Palworld Promo Shot
Image: Pocketpair

Plagued by controversy and a legal battle with a corporate giant, I admit I never thought Palworld would survive to leave early access, but I'm happy to be wrong. It took a few hits along the way and player counts settled down after an initial explosion, but the creature-collecting survival sandbox has finally graduated from early access on Steam (and other platforms) today. Today's launch update includes a comprehensive update of the main quest, a new region (a set of floating sky-islands), and a new finale taking players on a quest to the World Tree - check out the launch changelog here. It is extensive.

The update also adds another 72 Pals to collect (making for a total of 287), new stuff to do out in the open world, additional friendly settlements and enemy bases to visit, plus an overhaul to Pal Habitats. Player progression has been re-tuned, the level cap has been increased to 80 (from 65), and random dungeons are both more numerous and rewarding. And for those playing online, the game finally has built-in voice chat. From the looks of it, rolling a new character and starting a fresh world seems the best way to experience Palworld now, given how so many changes appear to be spread across the entire campaign.

Despite its outward similarities to Pokémon, Palworld has always had far more in common with the notoriously hardcore Ark: Survival Evolved, just trading in dinosaurs for marketable plushie-compatible critters. It hits most of the same exploration, tech-researching, and base-building notes. Most positively, it reduces the grind and frustration of playing solo by letting you assign your many Pals to the kind of grindy labor that would bore a human player to tears in Ark. It's less 'We have Pokémon at home' and more 'Ark but it doesn't personally hate you'.

Plus, the clean anime aesthetic helps - Ark's hideous lumpen cave-people are hard enough to look at even when they're not automatically defecating on the floor. It's telling that nobody has even attempted to mod that unforgettable Ark feature into Palworld.

It's also worth noting some facts of Nintendo's ongoing (and increasingly unserious) legal challenge to Palworld. Despite allegations from outraged fans claiming that Palworld directly plagiarized designs or even (in some particularly strong claims) ripped files directly from Pokémon games, this was never Nintendo's legal claim. Instead, they leaned on Japanese patent law, under which they claim ownership of basic, broad concepts such as 'gliding by being carried by a creature'. Patents that were notably rejected outside of their home turf, and, in some cases, within.

The one downside to the v1.0 launch: Pocketpair note that the game's underlying systems have changed enough to cause conflicts with many mods. They highly recommend disabling them for the new version. But once it updates to support the new version, I do recommend this little mod pack. Mostly small cosmetic tweaks designed to roll back the changes that the legal battle with Nintendo forced upon the game, such as restoring the ability to summon pals by throwing spheres and gliding while being carried by your critters.

Of course, hitting v1.0 doesn't mean that Palworld development is ending. Considering that the game has sold over 40 million units so far, there's clearly a massive audience hungry for more of this particular fusion of sandbox genres. I expect a post-launch roadmap, and maybe an expansion or two announced once the dust settles on this particular update. But for now, there are Pals to catch.