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

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."

"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."