Palworld Survival Evolved
Despite initial appearances and Nintendo’s litigation fetish, Palworld has far more in common with something like Ark Survival Evolved than Pokemon. Palworld is very much a survival crafting game, which happens to be a genre I love and often have a lot to say about. Awhile back I wrote a piece speaking about how the Survival Game Genre is Broken. In many ways Palworld fixes some of those issues and is a step up for the genre. In other ways it suffers from the same design flaws that plague other survival games.
You can find a video version of this article on YouTube!
After a great many hours of palling around, I’ve compiled a list of 5 things that Palworld gets really right, and 4 it gets very wrong. Let’s dig into them.
Right: Sandbox Settings
Palworld features a whole host of settings that allows you to tweak and customize Palworld into the experience you want. This ranges from statistical changes like tweaking damage and hunger, to things like enabling Pal death, randomizing Pal Spawns, enabling or disabling base raids and much more.
I don’t recommend heavily modifying many values on a first playthrough (except one, but more on that later). After all, you have to meet the game where it’s at to know what type of changes you would like to make. But the sheer customization of it is fantastic and allows people to handcraft the way they want to play. The only thing missing is a slider that affects Pal Sanity, I’d like to have that option to make the management side of Palworld more difficult, but aside from that I’m impressed with the options available.
As someone who often finds modern games too easy. I appreciate having the options that Palworld offers to make the game more challenging or to simply fuel different play through concepts.
Wrong: Badly Balanced Default Experience
Despite the fact that Palworld offers a ton of customization options, the vast majority of players are going to simply select “Normal” or “Hard” mode and start playing. I think these default settings make for a really bad experience for one simple reason.
By default, you level up way, way too fast. By simply exploring and capturing Pals, you will bypass entire tiers of the tech tree. There were numerous times that I had gathered the resources to craft a cool new gun, only to find that I gained so many levels in the process that the gun was made obsolete by a new one. I crushed the first few tower bosses because I had accidentally over leveled them by a massive margin, and I never really got to enjoy early Pals for base automation, because I constantly had access to bigger or better ones. It became difficult to actually invest myself in anything, my base or my pals because I was progressing at such a speed that doing so felt pointless.
I feel like the default settings have really fallen into the attention span trap that so many modern games do. It feels like your constantly strapped to a comet while a crack addicted gremlin screams in your ears” New Pals! New regions! New stuff! Go, go, go, don’t get bored, more new stuff, faster, faster, faster, DOOOOPPAAAMINEE”.
The problem is, Palworld doesn’t benefit from that pace at all. The game is much more enjoyable if you explore slower and have time to actually enjoy the pals you catch and tech you unlock without making them obsolete within minutes because you dared explore that small island over there. I ended up starting over and after doing some research online I found I was not the only one who felt this way. I turned down the experience gain setting all the way to 0.3 and had a much more enjoyable time. I would recommend anyone to do the same, even on a very first play through.
Right: Great Exploration
The world in Palworld is huge and every time I thought I’d seen the edge of the map, there was another landmass in the distance to go see. While seeing new regions, and pals is one benefit of exploring, there’s a lot more to it. As you move around the map you can find, chests, eggs, effigy’s that can power you up, caves, enemy camps, fishing spots and a whole lot more. Interestingly, the loot you find is based on the regions level, but those regions aren’t really locked off to you, even at the start of the game.
You see, in many open world games without level scaling, the open world isn’t truly open. If you can’t go to an area until your level 50 because you will die instantly, well, that’s not much different than just locking the area away in the first place. Higher regions in Palworld are dangerous, higher level enemies will destroy you in combat, but not all Pals are aggressive, and if you’re careful, clever or fast you can dodge the attacks of the aggressive ones. It’s gives some nice risk versus reward to exploring areas higher than you, rather than just slapping you out of them altogether.
Furthermore, the world is beautiful and designed in a way that makes exploring it fun. There’s a ton of verticality and you can climb anything as long as you have the stamina. You gain tools like gliders, grappling hooks, double jump boots and a variety of Pal Mounts that further aid in your exploration. Some Pals even augment your glider, such as making it faster, removing fall damage or causing you to slowly ascend when using it. The world is simply fun to move around in and choosing to move around in it constantly litters your presence with drops of loot to find, rare eggs tucked away and a constant supply of things to do and come across.
Wrong: Too Many Ways to Bypass Exploration
Traveling around the world has many mechanical benefits and is just straight up fun. But Palworld really undermines one of its greatest strengths by making it too simple to bypass moving through its own world. The first is with flying mounts. You gain access to them far too early, and it removes a lot of the wonder, mechanical fun and danger of exploring while moving around the world. There is so much to the mechanics of getting around between the climbing, gliders, ground and sea-based pals and it all gets undermined by the ability to fly, and really early in the game as well. There’s little point in using a pal like Croajiro to launch you up high, when you can just fly.
There definitely needs to be some type of cost or danger to flying around. Granted some later game regions do specifically target flying pals, but it’s too little too late. I opted to just not use flying pals most of the time.
Secondly is the abundance of fast travel points littered around the map. Most survival games have very limited fast travel, and for good reason. Much like flying, the fast travel points undermine the exploration, and you honestly end up missing out on a ton of treasure if you constantly use them. Fast traveling between bases is a good idea, and since by default you can make 4 of them, that gives you a good range of travel points. But the numerous eagle statues that you can travel to and from are just over kill.
Heck, there’s an even an item you can craft that allows you to teleport back to your base from anywhere. It’s made completely redundant because there is almost always a fast travel point nearby. There is an option to limit fast travel to your bases, but it’s not enabled by default. It would work much better if there were either less fast travel points, or some type of item that was required to use them. That way it would become a thoughtful mechanic, rather than one that undermines the gameplay.
Right: Base Raids
Any survival game that doesn’t endanger your base is a failure in my eyes. If a base can’t be threatened, much of it simply becomes a cosmetic resource grind, and that’s not for me. Thankfully, Palworld features base raids, two kinds in fact. The first of which is where enemies will periodically attack your bases. You’re given a warning, and the opportunity to bribe the attack away, but if you don’t, waves of enemies will rush your base forcing you and your pals to defend it. You are granted some pretty nice rewards for fighting off raids as an incentive to take part in them.
Secondly is the raid boss type of raid, you can choose to summon raid bosses at your base allowing you to take advantage of your bases defensive design. You can choose to fight them elsewhere if you want, however. Both cases add an element to Palworld that is lacking in most PvE centered survival games. You actually benefit from having base defenses and building your base in strategic ways, plus, it’s fun to fight against the attacks. It makes walls and buildings more than just cosmetic, and that really adds to the overall fun of building them.
Wrong: Too Many Good Locations That Can’t Be Raided
There are a lot of locations in Palworld that can’t be raided at all. If you build a base in such a location, raids will simply never spawn. Furthermore, if a base can’t be raided, it also can’t be visited by wandering merchants. Some of these locations are obvious, build high up on a tall mesa with no way up from the ground, and it’s obviously going to be immune to raids. That’s not what I’m complaining about, games have limitations and if you go out of your way to make a base in an unraidable location, no game is going to be able to account for that.
The problem is that there are plenty of spaces that are packed with resources that should in theory, be able to be raided, but aren’t. Behind the scenes there seems to be some type of set spawn locations for enemy raids, if your base happens to fall outside of these zones, no raids, and no merchants. The biggest issue is the game does not make you aware of this at all. The only way to know if your base can’t have raids or merchants is for them to simply never occur.
If you were a new player that knew nothing about Palworld, it would be entirely possible to play through the entire game without ever knowing that raids and wandering merchants were a game mechanic. Simply by accidentally building your bases in areas that doesn’t support them. Some of those areas are nice, flat and chock full of resources to such a degree that the game is practically telling you to build there with giant neon signs.
It’s frustrating even for a veteran player like me. I spent over an hour recently trying to build a base that could be raided in an area that had the resources I wanted and had to move it over 4 times before I found a viable location. Why should I have to FIGHT with the game for its mechanics to engage with me?
Right: Changes The Survival Grind
Go here, hit a rock, go there chop a tree. Any fan of the survival genre will be familiar with the resource collecting loop. While you certainly can and to some degree will mine rocks and chop trees in Palworld. Much of the resource grind is offloaded to your pals. In addition to being monsters with elemental powers, every Pal also has a work suitability. Some are good at logging, others good at watering, or crafting etc. Summon a logging Pal while you’re cutting some trees and it will help you, if it’s a mount you can ride it and collect resources even faster.
However, the biggest difference is the ability to use pals to automate collections. Build a logging camp in your base and Pals with the lumbering skill will work to chop wood, other pals will then transport said wood to your storage. This turns the resource grind into something more of a management game. You build your bases with efficiency in mind and work to order your pals around, keep them fed, healthy and sane and they will do the vast majority of the resource work for you. In the instances that you still have to get your hands dirty, you have pals with skills to help you, such as ones that reduce how much a resource weighs or how efficiently you collect it.
It adds an additional layer to the Pals themselves. You might want to catch a Digitoise because it mines really well, or Arsox because it cooks, or Sekhmet because it’s a dancing cat girl, has really good handiwork. While it’s not as deep as something like Satisfactory, it definitely spins the usual grind around into something fresh that strengthens its core premise of catching and raising Pals.
Wrong: Lack of Danger
Palworld commits the cardinal survival game sin of not being dangerous. It can be, when you’re exploring zones that you are under leveled for, and I’d say that the game even encourages you to do so. However, Palworlds level system is exceptionally rigid. Anything 10 levels above you are essentially untouchable, anything 10 levels below you are non-threatening, and anything with a level similar to yours is…also largely nonthreatening unless you are outnumbered.
It can give the game an odd feeling, because I can’t actually tell how strong any individual pal of mine actually is, at least until the late game. Whatever debuff that nerfs damage when you’re under leveled is effective against all of my under leveled pals, and any given pal of mine is likely to dog walk any other pal of a similar level regardless of how I’ve raised them. It makes the numeric level feel superior to everything else, skills, passives, all of it.
This also means that as you play, huge swaths of land become completely non-threatening to you. The more late game weapons you unlock, the less you have to actually use them on that a good old handgun from 20 levels ago wouldn’t have dealt with. This set up can make Palworld feel much less like a survival game, and more of a cozy game. That is unless you randomize the Pal spawns and their levels in the world settings. Then it becomes an island of nightmarish survival. I’m really glad that option exists.
Right: Incredibly Interesting Monster Catching Core
One of the reasons that Ark Survival remains popular, despite its numerous issues is it has one thing that other survival games don’t. Dinosaurs that you can tame and ride. Palworld is nowhere near as janky as Ark, but it has a similar strength. It has a lot of Pals, and the Pals themselves are multifaceted and interesting. A single Pal has several aspects to it. Take the simple Lamball, sure it’s probably the lowest Pal of the totem pole, a simple normal type and like all pals it can fight.
However, this Lamball alone has a lot more to it you might think. For one, it has a unique rolling attack that’s almost entirely ineffective, but hey, it has a unique attack that’s also adorable. It has the farming skill and will drop wool if assigned to a ranch. It has handiwork so it can build and craft things for you. And, it has a unique Pal skill allowing you to hold it against it will as a shield against incoming attacks. All pals can spawn with passives, so maybe you get lucky and have one with farmhand or something that makes it work faster.
That’s just 1 pal of 287. They all have quirks like this. They usually have one unique combat move in addition to universal ones. They have different work skills, and Pal skills. Some can be ridden, some buff you for just being in your party. Every capture offers you an opportunity for build crafting, base work or just a battle companion, and there’s a lot of freedom in how you pursue this.
For example, one of the ways you can improve pals is by condensing them. You uh, basically catch a bunch of the same pal and smush them into one Pal using a condenser. It’s best not to think about the dark details of it. Anyway, that improves a Pals star rating, which makes it stronger, AND improves its work skills. It also levels up its pal skill. I keep a Celaray in my party because it extends my gliding. By condensing it into a higher rating, it makes my gliding even faster and more efficient.
You could focus on breeding to get passives you want on to a new pal. Breeding is…not exactly what you might imagine. Breed two pals of different species,and the egg they lay will hatch an entirely new pal of an unrelated species. Weird? Yeah, but it also gives you some extra leverage. Let’s say you have a Lamball with the infinite stamina passive. That’s useless, stamina only matters for mounts, and you can’t mount a Lamball, unless you’re from Wales.
However, if you breed a Lamball, with a Flambelle, you get a Rushoar. You could try and pass the infinite stamina passive to the Rushoar and have a nice mount with unlimited sprint. The Pals are simply interesting and useful in several ways, and that gives Palworld an incredibly solid foundation that the rest of the game was built on.
Palworld’s Future
I hope Palworld continues to be supported because in a lot of ways it’s one of the strongest games to release in the survival genre in a long time. Some of its issues could easily be fixed, such as adding viable base raid locations and tweaking default XP gain. Other issues would require much more work. Either way, I’m invested in seeing how the game evolves, well maybe not actually “evolve”, lest Nintendo descend with its blood thirsty flock of lawyers again. But the future of Palworld could be a bright one, it’s certainly a standout game with a whole lot going for it, and it’s one I want to continue playing even with its imperfections.
What to do you think about Palworld? What does it do right for you, and what do you think it could do better? Let me know in the comments below!
