The first Palworld roadmap is here, with developer Pocketpair promising improvements, but only after it's addressed the mass of bug reports it's facing after its smash-hit success.
In a tweet, the studio said that "sales have far exceeded the development team's expectations, and we are currently experiencing many problems due to excessive access congestion." That means that while a more complete roadmap is on the way, the studio will focus its efforts on bug-fixing and other behind the scenes issues. That could mean potential rollbacks and persisting loading screens.
After those pressing issues have been addressed, however, Pocketpair promises fixes to key configurations and the AI and pathing of Pals located in players' bases. These changes are intended to be implemented "ASAP," but there's no date attached at this time.
[The Future of Palworld] We would like to share with you our roadmap for Palworld. Sales have far exceeded the development team's expectations, and we are currently experiencing many problems due to excessive access congestion, among other challenges.We will prioritize… pic.twitter.com/UKD2HFRaG4January 24, 2024
Further down the line, Pocketpair's already looking to the future, promising "planned future updates" to include PvP, end-game raid bosses, and a Pal Arena dubbed 'PvP for Pals'. Those are the headline features, but there's also a promise of Steam-Xbox crossplay, server transfers, improvements to the building system. Of most interest to most players, I imagine, would be the promise of new islands, pals, bosses, and technologies.
Most early access survival games will have a roadmap that looks something like the latter stages of this one regardless of their initial success, so it's little surprise that the Palworld roadmap already looks pretty robust. What's slightly more of a surprise is that that roadmap has been pushed aside for more critical fixes, but we've actually already seen almost this exact thing happen elsewhere.
Valheim, another multiplayer survival game that arrived in early access to a huge player count, was made by a very small team with no expectation of its massive success. A huge influx of players led to a huge influx of bug reports, and developer Iron Gate was forced to push back its own roadmap - a period of updates planned to last the nine months to the end of Valheim's debut year was extended significantly. That might not have felt like the best thing for players invested in the viking afterlife, but it's helped Valheim's longevity - after a huge peak of nearly 500,000 players on Steam, it's still played by tens of thousands of players every day. Given that Palworld's director has cited Valheim as inspiration for his own game, perhaps these similarities aren't too surprising.
If you're yet to jump in, check out our Palworld review.
