Palworld vs Subnautica

[DaHeckIzDat]

Since Palworld came out on PS5 a couple days ago, I decided to download it. I'd played a few hours of the early access version on XB1, and while it was fun, it was very obviously an early access game. Not only does the PS5 version run much better, but since it's actually installed on my PS5 (I could only stream it on XB1) the game's performance wasn't tied to my internet connection staying strong.

But one question kept coming back to me while I was playing it: why is this so much more fun than Subnautica? If you read my review of Subnautica, you'll know that I started off really enjoying it, but quickly lost interest when it started introducing base building mechanics. Palworld, being another survival crafting game, shares a lot of the same features that I didn't like in Subnautica, but for some reason I don't mind them as much. In fact, there's even MORE base building in Palworld than in Subnautica. So why am I not bouncing off of this game the way I did with Subnautica? I think it comes down to one thing: automation.

In Subnautica, you're a lone survivor stranded on an alien planet with nothing to keep you company except the sea monsters who want nothing more than to eat you. Everything you need done, you have to do yourself. That means that even when you'd rather be out exploring the ocean, you're constantly being pulled back into mundane busywork so that you don't run out of resources to build the equipment you need.

In Palworld, you're not alone. The entire point of the game is to capture and tame the Pals that inhabit the island with you. Once you do that, you can either bring them into battle with you, or you can put them to work back at your base. At first they won't be good for much more than carrying things back and forth, and you'll still have to do most of the work yourself. But the more Pals you catch, and the more stuff you unlock on the tech tree, the more your options (and your base) will grow.

It's actually kind of brilliant how thoroughly the devs have intertwined the capturing of Pals with the expansion of your base. When you first start out, you won't need more than a few rocks and sticks to build what you need, so doing it yourself isn't a problem. But once you unlock bigger and more complicated stuff to build, going out into the world to gather all the resources you need to build it would be a huge time commitment. Luckily, you can build things like gardens, lumber camps and stone pits, which provide unlimited amounts of food, wood, and stone right there in your base, but gathering it all would still take forever. This is where your Pals come in. Some Pals can plant seeds, others can water them, and virtually all of them can gather, so you'll team them up on your gardens, and boom! All of your food needs are permanently taken care of. You assign one Pal with the woodcutting ability to your lumber camp for limitless wood, but you don't have a Pal that mine rocks, so you venture out into new territories and capture Pals until you find one that has the trait you need. Oh, and you can assign a fire Pal to your forge to perpetually turn ore into ingots, and then another to your campfire to cook food, and this Pal has a bonus to defending your camp so you build a fortification for it to patrol and give it a gun. And why stop there? You might go on a crafting spree and use up all the resources your Pals have been collecting, so you build two more lumber camps and stone pits, but then you have to capture more Pals to work them, and that means you need more food, so you build another garden, and then catch more Pals to work that garden, and then of course all these new Pals need more beds to sleep on, and you may as well build a new hot spring to help them stay in a good mood while they work, and...

You see where I'm going with this? In Subnautica, base building was a chore that kept you from the parts of the game. In Palworld, everything you do in your base directly benefits you, so you're actually incentivized to do it. It also helps that the base building revolves around the game's core mechanics (exploring the world and capturing Pals) so you're furthering your own goals just by doing what you would be doing anyway. Whereas in Subnautica, to gather resources you have to stick your head in the sand and swim back and forth until the game decides to spawn whatever random item you were looking for, which doesn't lend itself well to the sense of exploration and discovery that initially draws people into the game.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to playing Palworld.

[BlasteroidAli]

Fantastic to know that Palworld is now an underwater game. I really must try Pokemon underwater. Not.

[Stalvern]

Kinda missing the point of the comparison. OP isn't comparing Pokémon and Ecco; it's an open-world survival game with monster catching vs. an open-world survival game that's underwater. Two different hooks for the same underlying premise.