So I was getting burnt out on WoW, got the damn stupid Stormcrow mount and was looking at 22 level 80 characters and wondering if maybe I needed a break, and a friend pointed out I had Palworld and could probably just put my characters into mothball mode until Undermine:D pops up.
And oh my God, Palworld has been updated to hell and back, Nintendo can eat all of the mushrooms from the s-bend of a warp-pipe, this is a lot of fun. There’s more Pals, more mechanics, a vastly expanded map and the game is actually stable now.
And it got me thinking. Palworld is a kind of Isekai, but you’re still on the same world, just trapped on a mysterious continent with nothing but your wits and the flimsiest protagonist plot armor I’ve seen in decades. Its just you, the Pals you beat into submission and then shove into your balls convince into helping you build your sweat shop empire humble base from which to explore this land ripe with elemental power and strange metallic ruins of a bygone era, infested with feral Pals, shipwrecked survivors who have formed their own factions and have become hostile to all others, either by dint of religious fervor, criminal tendencies, or exposure to the strange mineral Paldium or the influence of powerful Pal who may or may not have been worshipped as actual Gods in the long-lost civilisation that once ruled this land.
There are a rare few neutral outposts where you can barter and seek shelter, and a mysterious organisation trying to smuggle Pals off the continent but find themselves trapped by the same mystical barrier that keeps you and the other survivors confined to the continent, and you gradually learn to wield both the mysterious energies of Paldium and the elemental forces of the Pals, both as your companions and as resources harvested from their corpses, to struggle for survival and to learn how to either escape, or conquer this ‘World of Pals’.
And its been a hoot. I keep getting raided by ‘Fangirl Pals’, which is a rather curious Pal, No 69 on the Pal Registry, Lovander.
And there’s a whole host of breeding minigames (stop that), exploration, randomly generated dungeons, collecting Pals, ‘Lucky’ Pals that are the Palworld version of Shinies from Pokeymanns and Rare Elites in WoW rolled into one.
There’s a whole host of base-building to get lost into, technology trees to explore, and rare NPCs and easter eggs to uncover.
I may have fallen off of several cliffs following Lunaris, as I was quite distracted by her … unique posture while levitating around.
And it got me thinking … what if we get around to the other side of the planet … and the Arathai Empire’s quite small, just a small island-continent. But the larger landmass? Its a place where the ship-wrecked crews of ten thousand years of storms and tsunamis have been washed ashore, in a lawless, untamed and hostile land, and have formed their own societies and cultures?
A land where Troll, Man, Elf and Dwarf, with later arrivals of Orc and Quillboar, Saurok and Worgen, are forced to cohabitate and work as one in a land where the Elemental chaos that once ruled Azeroth still reigns supreme, where the land, flora and fauna alike are infused with elemental powers and abilities, and only by taming, or stealing, these powers have the Mortals managed to carve out domains of their own.
How deeply do the divides of race run in a land where survival can be determined if a herd of earth-infused saurians stampedes right, into the plains, or left, into your village and smash right through your defences? Where Cults devoted to powerful Elemental beings rule those lands and will happily enact devastating wars against each other, and non-believers and heretics, at the whims of their chaotic masters?
Is that where the Arathai got their Light and their Fire fused together? Is that the lands they have subjugated? A place where the stability and ‘normality’ of the Alliance and Horde is a distant dream, where every day, survival is the aim and using the powers of land, beast and plant to secure that goal is a necessity for day-to-day existence? If Light has bound itself to Fire, has the Arcane bound itself to the Wind? Life to Water? Death has become one with the Earth?
I dunno, my brain just won’t stop burbling at me, and I’m about to make it everyone else’s problem.