The Five Biggest Problems With ‘Palworld’ Right Now

Palworld continues to put up huge numbers, though it is possible we may have seen it peak after hitting 2 million concurrent players on Steam. We’ll see how it performs over the weekend. But while the game is good, there are a number of things that Palworld, as a low-budget, Early Access game, still needs to work on quite a bit, and I wanted to go through what I view as the game’s biggest problems at the moment.

1. Pal Base AI – There is zero chance you have not experienced this one, as Pals are constantly getting stuck on buildings, on each other, on the landscape, or in my base, sometimes falling through the ground and starving to death. This is especially pronounced with the bigger pals who are also the most efficient at tasks, so if your base is full of them, it’s kind of a mess, and you really need to spread out everything. Even then, you will still constantly run into problems.

2. Pal Job Assignments – There needs to be some sort of system where you can manually tell Pals which of their skills to prioritize. Early on I ran into an issue where a number of my Pals were doing nothing but grazing at the ranch, even though there were clearly more important jobs to be done. I also find crafting Pals to often ignore building projects completely in favor of other jobs. This is also true when you try to manually assign them by throwing them at stations, which only seems to work half the time. And then this comes when say, your base is being invaded and the Pals won’t logically go man your base crossbows or machine guns. It’s very frustrating. Pals will sometimes also not go to a hot spring you literally have right next to them if their SAN is low and they’ll just end up misbehaving or slacking off.

3. Invasion XP – Right now Invasions exist as a sort of just…tax on you. You will be invaded by (eventually) high level enemies who will either die to your powerful Pals or incapacitate half your squad if your defenses aren’t good enough. But there’s simply no benefit to the player here other than a tiny amount of materials for kills or mitigating damage as much as you can. Specifically, I have no idea why a successful defense of your base should not result in XP for your base squad and your active Pal squad, along with you as a player. But there is no XP aspect to this at all, which makes no sense, given that these can be some of the toughest fights in the game.

4. Dungeons – Palworld has already talked about introducing raids, but they need to fix dungeons first. There is essentially just a singular dungeon in the game, one that rearranges its rooms and hallways, but there is like, one real room, two kinds of hallways, and one boss area. And that’s close to every dungeon. They have to introduce some diversity into these. I’m not asking for puzzles or mechanics (though a small amount could be nice) but these are clone stamped in a way that feels not great compared to the rest of the open world.

5. Stat Balancing And Late Game Economy – This is a more general balance pass, but as it stands, there are a bunch of player stats that are not useful at all in their current forms and would need crazy buffs to be relevant. All you need is carry capacity and some stamina and HP, while player attack and work speed are pretty much pointless under the current system.

Past that, the higher you get, the more tedious just…playing the game becomes in a not-fun way. While I get that higher level ammo and spheres would cost more, it gets to the point where 90% of the game is farming materials and crafting things and 10% is actually playing and exploring. When the only balls you can use to capture enemies in new zones now take 5x the time to craft, it gets tiresome quickly, and there should be some sort of economy pass taking a look at this.

Those are my changes I want to see, let me know what yours might be.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.