I mean, as it stands now, there’s no gameplay other than “build up base”, “collect all monsters” and “level up”. End game is non-existent. It needs something more or it absolutely will die. There’s been a million open world survival games that have come and gone for the same reason. This very well could just be a flash in the pan, largely held up by hype more than anything.
I can’t think of a game that I’ve played and enjoyed that had an “end game” except rolling credits, and that’s totally fine. Flashes in the pan are totally fine. The game can’t “die” as long as a single person wants to play it, because it’s playable regardless of the presence of the company’s servers.
I can definitely think of quite a few non-live-service games with an “end game” that I’ve enjoyed:
- (Older) Pokémon games with their battle towers, where putting together a flexible team with as few weaknesses as possible is the aim.
- Loot games like Borderlands, Grim Dawn and Last Epoch where I want to make new builds and test their limits against harder and harder challenges.
- Factorio, where I want to optimise my factory. Although there’s absolutely an argument to be made that that is the game, but I think it becomes more about player-set goals once you’ve launched the rocket.
All of them are either offline or have offline modes available. All of them have potentially infinite “content” if you’re the sort of person who like optimising, or just being able to set yourself new targets. They’re all enjoyable to play for their “campaigns” alone, but they also have very strong sandboxes that players can continue to engage with even after the game stops giving them objectives.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment, though. I think MMO-style “end games” where you login for your daily, time-gated quests and do the same thing you always do with no variation or sense of progression (be it narrative, emotional, build-related or some other kind of progression) isn’t necessarily healthy. And I dislike the way “end games” have tended to move away from being optional post-game content for people who aren’t ready to finish playing yet and instead are often viewed as the main game that you have to get through the sorry excuse for a campaign/story to access.
Factorio is definitely the one I had in mind, especially since it’s the game I’ve played most similar to Palworld, and that game is over for me once I’ve launched the rocket. I did do that twice though, with two very different factory designs. If I’m not compelled to play Palworld two different ways, I’ll still have gotten my money’s worth.
OMG, stfu. No one is talking about “you’re still alive as long as someone remembers your name” type bullshit. We mean an active and engaged player base. That’s what a games “death” refers to. You are being incredibly obtuse.
Who cares if there’s a huge player base a year from now? Really? This isn’t “you’re still alive as long as someone remembers your name”, this is the game literally still exists and can be played. To play multiplayer, ping your friend on Discord and host it yourself, even if that’s thirty years from now, but good luck doing that with The Finals or something. That game really will be dead in 30 years (maybe even 1 year). If Palworld’s population is in single digits a year from now, they’re still filthy rich, and people who bought the game still have access to it whenever they want. Nothing about the game is worse off for the population not being in the millions anymore.
why does an “active and engaged player base” matter at all? you can host a personal/local dedicated server, so no worries about them shutting the servers off. the game has no larger community interactions beyond what happens on a server. there’s not even pvp that would suffer from a diminished player base.
do you, like, only play games that other people think are cool?
You are right, but is it any different for games like Ark, Conan, VRising, Rust or any other sandbox builder focused on multiplayer? It’s always just a farm-build-collect-repeat cycle. It’s why I get bored of them easily at least, the only games in that genre that can usually keep my attention are Factorio and Valheim.