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  1. Games
  2. Survival Games
  3. Palworld

"Apologies, Palworld gamers," but Pocketpair communications lead says an underwater level will never happen: "You're pushing the game to its absolute limits"

News
By Ashley Bardhan Contributions from Austin Wood published 19 March 2026

That Pal is not The Little Mermaid

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Palworld
(Image credit: Pocketpair)
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Palworld fans have been asking for an underwater ecosystem ever since the creature collector launched in 2024, but John "Bucky" Buckley tells GamesRadar+ it's never going to happen.

Buckley, developer Pocketpair's head of publishing and communications, explains that the underwater expansion many fans dream of is too much of "a huge undertaking." He tells these fans, "You're talking about rewriting a lot of the game's bones to allow for that. And so, these ideas, these big ideas – that's what you get into. Is it worth that massive kind of restructuring? Or, do you start thinking about, 'That could be something else'?"

He says that Palworld is the baby of that exact question, since Pocketpair's previous multiplayer survival game Craftopia had "limited creature-collecting elements to it," but the developer was eager "to expand on that" feature.

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So, at this point, it seems more likely that Pocketpair would create an entirely new, underwater survival game experience than give Palworld the underwater overhaul so many players have been begging for.

"Apologies, Palworld gamers," Buckley says, anticipating your disappointment. "But, like, massive underwater cities – it's not feasible. You're pushing the game to its absolute limits."

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  • Screenshot from Windrose, showing a pirate aiming down the sights of her rifle while standing in front of tropical trees. "It would just be Palworld 2": Pocketpair says adding a feature from the viral game it's publishing is impossible

"Remember," he adds, "this is a game that's on consoles and PC. So there's only so much we can do with it before we start to reach the point where it's not going to work on certain consoles anymore."

Palworld publishing lead is "more determined than ever" to make things "a little less sh*t" for cool devs struggling to find funding: "The West continues to stumble."

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CATEGORIES
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Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
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Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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Read more
Palworld pal Cattiva looks sad in official animated short Finders Keepers.
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