“The game now has an overarching linear mission that brings you from the very beginning to ultimately, at the end of the World Tree, what is Palworld? The big reveal.”
We sat down with John “Bucky” Buckley, the Head of Publishing & Communications for Pocketpair, to discuss the present, past, and future of Palworld and the IP: what surprises are in store for players in 1.0, everything leading up to this point, and what’s next beyond it.
New Features Coming to Palworld 1.0
As players gear up for Palworld 1.0’s release on July 10, the first question on everyone’s minds is, what’s new in Palpagos?
Bucky jokingly tells us the previously reported 27 pages of patch notes are well past 30 at this point, and that there’s plenty of content that still hasn’t been shown. Although the team would prefer to keep most of it as a surprise, Bucky still let us in on a few of the features and overhauls fans can expect from the update.
- Two new Zones: World Tree and Sky Island (name unconfirmed)
- Overhauls to “all of the systems” including combat and movement
- Story and new player experience overhaul
- More new Pals than Bucky can remember
Palworld 1.0 overall is split into “two big prongs,” the first being an “overhaul of almost every major system”, and the second being an “absolute dump of new content”.
Both the Sky Island and the World Tree will bring new mechanics, so it won’t simply be more of the same either. The Sky Island comes with a “whole new set of mechanics in itself”, and the World Tree has something which Bucky describes lovingly as a “gimmick system”.
“There’s a very interesting mechanic to the tree. I think people will be surprised by what it turns out to be. It's not just going to be another kind of Island.”
A Complete Story Mission Leading to the Game’s Ending
From the launch of early access, a new game in Palworld has begun with a short cutscene where the player character finds the Palpedia, which starts up with a cryptic message, “The towers are the key… the tree holds the truth.”
It’s easy to infer that players should defeat the Tower Bosses and then go to the World Tree for the ending, but the World Tree and its “truth” have never been implemented until now.
Still, the story won’t suddenly be the main focus of Palworld. “It's not super narrative [focused]. Don't expect cutscenes every five seconds or so, but it's a lot more structured.”
He also told us what the “truth” held by the World Tree would be. “The game now has an overarching linear mission to it that brings you from the very beginning to ultimately, at the end of the World Tree, what is Palworld? The big reveal.”
We’ve always wondered who created the mysterious Wildlife Sanctuaries around Palworld, which imply the presence of an ancient technology. The ending of Palworld 1.0 just might reveal the ancient origins of the Pals, and what the island of Palpagos really is. Could this all be a research experiment by a more developed civilization, one that even we are a part of? We’ll have to wait for 1.0 to find out.
Players Should Start Over, but They Don’t Have To (Technically)
Given the overhauls and new content coming to Palworld 1.0, Palworld’s official communications have strongly recommended players to start from scratch for 1.0 for the best possible experience. So will those players who don’t start over miss out on the new story?
As Bucky explains, players with existing game progress can still play the whole story, but it might not have the same impact.
“Everyone's mission progress will be wiped, no matter what. [You’ve] gotta go back with [your] level 60, 65 Pals and go through these very basic steps first. That's kind of unavoidable. There are means to skip through certain bits of it, but you will have to go through the Tower Bosses again, and you'll one-shot them, but you'll still have to go through these to experience all the new stuff.”
Players will technically be able to do everything no matter where they’re starting from, but to experience 1.0 the way it’s really intended to be played, from the start is the way to do it.
“That whole onboarding process is completely changed now, so if people are open to it, we would strongly recommend, start fresh!”
The Origins of Palworld, the Misunderstood Survival Factory Sim
To understand how far Palworld has come with 1.0, we took a look back to the team’s experience from the very start of Palworld, starting from the development stage, into the release of its first trailers in 2021, through to its early access release in January 2024.
Although Palworld is commonly boxed in with other creature collecting games, we learned that the origin of the game comes from somewhere completely different: factory simulation games.
“It started life as, ‘Wouldn't it be fun to have a factory game like Satisfactory, but instead of machines, it was little creatures? Wouldn't it be fun if those little creatures were each their own individual, rather than just miscellaneous creatures that were working? Wouldn’t it be fun if [there was] creature collecting?’ And then it turned into open world and survival crafting naturally. The game has changed a lot from the original concept, but I think the core idea of Factory Sim with your Pals is still there.”
That focus is most apparent in the 2021 Announcement Trailer: “The very first trailer had a lot more factory elements than we actually ended up doing.”
Early Access Launched Palworld Into the Stratosphere
Above: Raining down lead on adorable Pals from the official 2024 trailer.
Three years later, Palworld was ready to bring its one-of-a-kind concept out into the world.
“When we were making Palworld, we all assumed the big moment would be the 2024 Early Access release. The team really felt that that was their their chance for Palworld to take off.”
They couldn’t have been more right: Palworld smashed records on release, reaching over 2 million concurrent players on Steam, and is still the all-time #3 according to SteamDB.
But those numbers also came with misconceptions. “A lot of people, especially in the general public, had an idea of what they thought Palworld was versus the reality of Palworld.”
Leading up to the release, videos of players blasting away at cute Pals with realistic firearms, and sending them off to toil in factories, were already going viral. Though pushing those shocking themes to the forefront was a genius marketing move that helped launch Palworld into the stratosphere on release, the game was often misjudged by those who hadn’t played it.
“People expected it to be more of a linear-narrative traditional creature collecting game, whereas we very much made a survival crafting game, so there was a clash between these two things. So, the first challenge we had was how to kind of set ourselves apart, and then also grow on that.”
That said, it’s understandable given the “creature collector” label why players might misunderstand Palworld. It’s not often that you’ll play a monster battling game with less focus on an RPG storyline. The gameplay loop fits the survival archetype first and foremost; rather than partnering with a starter Pal to join you on the long journey ahead, your first Pals will be tools you use to build a base and survive the first night.
The Craziest Feature Planned for Palworld, and Why it was Cut
Above: Grizzbolt, appearing in plush form in Pocketpair HQ, is rarely seen without its signature minigun.
Palworld came out guns ablazing with all of the outrageous features that the trailers had indicated, and as it turned out, that wasn’t the end of it. Players soon found that you can buy and sell Pals with the Black Marketeer, butcher your adorable Pals for meat, and even capture humans in Pal Spheres and force them to work on your base as laborers.
So it’s a bit surprising to hear that there was a feature that Palworld decided against, on the basis of it being too “silly”.
“There was a very short moment in time where we thought about having poop as an item, and actually added it to the game. ARK, for example, has poop, right? It serves its purpose.”
“We thought about it for a minute, and [decided] it's a bit too silly for Palworld, and removed it. It would almost be like we’re just trying to ‘check all the boxes’, and then [we realized it] would just be a tedious manure system.”
Arguably, it does make sense on paper, but we’re thankful that we can stick to monitoring Mozzarina’s milk production on our farms and not its fertilizer output.
Surprisingly though, Bucky says that there’s never been a feature that was removed specifically for being too controversial, and all the features so far have been generally accepted by the fanbase. He explained the reason why as a matter of game design.
“We try to build Palworld horizontally rather than vertically, so there's always a system that you can use in lieu of another system. So we try not to force people into these things if they really don't want to engage with it.”
Palworld’s Content Updates, and Understanding the Player Base
Above: Attempting to enter Feybreak on a flying Pal will get you shot down fast.
One of the major challenges of early access for the team was, “how do we grow the game in a way that the players want us to, pulling that feedback and making changes?”
Giving fans what they want might seem simple enough, but it’s not so clear-cut when dealing with different types of fans with different needs.
“[In] one of the first major updates, we added one small area called Sakurajima, and a lot of the kind of fans who jump in and jump out loved it…But a lot of the more hardcore fans instantly said, ‘well, I consumed this content in an hour. I was at max level. I could fly everywhere. It was almost irrelevant content for me.’”
“So when we came around to our first big winter update, called Feybreak, we really had to think, how could we make this engaging for the returning players and the hardcore players? So, a lot of players said it would be fun to have an area that you couldn't fly in.”
“We had to come up with a solution to prevent flying in this one little slice, [and] that's something that we never really considered before early access. That's something that very much came about from players shouting at us,” he chuckles.
In the end, the solution did come from listening to the fans, but the team had to be careful to make sure both casual and hardcore players would benefit from any changes they made.
The Future of Palworld
Throughout early access, whenever Palworld’s player counts would drop and clamors of “Palworld is dead” would arise, Bucky would be there to remind us that Palworld is not a live service game.
So what will happen to Palworld after 1.0? Bucky assures us that even if Palworld is not a traditional “live service” game, the release of 1.0 is not the end for Palworld as a whole.
“Palworld’s not a live service,” he laughs.
“It’s not something that’s meant to have new content added every week, or every month. Even if we chose to completely stop development on July 10th after 1.0, the game would always be playable as it is without any changes. So in my opinion, we’re not a live service game.”
However, this doesn’t mean that Pocketpair is moving away from the Palworld universe. While maintaining that nothing is set in stone regarding future developments, Bucky tells us that the team is contemplating various possibilities.
“We are also kind of thinking about the future; Palworld is already a very big game. It already pushes the tech to its absolute limit, especially as it’s on consoles and on PC. We’re thinking carefully about what we might do next. We’ve got some spin-offs we’re experimenting with, and hopefully we’ll be able to figure out how to keep expanding the Palworld universe.”
Once Palworld goes beyond “very big” to “big enough” in the team’s eyes, does that mean we’ll be getting Palworld 2? For now, it’s safe to say that Pocketpair is looking further towards other projects beyond the original game.
Why a Terraria-Sized Collaboration Won’t Happen Again
The Tides of Terraria 0.6 update was one of the largest in Palworld’s early access period, with a new Terraria-themed Dungeon, Raid Boss, and even new Pals straight from Terraria.
For such a massive undertaking, it’s surprising to hear that collaborations were never something that was intended for Palworld initially.
“It came about very naturally. [With the Terraria collaboration], we just met those guys and it was the seed of an idea. Ultrakill, one guy on our team who’s obsessed with it said, ‘can we do this?’ And we said, ‘we’ll ask.’”
“We’ve had discussions with a lot of games. I don't think it's a big secret to say we've had discussions, and we've mocked up ideas, but it takes a lot of time. Something like the Terraria collab took a huge amount of time to develop, and we're super happy with it, but we know there's a core part of the fan base that would just rather more Palworld, and we get that.”
“There was maybe a minute where we thought, ‘should we do a little something for 1.0?’ But we think keeping it purely just Palworld is the way to go. Post-1.0, will we do more collabs? Maybe? I think it's fair to say we probably won't do a Terraria-sized one again. That's half a year's work.”
But even if the scope gets toned down a bit, Bucky had some ideas ready to go for collaborations he and the team would love to see for Palworld in the future.
“We'd love to work with ARK if that ever came around. We're very close to those guys. We just released a bundle with them. But actual asset collaborations [take] a lot of time. How do you put dinosaurs in Palworld? It's hard to figure that out.”
Enshrouded and No Man’s Sky came up as well; “If we could make it make sense, we would do it tomorrow”.
While we had expected other indie creature collecting games like LumenTale: Memories of Trey to come up for this question, it’s really telling that even down to their dream collabs, the Palworld team is laser-focused on the survival genre. Despite all its accolades as the savior of the creature collector genre, Palworld is a survival factory sim at its heart. That could be what makes it feel revolutionary in the creature collector genre – it honestly doesn’t care what other games in that genre are doing.
Despite some hesitation, it’s great to hear that collabs are still on the table. “I think it's fair to say maybe we'll do one more at some point in the future. Maybe a small one.”
The Palworld IP is Driven by the Players
When considering what’s next for Palworld beyond the Palworld game, it’s clear that the team thinks about it from one perspective – what do players want out of Palworld that they might not be getting from Palworld proper?
“We've got Palfarm, release date… TBD (laughs). That [project] very naturally came about. There's a lot of Palworld players who just want Cozy Palworld, and it's really hard to offer that in Palworld, because it goes against the spirit of the game.”
As for the upcoming “Visual Novel”, More Than Just Pals, it started as an April Fool’s joke, but there was one problem: the fans said they wanted it. “A lot of people want it, so I guess we'll make it.”
In addition to the Palworld OCG coming later this month, and Palworld Mobile in the works, there’s “a few other little secret things in development. The IP is gonna keep growing.” The team hasn’t figured out if the spin-offs will stay as “side stuff” or if the Palworld game will end up as just one part of an IP ecosystem, but by how Bucky tells it, it really depends on what direction the fans want to see Palworld grow.
“It's crazy to think what the game was versus what the game is now, and it's, I would say genuinely 90% because that's what the players wanted, so we're just really, really grateful to them. Thank you guys.”
Palworld launches out of early access into 1.0 on July 10, 2026, on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Mac.
Giving my best “Smugcat” (working title for Cattiva) while Bucky gracefully lets it slide.
Thanks to Pocketpair for this awesome opportunity, and see you on release!
good interview, but god it was repetitive sometimes. like bro i get it, it's not a live servce. excited to jump back in for 1.0, with or without poop