It’s been about 2.5 years since I last touched Palworld. With its 1.0 release, it felt finally time to go back.

TL;DR: I haven’t booted up Hearthstone or Guild Wars 2 a single time since, not even for weekly quests.

I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about changes, as I only played around eight hours back in like… v0.12 or whatever. What I can confirm, broadly speaking, is that the game pretty much plays like it did 2.5 years ago, minus the bugs. All of these impressions are coming from around ~30 hours of game time on default, Normal settings.

The gameplay loop is the same with ARK: explore a defined map, grind resources, capture creatures, repeat. The big difference is that Pals are much more inherently useful in all aspects of the game. You can summon Pals to help you fight/tame other Pals. You can summon Pals and then ride on them over land, sea, and/or air. You can summon Pals and utilize them as living flamethrowers, grenade launchers, miniguns, or even as swords. Crucially, you can deploy Pals in your base to farm resources, craft ammo, plant/harvest crops, and otherwise keep you company. And because Pals can be useful for all of these different scenarios, you are encouraged to capture all of them in the off-chance they are better at a given task than what you have, rather than just the completionist “gotta catch them all” achievement.

The actual act of playing the game has been an interesting experience for me. Palworld very much feels like a AA game… which it is, with MSRP of $30. The title screen, the menus, some of the textures all kinda scream “stock Unreal assets.” More than that though, some red flags immediately raised to me when I discovered that the first resource after Wood was just “Ore.” Not Copper Ore, not Iron Ore, just… Ore. In the past I have railed on designers having excessively prescriptive design, e.g. Copper Sword, Iron Sword, Silver Sword, etc. Palworld does have other tiers of items, like Refined Ore and others, but having “Ore” the baseline was indicative of an overall balance towards volume than rarity. Which is indeed how it has played out thus far.

What I do appreciate (to a degree) is how many different activities are available in the game. There are faction bases that you can attack in the open world, which gives you some loot. There are instanced dungeons, which contain some Pals and resources that only spawn inside. There are open-world “bosses” that are effectively super-charged Pals. Base raids are a thing, unless you either pay the messenger for them to go away or turn them off in the menu. There is also Fishing, which can net you some nice rewards and high-level Pals. Respawning treasure chests are strewn about in the land. In short, there are plenty of distractions when exploring, such that you may end up not actually accomplishing the thing you set out to do, unless you are able to ignore everything else.

In short, Palworld is great! For now. I can imagine a scenario in which some of these activities get old after a while, in which case the loop collapses. I also find it difficult to imagine replaying the game later, since the map isn’t procedurally generated. I believe there is an option to randomize the Pal locations, but I’m not certain how much extra juice that will provide. Best-case scenario would be for there to be ongoing support, ARK-style, with perhaps new maps eventually, whether created by Pocket Pair themselves or dedicated modders.

Then again, there is something to be said for having an experience that is just over when you’re done.