The flying is pretty great. I liked what I played of it, but I’ve been holding off on a full playthrough until they fix the terrible user interface (which is luckily one of their top priorities).
The frustrating thing about that is how they didn’t even slow down with their bullshit after that scandal, and some of the most hated DRM in recent history have a direct lineage from Sony:
Admit it, you just like Soulmask because it lets you turn into Anubis (the Original Furry) on demand.
I’m onto you, Kolanaki!
Haven’t exploded their budget on a hiring spree
The big thing they did with the cash was start a publishing arm to help fund other indies. So far the biggest title to come from that is the pirate survival game Windrose.
Here’s hoping Pocketpair continue being as awesome as they’ve been up to this point.
I play co-op, and multiplayer has the unfortunate quirk that the game lets you pull base Pals you don’t own into your own Palbox and doesn’t show any indication of who the original owner was afterwards. Combine that with raid bosses, where you’re hurriedly swapping out Pals with fresh ones en masse as the boss defeats them, and I have no idea who owns half my Palbox. So I avoided condensing anything that wasn’t fresh out of the incubator.
Reading the changelog, you may have gotten what you asked for.
You hit the nail on the head. I’d describe Palworld as a shameless clone of ARK with Pokemon mechanics bolted on top, and a focus on automating your base vs ARK’s attitude of “do everything yourself”.
But the main thing Palworld gets right is copying all the good things about ARK that had people play it for thousands of hours, while reducing or eliminating all the bad things people hated about ARK (while still playing it for thousands of hours).
Mostly it improves the formula by reducing busywork and how long things take - in ARK, basic tasks could take hours and require the player’s constant attention that whole time, whereas in Palworld almost nothing takes more than a few minutes. Hatching eggs is the main exception, and that’s entirely passive outside of putting it in its preferred climate and coming back later to hatch it.
Things started going downhill when Lenovo wasn’t fined into oblivion in the 2010s for putting malicious spyware on the laptops they sold their customers. And I mean actual literal spyware, as in “installs a root certificate and decrypts and reads all your ‘secure’ internet traffic, ostensibly so it can place random ads in it”. While also leaving gaping holes for attackers to use, of course, but letting a random program written by someone with ties to Israeli intelligence install backdoors throughout their customer base earned Lenova slightly more money so it’s all good!
And that wasn’t even the first or last time Lenovo have done something like that. They just… got a free pass, and this type of thing gradually became the norm. It’s infuriating.
Since their current cash wouldn’t fit in a 32-bit integer that’d mean it’s at least 64-bit. An integer underflow would require a debt of over 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 units-of-currency before it rolled over to positives.
Man, this bubble is even bigger than I thought! /s
Yeah, boxes weren’t too bad with the filters (at least until late game when you had several hundred Pals - and 1.0 reducing the number of each Pal you need to catch for maximum experience from 12 down to 5 should go a long way towards fixing that box bloat), but the Palpedia was nearly unusable without search. You had to manually go down the entire list to know if you’d seen or caught a Pal before or wanted to check where it spawns.
That is an absolutely insane changelog that includes nearly everything I wanted changed or fixed in the game, to the point that I’m actually kind of upset how many desperately needed quality-of-life fixes they held back for 1.0.
Stuff like searching the Pal boxes or Palpedia is something that should have been added the instant it was ready. Pal management was a pain in Early Access due to lacking such a basic feature.
Don’t worry. The title is just clickbait and Carmack is actually saying the complete opposite.
There has never been a more thematically correct choice.
A small addendum: Jolt, the other new-ish free physics engine this would be competing against, is also deterministic (with some caveats that Box3D hopefully avoids) and more performant than contemporary commercial offerings (the benefit of being new and not held back by decades of accumulated cruft and early design decisions such as obsolete threading models).
What sets Box3D apart is that, like you said, many devs are already familiar with the 2d version of this engine and Box3D mimics its APIs aside from the added dimension. This makes it very easy to pick up for a large portion of the indie crowd.
They’re being paid in experience!
Alyx’s physics were genuinely groundbreaking. If this includes all the features they showed off in that game, it’ll be one hell of a contender in the physics engine market.
Though it would have been more impactful (ha) if they had released it six years ago alongside Alyx, back when the free physics options were all kind of crap compared to the commercial ones. Jolt has become the de facto free 3d physics solution within the past few years and it’s also a huge step up over the old offerings.
Edit: sadly it seems Box3D is based on a stripped-down version of Rubikon and doesn’t really do much beyond extend Box2D to the third dimension. I guess its selling point is that it’s probably much, much easier to integrate than Jolt, and that the API will be familiar to Box2D users.
Now imagine how bad the other MS execs must be for Spencer to be considered the ‘good one’.
His main value was acting as an insulating layer between Xbox and headquarters.
When COVID relief was handed out (and after Trump neutered investigations into relief fraud), a bunch of corporations immediately used the extra cash to fund stock buybacks instead of using it to shore up their finances - literally putting shareholder profits ahead of the health of their company.
That’s part of it, but it’s also because the industry saw a massive spike in profits during COVID when everyone was stuck at home, and shortsighted executives made hires and investments as if that money train was going to continue forever. Once things went back to normal they immediately started canceling projects and firing talent.
Microsoft is also going through leadership changes, and it’s unfortunately common for incoming executives to can projects started by their predecessor since they won’t get the credit for them.
Of course it’s the employees who pay for their idiocy and not the ones who actually fucked up.
Edit: I remember reading a thread several years ago about just how dysfunctional Microsoft’s gaming wing is and how Phil Spencer almost singlehandedly kept clueless higher ups from destroying the brand with their dumb, out-of-touch ideas. With his retirement, I have a feeling Xbox will enshittify at speeds we’ve never seen before.
His base was already drinking bleach. It’s only a small step up to injecting it!