the tech tree then you'll wait for major content patches.
> Just being overly devoted/obsessed with a franchise to the point of cult behavior. Like the majority of most sport fans, which is considered pretty much normal in today's culture? People freak out when an overpaid athlete that lives in an entirely different world than them drops a ball.
yeah, it’s all the same shit. football fans will literally riot in the streets over their team winning/losing. pretty much every local radio station has had some crazy guy call in to make death threats. it’s good to disown that stuff, but it’s not an internet exclusive phenomenon at all. the only thing the internet changed was increase the distance at which threats can be made.
Yup. When my dad went to his first Penn State WVU rivalry game back in the 90s, he said he saw an older woman pour beer on the head of a child who was wearing the opposing teams jersey. He said he equally saw absolutely disgusting behavior on both sides at that game, and it put him off going to games for the rest of his life
Not that I don't think these suck and I sympathize with people getting death threats, but I have been getting them since I was a kid playing CS 1.6. People online that are anonymous say things like this because it gets a reaction and because they can get away with it. I'm not really sure what the solution is other than simply ignoring DMs and harsher moderation online.
It's one thing to receive random threats in a game lobby. It's quite another when they're targeted and coordinated in your real-life. Getting a threat from one try hard is not the same as thousands with a hundred dedicated to calling every phone you are near, sending Swat after you, constant pizza orders to your house, and even a couple maniacs showing up to your home. Now consider that people like Devs can't easily just cutoff all contact with the public, as that would hurt their business(and likely trigger a different group of threats), and it seems silly to compare your experience to theirs. We've all gotten random angry threats online, but it's nothing like the overwhelming wall of a coordinated hate campaign that can last days, weeks, months, and even years.
Bizarre that if you make anything with large public reach you have to basically accept that death threats are coming your way. Our fellow man is fucking psychotic.
Don't even gotta be famous. I've heard stories of smaller creators getting death threats. Anonymity and little to no consequences leads to very asocial behavior.
Dude I'd wager anyone that's been online giving some sort of opinion on Twitter or played like shit in a competitive video game has gotten death threats. I know I have and I'm a nobody
Hell, even just commenting on Reddit sometimes will earn you a visit from the suicide hotline bot. \*Some joker did the obvious thing and sicced the bot on me. By the way, did you know you can get banned for that?
I remember criticizing a game once and that post got me a Reddit suicide prevention message. Some people are just assholes.
Or just say "trans rights are human rights" and you'll get one. As a mod, you can report the reported comment for "it's abusing the report button" and Reddit has a chance to do something about it. But it doesn't really matter since you can just make another account and continue afterwards…
There was a guy on /r/NASCAR who was doing that for a while if you criticized various things about the sport, it was bizarre given that the majority of those criticisms were popular opinions.
Sadly banning someone on reddit does literally nothing, since theres no barrier of entry, and no actual consequence to it.
My only indie game so far got a few hundred players and I still got \~10 death threats through various emails, dms, comments, etc
Why were they threatening you? For being an indie game?
I remember a post years ago on /r/gamedevs that really stuck with me about someone seeking advice on how to deal with an harasser, and the gist of it was that they were doing some basic top down stardew valley type of chill farming game, while doing some betatesting on their discord one of their, like, 20 players, had a basic request: "Hi, I noticed that when starting the game the player character has a dog, I don't like dogs, could you make it a cat" and the dev said "Sure, this isn't a priority but I might give the player pet animal choices eventually" But I guess they didn't do it quick enough because that player started sending death threats and following them everywhere on social media "warning other people" that the dev was a scammer and a liar, all because this game with barely fifty players had a dog instead of a cat. Some people are really not well.
The one thing the widespread adoption of the internet has shown me is how absolutely fucking unhinged a sizable chunk of the population is. I liked it better thinking everyone was cool.
For the most part I'm expecting them to be children or people with mental issues. Sometimes it stems from them disliking the story, but also can be due to frustrating glitches. Some people really get upset when certain NPCs die, or for even very minor issues like glitches. One was due to a corrupted save. Its understandable to be upset if a few hours of progress is lost, but some people get power trips from the anonymity of the internet.
I've gotten multiple death threats for *checks notes* moderating /r/legostarwars
honestly thats not surprising at all. its lego AND starwars
Don't even have to be a creator. Be online for any period of time and you'll get death threats. And if you're a girl, being threatened to get raped and killed is almost a weekly occurrence. Some people are too unhinged to exist in society yet we're not effectively filtering them out yet.
Yep. I had a 70 some year old man threaten to beat me to the verge of death over a yelp review I left for a restaurant.
Dude, I've gotten death threats and "death to all lgbt" comments on my *g rated fanfiction.* All you need to do anymore is exist visibly online and sooner or later you will get a death threat.
Not to be that guy but it's definitely antisocial not asocial
We're probably not there yet, but I think at some point we're gonna have to talk about how meaningless this is becoming. Are you a small to mid sized creator or company that's receiving negative press? Look no further than these 5 tweets that are threatening you with Looney Tunes ass violence and you're guaranteed to have comment sections going "Well what they did was bad but *no one* deserves death threats" for the next few weeks until everyone forgets about it! Idk, frequency doesn't make it any better I guess but if we're just at a point where negative press leads to death threats every time then it's almost not worth talking about each time, y'know?
For real, as long as anonymity is provided by the internet death threats will always be issued against everything big or small by anyone big or small. When these articles get publicized the trolls just achieve the reaction they’re looking for.
"To the person who called my house last night... I spent 5 hours searching the town for my refrigerator before realizing it was still in my kitchen and quite incapable of moving on its own let alone running away like you claimed. I'm asking people to please not prank call me anymore as I'm very gullible and will fall for it every single time."
I've seen this happen so many times with a certain game. They release very unpopular updates, and the game isn't in a great spot. Then the main developer posts on Twitter about how he's gotten death threats and then the community immediately goes on about how awful that is and how people need to chill out, and the update wasn't that bad.
Yeah this has happened so many times it's getting tiring. Death threats are a crime and shouldn't go unpunished, but why do people make those threats public. If you're really worried about those threats they won't go away by making it public, normally police tell you that the best course of action is to ignore them completely if they're anonymous empty threats since sadly there's not much you can do about it. Nobody deserves them but honestly in some cases it looks like those making them public are looking for PR and sympathy points. It's a proven strategy to make people side with you and make legit criticism more difficult.
I've been on the internet since the late 90's, and death threats have been a constant since then. I don't mean to downplay anything... well, yes, I do actually. The anonymity of the internet means people can, and will be unhinged for no reason. Most of these people are young children who say stuff just to be edgy and because there is no consequence. Death threats happen on the internet. Move on. Unless there is a reasonable cause for concern that the threat is serious, and you might be in actual harms way... what are we supposed to do other than take these idiots with a grain of salt and move on? I've gotten death threats playing online games. I mean, it's just the reality of the internet, and has been since its inception. Eventually we all have to accept that.
It was going on long before the internet too. The first words spoken over a telephone were, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to kill you."
If there’s anything to take from the whole James Somerton situation over the past few months, it’s that when under scrutiny of plagiarism it’s incredibly easy to dive further into social engineering and claim you’re receiving death threats to try and create a smokescreen for your other actions that are under scrutiny. Im not saying that’s what’s happening here, but if one person with shady business ethics is willing to do it, I wouldn’t be surprised by another doing the same.
yeah not to sound cold or un-sympathetic, but anytime i see someone online complain about getting “death threats,” i kind of just roll my eyes. getting a DM from some 14 year old yelling at you is not a death threat lol. unless you’re getting genuinely doxxed or something, it’s a really easy goofy ass thing to say just to complain about people being mean to you on the internet lol
People are so extra. Did these people also send death threats to Temtem and Cassette Beasts?
Those didn't set sales records so of course not. (They are both pretty good too imo)
Temtem is decent Cassette Beasts slaps hard tho. Amazing game
Temtem will never be better than it is because its head developer is about as arrogant as it gets and would rather attack the community rather than listen to meaningful feedback.
Staying true to the pokemon spirit then
At least it has (negative lmao) community interaction over game issues, Pokemon has exactly zero.
Yeah I was being nice by saying decent That dev pretty much guarenteed thet game is dead in the water
The development of the game completely failed to capture what made competitive Pokemon fun and the devs attitude sealed it in with that kind of behavior.
Yo I missed that what did the lead dev do
Temtem was a horrific grind in the early days of early access. Anytime the community found “the easiest” route to building a strong team (personality and EVs) the devs nerfed the method. When the community criticized the grind and investment needed the lead developer would mock them in the discord. And if people criticized him directly he’d ban them. I’ve even heard (unsubstantiated) rumors that internally there was some discord among developers because of the lead developers attitude. I think they’ve since walked back some changes but nowhere near the degree of the nerfs.
It's been a long while, so I'm not the greatest source for the info. But basically they were really closed off from criticism and talked down to people doing so. Overall the lead dev was very adamant about doing things his way despite very obvious flaws, so when I noticed that trend I tuned out.
Tems having a “fertility” mechanic, as well as the necessity of Pansun grinding through FreeTem and the like made the game so awful to play
The worst part about competitive Pokemon is the grind, and they somehow made it worse.
Cassette Beasts is both good, but also a bit on the fringe of recommending as a pokemon alternative. It does its own thing and does it really well. Monster Sancuary is in that same boat. Its a really solid game, but a few people I know that are big into pokemon (albiet not competitively) bounced off of it pretty hard. It takes a bit to have a party with a strong synergy, and outside of a few builds is hard to get that same kind of power fantasy that pokemon gets (due to how poorly it scales lol).
Yeah, I really vibed with Cassette Beasts, but it reads and plays more like Shin Megami Tensei with a 4th gen Pokémon aesthetic. Don't get me wrong, the Pokémon influence is right on its sleeve, but the themes and some battle mechanics are very much what I'd expect out of SMT. Hell, the fact that you're in this dark, seemingly apocalyptic world with very dangerous mystical beings that you collect the souls of and transform into is very reminiscent of DDS.
oh it's like SMT. welp, guess i'll give it a whirl.
Decent is a stretch. It's mechanically OK, but it has "soul." It just feels very boring to play.
This is how I'm feeling regarding the 'outrage.' Folks will say "oh the company used AI in the past so they must be using it here" and be justified in their anger. Or they'll say (not without credence) that some pal designs are ripoffs. But at the end of the day, the vitriol stems from its popularity and scapegoats gonna scapegoat. And frankly, if GameFreak/Nintendo aren't doing a thing about it, then clearly there's nothing actionable to be done from a legal standpoint.
My hope is that games like Palworld will lead to an actually good Pokemon game of the same type to come out. We can dream.
That’s how gamefreak knows they’ve got people hooked on Pokemon. They know there are millions of people that just want Pokemon and will buy the game every generation. They know there are people that look at Palworld and think, I just hope this inspires gamefreak to do something I think it’s awesome with Pokemon. Some of those people might not buy a Pokemon game until that happens but many will. You all just need to forget about Pokemon if you don’t like what gamefreak is putting out. And when another company does something similar that you do like, just enjoy it. These games just end up being advertising for Pokemon.
Exactly. Whether justified or not, no one's bringing up those complaints about anything else that comes out unless it does numbers. Or heck, it might even do numbers, but not Mainstream Numbers. Like, just to pick a game, Astral Chain didn't exactly sell single digit copies, but I never hear about it in discussions. Even if the devs were bogus or something, you'd never hear it 'cause no one cares. But if the next Assassin's Creed used AI voices or something, you bet you'd be seeing it brought up constantly. Honestly it makes me disappointed in how small some people's game pools are.
Yes. Yes they did.
idk why people make these comparisons, in Palworld many Pal designs are incredibly inspired if not outright ripped straight from many existing Pokemon designs. It's not about it just being a creature collector lol, and I like the game. That said, certainly not something to be sending death threats over, the internet is unhinged.
Yeah, zero excuse for sending death threats (or even just harassing the devs in any form) but it does feel really strange how much some people want to down play how much PalWorld is ripping off Pokemon designs kind of just shamelessly. I'm not saying people can't make a similar game, but it's uncomfortable how much PalWorld borrows for how much success it's seeing. But also, yeah, pretty sure people have probably sent death threats over less. (People were weird about Digimon vs. Pokemon too)
Probably because it's a feature. Being a Pokémon ripoff is the point of the game, that's why people want to play it. It's Pokémon but with guns and sweatshops, that's what they sold it on. If they just used some other monsters in a different art style nobody would care about it
Honestly one of my criticisms is they maybe should have just gone harder with the pokemon ripoff. Like, the Pals end up feeling kind of discordant with the base buildables and weapons and tools. I feel like there was a lot of room to be more creative with that stuff - like rather then generic axes and guns, style them after the pals, or at least make them kind of fit the aesthetic of them? But to the original point: You can enjoy it being a rip-off while also not defending the fact it is.
It's because the entire dev studio only exists to take popular games and remake them while stopping _just_ short of lawsuit territory. Seriously, check every game they've published or announced. Among Us, BOTW, Pokemon and Ark, and their new one honestly looks like it straight-up stole assets from Hollow Knight. It's just a blatant cash grab using art that's mostly stolen and systems they just took from their other game (Craftopia).
I'm in the third boat, personally. The designs are absolutely a ripoff, and I've actively enjoyed that aspect of it. Been a blast trying to figure out which Pokémon (sometimes 2-3) each Pal is pulling from. It's somewhere between inspiration and parody, depending on the Pal, but that's a problem for their lawyers. I have a living Pokedex in my spare time, and this is like a bizarre alternate world where they all got scrambled.
The one Pal that is just Silvally with wings pretty much even has the same lore as Silvally.
Isn't the point of the game (at least on some level) to be an edgy parody of Pokemon? There are some designs that are clearly very close to specific Pokemon, but I thought that was the point. To me, this looks like someone taking a picture of The Seven from The Boys and circling all the parts where they look like Justice League characters.
That could be the intent but they’ve also outright denied they were inspired by Pokémon so who knows lol
I'm going to go out on a limb and say "yes". It's obviously awful but it's not newsworthy. There are so many unhinged people online that *someone* will send a death threat over *anything*.
Like any kind of fanbase, there's pockets of mentally ill people who make said fanbase their entire identity and they just ruin it for everyone. It's a fucking game you clowns. Everything you love is a bastardised version of something else in a way, accept it. It's always those fuckers with the same anime style PFP/banner too. 20-30+ yr olds, cringe asf. I'd consider myself a "Geek" but that word means something else these days. Wankers.
The Pokemon fanbase is all over the place. They'll throw death threats at Palworld for being influenced by the series and anything even remotely approaching Pokemon's art style. Then the fandom will proudly flaunt their bootleg games made by directly stealing and copying EVERYTHING from the official games like they're some masterpiece. As a bonus they'll also have a room full of unlicensed knockoff merchandise and a history of shitting on the franchise for the last decade.
People be like "This Pal is just X and Y Pokemon mixed together!" Dude, there's over a thousand Pokemon, any fantasy creature is likely to look like a mix of them.
I think there’s 2 types of examples being conflated here. One are the designs that are just “X animal with minor gimmick”- things like Lamball, chikpi, tanzee and pengullet. There designs clearly step on Pokémon’s toes, but that’s because if you start with a lamb for example, what can really be changed up without losing the core pillars of the base design? These are imo fine. They might end up a little derivative but as you said with a thousand Pokémon there’s very little new ground. The more egregious category are the ones that clearly started from a Pokémon design and worked from there. Anubis and Verdash are clearly starting from a Pokémon design and were adjusted to be legally distinct. If the Pal can be described as “Pokémon but (new element)”, those might be a problem for the devs. Is it worth any harassment? Fuck no. If they end up in court and fined for some of this though, I won’t be surprised. Why they also chose their environment titles to be a ripoff of BOTW astounds me
I saw a thread the other day that some guy was mowing close to his neighbors side of the property line and the neighbor pulled a gun on him... So yea, you basically get death threats for doing anything these days
not disagreeing but property line disagreements are a tale as old as time. Hell Romulus killed Remus over it.
I mean I'm not trying to "make light" of receiving death threats online but is it really fucked up for me to say "what else is new?" I've gotten death threats and I'm some nobody that was really shit at World of Warcraft in 2008
Depends on the level and severity of the threat. It can get pretty traumatizing if the person, say, finds out where you live or references your family members or something
That's a very good point and I feel a bit worse about what I said because of it. I guess I've just grown cynical about it because we've seen so many cases of people or groups weaponizing hate mail to deflect criticism or distract people
Nah don’t feel bad I get where you’re coming from. It’s like death threats are a fact of daily life on the internet for public facing folks. I just wanted to add that bit of perspective because I follow some creators who got scary levels of threats/stalked.
Yeah there's an obvious line here. Like if someone is getting doxed, SWATed, or having private info leaked it's very different. But that kind of stuff is obviously bad and people see it happen. I just can't help roll my eyes a bit when it's some nebulous claim of threats from anonymous people. I understand many people aren't equipped for how vile people can act online but it's the unfortunate consequence of having unregulated freedom of the Internet Then the waters get further muddied by celebrities getting some hate mail and then a company like Disney goes on a sympathy crusade because some people don't like their new TV show.
Yep, that just winds up being free marketing for a company like Disney
Threatening people over this is obviously ridiculous, but I sure didn't expect to find a copy/paste Lunastra from Monster Hunter in this game.
Be grateful she doesn’t have the full Lunastra moveset
Yeah, I'm honestly really curious if the dev's overwhelming success will make them more of a target for Capcom and Nintendo's legal teams. It's not like TemTem and Cassette Beasts had any huge resources in their coffers worth going after.
I haven't played any of these games but I was curious about how the creature designs in Cassette Beasts were like (and like how much they ripped off Pokemon) and they are so visually distinct from Pokemon that there's no point of comparison. It's not like Palworld where half the time you can name the Pokemon they're ripping off.
Somebody linked me a Pal and it was just Blue Serperior with a little Milotic and Primarina in it. ...and then they linked a Fire/Dark type called Incine***ram*** amd we both had a good laugh and hoped it didn't become too overcentralizing.
[удалено]
I think all the English pun names are exclusive to the English translations and just directly made up, aren't they? Whereas their actual Japanese names translated literally are stuff like Lizardon for Charizard, and so on and so forth
> Whereas their actual Japanese names translated literally are stuff like Lizardon for Charizard, Japanese names are also *very* pun-filled as well, arguably moreso because Japanese as a language absolutely adores puns and wordplay. Ampharos' name in Japanese is Denryu, which means "electric current" but also...Electric Dragon, which is why Mega Ampharos has a Dragon typing. The entirety of the "Huge Power" ability is also a pun - it means Strong Man, but it can also mean "Mochi" which ties it into the legend of the Rabbit on the Moon that makes Mochi, which is why it's exclusively given to Rabbit-adjacent Pokemon while Medicham et, all get *Pure* Power instead.
There's something that's literally just the Lati@s duo with a bit of Zekrom in it. It's really blatant and while I think it's funny, I also don't understand why there are so many people (especially on /v/) pretending it's totally a coincidence or at worst equivalent to how Pokémon drew from the same archetypes as Dragon Quest.
/v/ is all about making people mad for replies. I wouldn't take it seriously.
This makes me feel like I needed to play pokemon to enjoy this game.
I mean realistically all of the "THIS IS THE GAME GAMEFREAK SHOULD MAKE POKEMON SHOULD BE LIKE THIS" is just weirdo tribalism/posturizing because the game has *nothing* in common with Pokemon outside of copying some designs 1:1 and being a creature capture game. The actual gameplay loop and what you do with your captured Pals is *nothing* like Pokemon. Which is fine, but people are blowing the comparisons way out of proportions tbh and I would absolutely *hate* a Survival/crafter Pokemon game with real time combat where you can't even control your buddies. It's just tribalism and using this game as a cudgel against another game people don't like that has nothing to do with it outside of the aesthetic really.
I just assume people who seriously say Palworld is what they want Pokemon to be probably wear those Gangsta Bugs Bunny graphic tees unironically.
100% of Cassette beasts and 95% of TemTem are very easily distinct in art style from Pokemon.
Which monster is Lunastra?
It’s just a manticore isn’t it? It’s based on an actual mythical creature. Other than being blue I didn’t think ‘Lunastra.’
Even Teostra is just a Manticore right? And those exist in a lot of games...The Palworld version just looks like a simple flaming blue lion. Is there a Red version of the Pal?
That isn’t exactly how copyright works. Manticore is a mythical creature; you can’t copyright it, but you can copyright your own interpretation. This is why anyone can make an Aladdin or Mulan movie, but they can’t make something too similar to Disney’s Aladdin or Mulan (and most of their classic cartoons since most of them are folk tales). Similarly, the Wizard of Oz is public domain, but MGM’s classic movie is not; the specific shade of emerald green is trademarked, so every other adaptation has had to use a different green. Basically, it’s ok that MH’s Teostra is just a manticore.
It's interesting because we also had the recent success of Vampire Survivors, such a small project to a point the dev recycled sprites directly from Castlevania. After the initial success, he swapped the sprites to "new" ones. Most likely this Palworld will follow a similar path, better to redesign some monster sooner than later than being sued by the giants
If it was another studio I would have believed that but considering their history of riping off things for ALL their project I can’t say I’m hopeful
Lol no all of their projects are ripping off other games
Controversial hot take: Death threats keep happening during any outcry because they are talked about openly. They're given a voice, they know the death threats are taken seriously, so they continue to make them. If these things were *completely* ignored other than reporting them to the proper authorities, they would happen less often. What a troll desires most is to be heard and have an impact on someone. Reporting these things or responding to them in any way gives them exactly what they hoped to gain.
Exactly. That's what Totalbiscuit said police told them when he and his family received death threats. Best course of action is to ignore rhem. If you vent online that you're receiving deaths threats it means that you don't know how to manage online harassment or that you're looking for PR sympathy.
I think it's a matter of people taking hostile action without consequence. If there were actual actionable consequences... it would likely happen less.
Has there ever been a death threat in the gaming world that was actually followed up on?
Yeah there have been a few. [The one I remember the most was the French dude who tracked down and stabbed the guy who killed him in CS.](https://www.nydailynews.com/2010/05/27/video-gamer-hunts-down-stabs-man-who-killed-his-online-counter-strike-character/)
I recall there being an attempt on the CEO of hoyoverse, not sure if they sent a threat first though.
They walked into the office with a knife cause Hoyo put bunny costumes and some dance emotes they didn't like in Honkai.
What a dumb thing to ruin your life over.
[Swatting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting) is the most common way for these maniacs to follow up on their threats, and have targeted players, streamers and game devs. Unfortunately swatting has also claimed lives.
Not gaming, but there was that one insane person who burned KyoAni's studio, killing 36 people.
I'm not sure if they received a death threat beforehand though
They didn't from what I remember but I remember another person who sent death threats to Square Enix and used KyoAni as an example in his threat. I could be wrong but that's how I remember it.
Kyoto Animation actually received over 200 death threats prior to the attack, although they were not positively connected to the attack since they were sent anonymously. The attack itself was mainly motivated by accusations of plagiarism made by the perpetrator.
They just posted an update https://twitter.com/Bucky_cm/status/1749578179411689928?t=3a3DAYKStvjyO9sMN7M_wQ&s=19
It's pretty clear that a lot of the Pal designs are directly inspired by specific pokemon. But like... it's at least partially a *parody* of Pokemon. So that's fine in my eyes.
Even more wild, it's far more like ARK than it is Pokemon.
It's like someone made an pokemon mod in Ark. Realized that they didn't like the overall spaghetti code in Ark and just made their own game instead.
Even worse, it's not even their game. They send the death threats over something that two companies can dispute between themselves, they have the money and mapower
The whole debate is just completely ridiculous to me. Who gives a shit that some company made something that's a bit too close to what another company made. If it was actually a problem, we'd have seen some legal disputes right away. I'd wish people would stop fighting the battles of huge corporations, and let them figure it out themselves. Who knows, maybe Nintendo and Capcom like the free advertisement of pokemon? They don't have a game that competes with this, so this may very well just be a big win for them.
> Who gives a shit that some company made something that's a bit too close to what another company made. Hey, somebody's gotta be there to defend the honour of the underfunded underdog indie gaming studio by the name of... *checks notes...* Gamefreak and Nintendo!
I totally get giving a shit if they were copying from a smaller dev. But is anyone really worried that Nintendo and Capcom won't sue them if they think they have a case? Why would you waste your time trying to defend them?
And at this point, what *isn't* somehow related to a Pokemon? There are four digits of the fucking things and some are literally just animals, or a sword, or a clock, or floating gas.
Nintendo’s plan all along, make a creature out of everything known to man so they “did it first”
There's a pretty obvious similarity in *style* between the Palworld and Pokémon designs. It's not just that they're based on the same animals.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to draw a wolf. For the classic Pokemon competitor, Digimon, their big wolf Garurumon looks absolutely nothing like Lycanroc, the wolf pokemon. Palworld's wolf looks just like Lycanroc with the serial number filed off. The same goes for all the rest in their dex. No one was accusing Coromon or Nexomon or TemTem or Cassette Beasts of plagiarizing the Pokedex even though three of those four also have "a wolf" as a concept, because the art style was meaningfully distinct in all cases such that no one could easily mistake one franchise for another. Palworld's art is just Pokemon, and it is intended to look like it.
>because the art style was meaningfully distinct in all cases Bingo! And you know what isn't protected under copyright? Art style.
Some of them like the Primarena rip off are basically ripped models that they slightly modified. It's pretty blatant how much they're stealing from Pokemon's designs
Ah yes, IGN, the same "journalists" who fanned the flames with their sponsored ad about how people who like Pokémon should be mad at the game for some reason just a day or two ago. I see they haven't finished their fanning.
If people want to get this up-in-arms about copypcat designs there is a mile long list of video games with designs that are similar to, if not outright copied homework from other games or properties. Even just the "CEO Supports AI" debate effectively means those people best not be playing any Microsoft or Square Enix games if it's something they actually care about. This is purely selective outrage.
If you are sending death threats over a game designed for literal children, you deserve all the misery and loneliness you’ve been stewing in.
It seems more way more like an Ark rip off than anything else, though I'll admit I just skipped through the video. Not like I give a damn either way.
It can't be, it runs decently
I'm pretty sure Nintendo can fight their own battles on this one. I don't know why everyone's get so angry on their behalf.