A new Palworld update has arrived for its Xbox and Microsoft Store PC versions, as developer Pocket Pair continues to wrestle its breakout hit into a more stable state. With the Xbox Series X|S and the dated Xbox One family of consoles to attend to, the studio clearly has its work cut out for it. However, this new patch should go a long way towards making things smoother for Xbox players.
According to Pocket Pair, Palworld version 0.1.1.2 fixes “some issues which negatively affected game stability.” Already one of the year’s best games despite sitting in early access, Palworld’s overnight success is a double-edged sword for Pocket Pair. While it can’t complain about the eight million-plus copies already shifted on Steam alone – an unprecedented number of sales – the studio now has to contend with congested servers, cheating, and other issues of scale that could eat into the time needed to improve performance and add new features.
Fortunately, Pocket Pair should be able to put its healthy injection of capital into action. It’s already shared its early access roadmap, emphasizing “addressing critical issues” as its major priority – it’d be ours for one of the best open world games, too. As Digital Foundry’s Thomas Morgan says in his excellent analysis of Palworld’s performance across Xbox consoles current-gen and old, “there’s a lot of work to do before the game can be considered final.”
As per Morgan’s testing, top-end Series X players are just about getting 40-50fps at 1620p. The biggest surprise of all is that the Series S actually performs more consistently than its bigger brother, though admittedly it’s only running at 720p. From our playtesting, we can confidently conclude that framerate isn’t even the biggest issue at play – Jamie says that in his 25 hours of play, he’s had a dozen crashes.
As such, it’s unsurprising that Pocket Pair is currently focusing its energy on actually keeping players in the game. It’ll still take time for the studio’s tiny team to scale up appropriately, but for now, we’ll have to patiently sit by and let them cook. That is unless Pokémon’s legal team shoves the brakes on the Palworld Express once its copyright infringement investigation comes to a close.
For more of the latest news on Palworld, check out the slew of features currently missing from the early access title that could be coming in the future. If Pocket Pair sticks to its roadmap, then there’s plenty of exciting new content on the horizon for one of the year’s best multiplayer games.