Pocketpair has moved to lower expectations for Palworld’s next update, with publishing and communications head John “Bucky” Buckley telling players that version 1.1 will not be the year-long undertaking some of them are asking for.
The exchange began when Buckley marked Palworld’s 1.0 launch by retweeting an image of a “Palworld v1.1 brainstorming session” with the line “time to get back to the grind,” and invited suggestions. More than 2,000 responses followed. Some were small enough to be plausible, such as additional storage slots; others, including cross-server PvP and playing as pals, were not.
Setting the bar lower
Buckley returned to the thread to draw a boundary. “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,” he wrote. “Open to ideas but, we’re not planning to spend a year making a massive update for 1.1.”
The suggestions kept coming regardless, and Buckley worked through a number of them. Asked about a variant system for pals, he said the idea would not be difficult so much as “exceptionally time consuming” — a variant of more than 200 pals would take “realistically, a year or more unless we hyper focus it,” unless the work were automated rather than done by hand. Pressed on why that would take so long, he answered that the studio would want to do it by hand rather than automate it. Pocketpair has been publicly opposed to the use of generative AI in game development.
Where Palworld stands
Palworld left early access and entered full release in July after more than two years, and PC Gamer reports that the concurrent player surge on Steam that accompanied the 1.0 launch is settling back down. More than a month on, the game is still posting concurrent numbers it had not seen since the early part of its early access run.
No release window or content list has been given for Palworld 1.1. Buckley has separately indicated that further collaborations are on the way.
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