GD I'm digging on Palworld.
Spent more time playing solo this weekend and it dawned on me how smartly the pieces fit together to create a fresh/novel gameplay loop.
Technology tier unlocks being tied to the player's level feels like an innovative approach. It makes you go out and explore the various gameplay feature sets to earn the xp for future unlocks, whether that's working on your base, farming materials, collecting Pals, exploring dungeons or whatever. And in turn those newly earned tech tiers circle back into increasingly complex base upgrades.
It's an organic feedback loop that has a smart rhythm & flow. It facilitates goal-oriented progress so there's always new objectives available at any time.
Another think that struck me was how awesome it is to be able to adjust loot-table variables every time you fire up the game. Many titles let you adjust resource availabilities, player/enemy HP, etc. at the start of a new game. But PW lets you fine tune those adjustments even after you've started a new game file.
I was getting fatigued with the player/Pal hunger demands so I went in there and dialed it down from the default 1 to .1 and it worked great! I was no longer getting pulled away to take care of that element and felt a lot more freedom to pursue other goals.
Perhaps I'll turn it back up later, but in the meantime I love having that option available at all times. Also turned off base raids because f that noise.
So yeah, there really is an infectious gameplay loop here that sports the flexibility & diversity to make it one of the more addictive genre entries in recent memory. The team really knocked it out of the park.