Palworld, the game currently taking the world by storm, was just released on early access. But when will it fully come out? Read on to learn about our best guesses regarding Palworld’s complete release.
Palworld Full Release Date
By 2025 At The Very Least
Palworld finally released in early access(EA) on January 19, 2024 after months of fan anticipation, and it has reached levels of unprecedented success, breaking records left and right. The alluring premise of "Pokemon, but with Guns" has enticed millions of players to try out the new survival fantasy game, overloading its servers into being overcapacity just within the first three days of EA.
That being said, early access is still early access, meaning that Palworld is still an incomplete game that implies a full release as a future end goal. However, accurately guessing when a game fully comes out is difficult, as EA games range from spending a mere few months to entire years in the phase – and Palworld is looking like it’s leaning towards the latter. A couple years of EA is optimistic, as some games don’t even get out at all, remaining to be labeled as early access after multiple years of development.
Assuming that Palworld WILL eventually become a full release, giving it 1 year for the full version is still very generous, what with the abundance of things it still needs to fix inside and outside the game, as well as additional features the developers still intend to implement.
What Palworld Needs to Work On While in Early Access
Palworld Still Has Lots of Bugs and Lacks Quality of Life Features
Its large scale of gameplay systems and mechanics will prove to be a gigantic hurdle to fully iron out for the developers, Pocketpair. Movement is still quite clunky, picking up objects disturbs immersion as they merely disappear when interacted with, trees cut down are just obliterated instead of visually being cut down, and enemies often spawn only to clip through the ground and die from fall damage.
Players are also discovering exploits which allow them to capture normally-uncatchable Pals, NPCs, or bosses. These are all but a few examples within the game that Palworld still needs to iron out, and who knows how much is still undiscovered.
Palword Platforms and Crossplay Compatibility
Besides fine tuning and squashing bugs within the gameplay itself, server allocation and capacity will also continually become an issue with the still-steadily-rising player count in all available platforms. And speaking of different platforms, Pocketpair plans to eventually release to more consoles, with the PlayStation in particular next in their sights. However, even existing console versions are having trouble, as the game on the Xbox are completely different builds from its Steam counterpart. This issue also poses a problem for the developers’ plans for crossplay, as versions across platforms must be the same in order to be bridged. For a large-scale game such as Palworld to enable crossplay between multiple platforms will be a very challenging feat, and thus will need tons of development time to undertake.
Palworld Controversies
Besides technical issues to fix, outside of the game, heavy accusations have been made towards the game and its developers. It has been widely observed by fans that Palworld’s fantastical creatures, Pals, share very close similarities to actual Pokemon, and that Pocketpair deliberately plagiarized assets and designs from Game Freak.
The CEO of Pocketpair, Takuro Mizobe, recently took to Twitter(X) to address some of the outrage.
"Currently, we are receiving slanderous comments about our artists, and there are some tweets that appear to be death threats.
I have received various opinions about Pal World, but I am responsible for the production of Pal World, as I am the supervisor of all productions related to Pal World.
I would appreciate it if you would refrain from slandering the artists involved in Pal World."
Though he did not directly address the plagiarism accusations, he urged people not to harass the artists working under him, and implies to direct all criticism to him, as he’s the supervisor of all productions related to the game.
These issues being linked so early to a game definitely leaves a sizable blotch, where there’s a possible scenario wherein it further escalates and the game would have to shut down or be redesigned to remove all seemingly-copied Pals. This would in turn lengthen its EA duration even more, giving players a much longer time to wait for a full release.
