Trivia / Palworld

• Blooper: There are times where older names of Pals are accidentally used in both Pocketpair videos and in-game entities:
  • Paldeck videos labeling Chikipi as Chickegg or Blazehowl as Kingferno.
  • The partner skill item for Blazehowl Noct retaining the name Dark Kingferno Saddle.
  • Earlier game versions labeling the Ice-type subspecies of Reptyro and Kingpaca "Ice (Pal)" before getting fixed to "(Pal) Cryst" in an update.
• Distanced from Current Events: Of a sort. The game's Early Access release came out in January 2024, just over a month after the debacle surrounding The Day Before, an Early Access game that was released in an Obvious Beta condition and was pulled from storefronts a mere five days later leading to accusations that the game was a scam. Shortly before this game's Early Access release, a section was added to the game's FAQ on Steam seeking to assure prospective players that this game wasn't a scam, something which would border on Suspiciously Specific Denial in any other circumstance.
• Dummied Out:
  • The Pals Dragostrophe, Boltmane, and Dark Mutant appear in the code and will mostly work properly, but they cannot be spawned in-game without mods. Boltmane is clearly a work-in-progress, though, as it's an Electric-Element pal with Fire-Element drops and work skills.
  • There exists a sniper rifle with its own associated ammo in the code. While it cannot be obtained outside of mods, it works perfectly fine.
  • Dung exists in the code. It can be spawned in but it currently has no use.
• Executive Meddling: Suspected to be the reason for the inability to name Pals and the Player Character in the console version of Palworld until the 0.1.5.0 update as well as the swear filter on both PC and console versions that was introduced at the same time.
• Follow the Leader: Outside of Pokémon questions, Palworld was meant to be a shooter in lieu of competitive shooter games (like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and Fortnite), which gained global popularity (including Japan) prior to Palworld's development. The company PocketPair also hired a hobbyist artist who's interested in guns through playing many First-Person Shooter games, after hard times looking for Japanese and foreign developers experienced with guns (for the former, the closest being Capcom's Resident Evil developers, but they don't have guns as their main focus; and the latter due to Language Barrier).
  CEO Takuro Mizobe: Japan makes a ridiculous amount of RPGs, but how many Japanese-made shooters are there? The only one that comes to mind is Resident Evil, and that didn't have guns as the main focus. I decided that Palworld would be a shooter at the very beginning of the project because those are the most popular games globally.
• Sleeper Hit: The game was mostly derided as nothing more than a "Pokémon with guns and animal cruelty" Shallow Parody meme game ever since the first trailers back in 2021 were shown. It sold 5 million copies in three days after its release and has received mostly positive reception.
• Troubled Production: When people questioned Takuro Mizobe the secret to their success, in his own words it was nothing short of a miracle that the game even came to exist as it was "the antithesis of proper game development" (source):
  • The game cost almost seven million dollars to develop, with no budget planning whatsoever. Takuro preferred the Ignorance Is Bliss approach and actively avoided looking at the development costs, while being completely willing to risk bankruptcy. When he finally saw near the release date that they were running low on funds but morale around the office was high, he doubled down and hired even more people to help finish it in time. A week before the game's Early Access release they realized that they were finally out of money.
  • Many praised the game's high level of polish by Early Access standards, which made it all the more shocking that the entire team was a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits with basically no idea what they were doing. Their code had no naming conventions or version control, relying on "buckets of flash drives" to keep it all straight. The models had no rigs, and no one knew how to CG model or animate as their previous games used bought assets. The lead engineer didn't know how to use git, the lead artist was a new graduate who was rejected by many other companies for having No Social Skills, and the lead weapon animator was a dropout who was completely self-taught through YouTube tutorials and playing FPS games. All their network infrastructure was designed by one 24-year-old, and many new recruits were Game Modders Takuro messaged through Twitter.
  • They were rejected by every publisher they sent it to, and had to self-publish with only a deal with Xbox Game Studios on the side for console exclusivity and Game Pass inclusion. In a post by Xbox celebrating the game's success on that platform, they alluded to stepping in after the game blew up to offer support for server and engineering optimisation. The game was initially made in Unity, but halfway through development, the decision was made to scrap the whole thing and remake it in Unreal Engine. At one point when they were low on manpower, Takuro pulled an Iwata and started optimizing memory bottlenecks himself despite having never touched Unreal before.
• What Could Have Been: Thanks to the major Troubled Production of the game, alongside regular changes made during the development process, there are a lot of things that were altered or left out by the time of the Early Access release:
  • Both early trailers and occasional bloopers reveal that plenty of Pals have had name changes during development, such as Reptigneo becoming Reptyro and Kingferno becoming Blazehowl.
  • A number of in-game Bloopers show that the English naming scheme of Pal subspecies used to follow the route of "(Element Name) Pal" (e.g. Ice Kingpaca), which was later changed to "Pal (Alternate term for Element)" (e.g. Kingpaca Cryst).
  • There are a number of Pals that were shown off in super-early-development content, such as the announcement trailer and logo screenshot, that are not only unavailable in-game but not even present in the game files, meaning they don't even have file names to refer to, such as a massive whale and what looks to be a white-colored subspecies of Dragostrophe.
  • The announcement trailer showed a cart drawn by a pair of Direhowl, the player shearing Lamball, Mozzarina powered combines, electrofishing using a Jolthog on a fishing rod, a group of Tanzee turning a capstan and an unknown woman with a Jormuntide. None of these have made it into the Early Access release. Furthermore, Mozzarina had a different look here, having a snouted face and open eyes instead of the Eyes Always Shut flat face.
  • Also some Pal abilities appear to have been changed between the announcement trailer and Early Access, such as Grizzbolt's early ability being Deployable Cover instead of equipping a minigun and then hosing down the immediate area with gunfire and the player being able to throw Galeclaw into the air as living homing missile, where it would seek out and ram the nearest target.
  • The announcement trailer also showed a different design for Syndicate enemies with them being shirtless and wearing only red tinted goggles instead of a full face mask.
  • The second trailer showed the player character riding a cart and lassoing a Rushoar, a Hangyu using a Teafant as a watering can, a rocket (with the associated infrastructure) being built in a desert base, a massive city built into a mountain, some kind of dingy laboratory run by what's implied to be the Syndicate, a raid of Syndicate mooks supported by Leezpunk, the player character conducting a Metal Gear Solid-esque raid on what's implied to be a Syndicate facility and an arena for Pals to fight in. Again, none of these made it into the Early Access release.
  • Both trailers implied that you used to be able to fuse Pals together to get an egg containing a new Pal.
  • The Official Pal Reveal Trailer depicted a cage full of Cattiva being wheeled into a Syndicate underground base as well as a Syndicate armored column attacking a player base with Leezpunk support (the previous scene showed Leezpunk riding on the tanks and operating the machine gun). As of the Early Access release, the Syndicate do not have underground bases, their mooks will never use Pals, and there are no vehicles in the game.
  • According to the Paldeck video, Dinossom was planned to have the Handiwork skill.
  • The early game trailers and screenshots of the island gave a stark contrast from what Pocket Pair released in 2021. The islands were much more open and expansive. One part showed vast fields teeming with forests, waterfalls, and other wildlife, while the deserts appeared darker and covered in sandstorms. Additionally, there were glimpses of human-made roads and wind turbines stretching near the ocean, elements that are notably absent in the current state of the game.
• Word of God: While it's unstated in the game, according to the developers on the Steam overview page, any pals at your base will keep working forever until the end of their lifetime. This is more explicitly stated in an earlier version of the page.

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