If you've been paying attention to the Palworld discourse over the past few days, you'll be aware that fans of both Palworld and Pokemon have been embroiled in a debate about whether 💫develop🐻er Pocketpair has plagiarized certain designs. Pokemon fans have been gathering new evidence almost every day to support their theories, with one such person having taken the in-game models of Palworld and Pokemon creatures ♓and compared them, discovering that they're actually extremely similar.
While that was enough for some people to prove that Pocketpair had committed plagiarism, just like everything else in this convoluted debate, the models weren't quite what they seemed. Earlier today, the person that made the model comparisons on Twitter has been accused of fabricating the entire situation, as they admitted they scaled down the models to fit better, and another user called MajoraZ has noticed that the "topology of the triangles" in the Palworld models are very different to the Pokemon models.
For all you non-developers out there that don't speak the language, 3D models are essentially made up of two layers of polygons, one inside the model and one outside. The "topology" that MajoraZ speaks of is the layer inside the model, and it's very possible for two models to look pretty much identical, but have completely different topology.
But the topology of triangles is different. I don't think they just edited existing models: they still seemingly made their own, just to have v. close proportions
While it's still possible that the developer of Palworld could have taken Pokemon models and edited them to their liking whilst also changing the topology, MajoraZ explains that it would be "more work than changing the overall look of the model". They go on to explain that while they haven't really got their hands on more modern 3D software, it's unlikely that the Palworld devs just ripped models from Pokemon and used them in Palworld.
Of course, none of this is letting Palworld off of the hook for straight-up copying Pokemon designs, as the plagiarism accusations are still in full force thanks to certain pals clearly having features riꦡpped straight off of certain Pokemon. However, this new discovery more than likely clears Pocketpair of the stealing accusations, as well as the accusations that Pals are AI-generated.
There appears to be too much work put into the models for them to be outright stolen, even if they are very heavily inspired by existing Pokemon designs. It feels like a nice conclusion to the debate, though I'm sure some new revelation will rear its head in the coming days to keep us all firmly rooted in the discourse.
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