The Feature Every Palworld Fan Wants Has Finally Arrived
Pal around on any device.
Palworld developer PocketPair may still be embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit, but it's not slowing down its ambitions to further expand its multiplayer survival hit. This week, the game received its biggest update yet, one that adds a feature fans have constantly requested since the game’s mega-successful launch last year.
Crossplay is now enabled for Palworld users across PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. Starting today, players can join their friends’ play sessions regardless of platform, and even bring their pals into new instances to ensure they’re not missing a beat with the new Global Palbox.
The Global Palbox allows players to copy their Pals into anyone’s world so long as the option to do so hasn’t been switched off. It’s a fairly easy build (3 Paldium Fragments, 5 Wood, and 15 Stone), and once it’s set up in their own instance, players can recruit any cuddly creatures stored in a Global Palbox constructed in someone else’s world.
This is part of a large slate of new quality-of-life additions, which also introduces new ways to show off what you want, how you want. Transmog has been added so players can customize their look without impacting their armor stats, and a new photo mode will let players showcase their elaborate bases and the Pals working tirelessly to defend them.
On the crafting front, players can make a new storage item with 10 times the capacity of a normal Palbox. The new Drafting Table adds the ability to combine low-rarity blueprints to create new higher-rarity ones, a welcome feature for players sick of endlessly farming drops for elusive legendary prints.
Rounding out the update is a handful of UI tweaks, balance changes to certain Pals and XP rewards, bug fixes, and new achievements. Dedicated servers for Mac users have also been added, and PocketPair says it's still working on servers for the PlayStation 5 version.
Palworld players can finally play with friends across platforms.
It’s a substantial update that couldn’t have come a moment sooner. While Palworld has sustained a healthy number of players over the last 14 months, PocketPair removing the fences between platforms will ensure players are never short of new people to meet, battle, and work with as the game continues to evolve.
Meanwhile, Pocketpair publishing manager and communications director John Buckley spoke to attendees at this week’s Games Developer’s Conference about the lawsuit filed by Nintendo last September, which claims the Tokyo-based developer infringed on multiple Nintendo patents. Reporter Stephen Totilo revealed that one of the patents is the concept of a game character throwing an item to catch a monster in the wild.
During a panel focused on the game’s surprise success and how the developer worked to meet the needs of its massive community after launch, Buckley provided as much insight as he could on the impact the legal proceedings have had on Pocketpair. Jokingly referring to Nintendo as a “fellow indie company,” Buckley said its pursuit of legal action was something they didn’t see coming.
Despite a lawsuit from Nintendo, Palworld’s player base has shown little signs of shrinking.
“We were pretty vocal before Palworld released that we did legal checks before the game released, and they were all cleared in Japan,” he said. “So obviously, when the lawsuit was announced, we were all like, ‘What?’”
“Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan, so a pretty depressing day,” he continued. “It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version. We were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show. Obviously, we had to scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that. But yeah, the short answer is it did not feel good.”
While the lawsuit continues, Palworld’s future still looks bright. The game has sold over 32 million copies since its release, and in January, the indie developer announced it would be paying its success forward by launching a publishing arm focused on supporting indie games. The first of these games will be a horror project from Tales Of Kenzera Zau developer Surgent Studios.
