Palworld went into full release in July after more than two years of early access, and it’s going pretty well: A massive surge in concurrent players on Steam is slowly settling back down to Earth, but more than a month after that 1.0 launch it’s still putting up numbers that haven’t been seen since the early days of that early access rollout.
Work on the game continues and there’s more to come, but Pocketpair’s publishing and communications head John “Bucky” Buckley recently warned that players should maybe temper their expectations about what’s next.
Buckley apparently set the bar higher than intended yesterday when he celebrated Palworld’s “incredible” 1.0 launch by retweeting an image of a “Palworld v1.1 brainstorming session,” adding, “time to get back to the grind!”
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He also invited suggestions, and received more than 2,000 responses, some of them—like more storage slots—manageable, and others, like cross-server PvP or being able to play as pals, less so. Eventually, he was forced to pump the brakes on the whole thing.
“Shot myself in the foot here, 1.7k comments later, but things like ‘add a new continent’, ‘add 20 more levels’ and similarly massive undertakings are not really what we want to do with v1.1,” Buckley wrote in a more recent message. “Open to ideas but, we’re not planning to spend a year making a massive update for 1.1.”
Naturally, that didn’t stop people from continuing to make unwieldy suggestions. Buckley made a trooper’s effort to answer a lot of them: In response to a request for a “variant system” for pals, he said it wouldn’t be difficult, “just exceptionally time consuming. A variant of 200+ pals would take a considerably long time to do. Realistically, a year or more unless we hyper focus it. Unless you don’t do it by hand and automate it somehow but…”
Replying to another user who asked why the process would be so time-consuming, Buckley wrote, “Because we would want to do it ourselves by hand rather than just automating it.” (Pocketpair has been quite outspoken in its opposition to the use of generative AI in game development.)
Eventually, though—as it always does—it came to this:
Deeply relatable. There’s no word on when Palworld 1.1 will be out at this point, or what will be in it, but Buckley also recently suggested that more collaborations are on the way, so at least you’ve got that to look forward to.
