Palworld Progress Report : Thirty-Five Hours And Counting

Wow! It's been a whole two weeks since I last posted about Palworld! Can you believe it? I mean, I've mentioned it plenty of times since then in the context of other games but the last time I posted something specifically about Palworld was the end of last month.

Given a gap like that, you might quite reasonably assume I'd lost interest or maybe even stopped playing altogether. That would be incorrect. 

In the post I just linked I mentioned Steam saying I'd played for sixteen hours. At time of writing, Steam has my time logged as thirty-five hours.

More precisely, it tells me I've put in 18.8 hours in the last two weeks. Since it happens to be the fourteenth today, that's how much I've played this calendar month, giving me an average February playtime for Palworld of just over an hour a day.

(Since we're on the subject of the fourteenth day of February, Happy Valentines to those who celebrate it. I got a great present from Mrs Bhagpuss - a Mikey Fox Fingerling. It's quite rare and hard to get although that may be because hardly anyone wants one. Mine may have been the last ever to be sold. I've renamed him Valentine Fox because Mikey is a really dumb name for a fox. Valentine Fox sounds like a movie star. ) 

Back on topic, yes, I am still playing Palworld. For now. 

If I've been playing, though, the next question has to be what have I been doing?

Levelling

I've been making inroads. I'm Level 25. I want to say halfway to the cap but I'm not exactly sure how many levels there are.

Levelling is an odd duck in Palworld, anyway. I'm playing on a single-player world with a near-standard ruleset. The only changes I've made to the defaults have been to remove the death penalty (So I don't have to go back and get my stuff every time I make a dumb mistake.) and to switch of base raids, (Which I found very annoying.)

I haven't touched anything else but I'm aware that I could make a whole lot of things much easier for myself if I wanted, including increasing the rate at which my character gains experience. You can speed it up by as much as twenty times, which seems a tad excessive. One day I'll make a world with everything tuned to the fastest, easiest possible settings and see just how much fun that is. Or otherwise.

He's gotta be worth at least a thousand xp!

Much though I like an easy life, I've encountered this sort of thing in other games and it can be problematic. While I'm theoretically all in favor of allowing players as much control over the levers of progress as possible, it is still true that even just knowing you could accelerate the speed at which you're levelling can feel uncomfortable, even if you decline to take advantage of the offer.

In other worlds, when you're aware your levelling speed is variable, the process of levelling doesn't seem to have the heft it normally would. At worst, the whole game can turn into a kind of internal battle with yourself over how much willpower you have or how much of your own fun you're willing to gamble. It's occasionally been an issue for me in the past but I'm pleased to say that in the case of Palworld I've mostly been able to forget about the metaphysics and just play as though the version of the game in front of me is the only one available.

Building

There are more progression markers than just levels. One of them is how far you've advanced your base-building skills. I upgraded my first base far enough to earn the right to a second one and the first thing I did was move to another island and make myself a real home. 

Building options in Palworld aren't the best I've seen but they're not at all bad and I was sure I could do a lot better for myself than the log cabin where I'd been living. I'd already opened access to building in stone and I'd considered tearing my first base down and starting over but I knew the option to have multiple bases was coming soon, so I decided to keep the sprawling eyesore, which I'd mostly been using as a combination storage dump, sweatshop and flophouse. 

Since you can teleport almost instantly from one base to another, there's really no reason to have assembly lines and slave pens spoiling the ambience of your seafront mansion. Better to keep all the unsightly practicalities in one place and go live somewhere else entirely.

Nice chair. Now if I could just work out how to sit down...

I picked a beachfront location with a great view, woods on each side and an open field behind. I spent a couple of sessions constructing a three-story mansion with balconies facing the sea, a long verandah facing the meadow and ivy growing up the walls. I put in a neat, tidy working area with the minimal number of essential machines so I make a few basics and do my repairs and left it that.

It took me a ridiculous amount of time to get a proper, pitched roof to fit. I had to watch YouTube videos to figure it out and even they didn't help much. In the end I got everything just about how I wanted it. I'm pleased with the result, even if it is still a little boxy.

I've begun furnishing the place. I have brick fireplaces, which light up a room with a charming orange glow. I have some carpets down and some tables and chairs. There's a lot more I could do but who wants to sit in crafting furniture when they could be out...

Exploring

There's so much to see! Getting a flying mount was a real game-changer, for a couple of reasons. Obviously, there's the access it gives to the many, many towers, buttes, cliffs and other extremely high places. I was expecting that and looking forward to it. Palworld has a great deal of verticality. In theory you could climb to a lot of these spots but in practice you'd run out of stamina and fall to your death long before you got to the top of most of them. I know. I tried.

What I didn't realise was that in acquiring a flying mount I'd also effectively get a boat along with it. Not an actual boat. That really would be weir and anyway I'm not sure if boats are in the game or not. Let me explain.

Flying mounts use stamina when they're aloft but not when they're "on the ground".  At ground level,  although they still look like they're flying as they cruise along just a few feet in the air, they operate just like a ground mount, using no stamina at all. 

That doesn't look natural...

So far, so ho hum. Not having to change from a ground mount to a flying mount is a nice perk in itself but no big deal. What is a Very Big Deal Indeed is the way flying mounts treat water exactly as if it were solid ground. 

Where as a player character or a ground mount will enter water, be it sea, river or lake, and begin to swim, something which uses stamina and can result in drowning, a flying mount just carries on cruising six feet above the surface, just as if it was still on land. It doesn't look like a boat but it sure behaves like one.

The combination of flying and "sailing" means there's nowhere I can't go, so of course I've been going everywhere. For an explorer archetype, it's been a joy but also very time-consuming. My Nitewing is great but you couldn't call him a fast flier. When I tried to see what was out in the deep ocean to the south-east (Spoiler - nothing.) it took me nearly half an hour to get to the edge of the map and back.

Mostly, though, it's been a never-ending series of short trips to interesting places. I've seen deserted cities, active volcanos, hidden refuges and mysterious statues. I found the perfect spot for my third base, when I get the go-ahead to build one. I've opened up a lot of the map but there's plenty left and I mean to see it all.

Hunting

While I've been out exploring, I have naturally run into many news species of Pal. Whenever I spot one I haven't collected, always assuming it's in my level-range, I stop to try and catch a representative sample for my Paldeck. 

Collecting is the driver but just catching Pals is fun. Throwing the sphere is quite a skill and so is softening up the target. There are lots of ways to do it. The sneakiest is to wait until they're asleep then creep up behind them and club them with a baseball bat. I've caught quite a few that way.

Catching tougher Pals requires a lot of softening up and/or better quality Pal Spheres. There's some thoughtful and challenging gameplay involved in whittling them down to a vulnerable state without either killing them or letting them kill you and it gets a lot more challenging when your own Pal is trying to "help". 

Screw sportsmanship! Just get him before he wakes up!

One thing all the Pals on my Go Team seem to have in common is that they don't know their own strength. Against Pals their own level or a little above they often seem overpowered; against most things lower than them they're just murder on paws. I've lost so many potential targets to an over-zealous assist from my Nitewing or Tombat and even my humble Cativa seems incapable of keeping her claws sheathed.

I could probably benefit for a more thoughtful choice of companions but I'm both lazy and loyal (A terrible combination for most video games, I've found.) so my line-up doesn't change much. I've had the aforementioned three and Foxsparks with me for a long time now. The only recent change came when I captured a Dumud, a kind of land-shark. The animations were so goofy I couldn't resist taking one along for comedy value. Of course, he is a shark, so he's just as deadly as the others, for all that he looks like a parade balloon come loose.

Teamwork

I feel at this point I should point out I actually treat all my Pals very well. The game, which has numerous moral failings deserving of a long, critical essay I may even one day get around to writing, allows for some really quite disturbing mistreatment of the hapless creatures you capture. I'm fairly sure that to get the most out of your Pals in terms of productivity and efficiency, you have to behave like a cross between Bernard Matthews and Patrick Bateman. That's not really me.

Other than capturing them in the first place, I leave the Pals who live at my base pretty much alone to get on with their lives. I feed them well, I make sure they all have somewhere to sleep and I tend to them if they get sick or injure themselves.

Now imagine him bouncing along like a spacehopper.

Other than that, I let them wander about, doing what they want, which mostly seems to be hanging around the food bins 24/7. If I really want something done urgently I might pick one of them up and show them the relevant crafting station but I rarely want anything done in a hurry so that doesn't happen often.

I definitely think of them more as pets than workers. Quite annoying pets. Who keep getting in the way. Which is why, for much of the last couple of weeks, especially since I built my big, stone house, as much as possible I've been playing...

Palworld Without Pals

Okay, not completely. I have my five, special Pal friends with me at all times. What I don't have are any Pals at all living at my new house. 

I thought about it. Obviously it would make a lot of things easier. The whole idea is that Pals operate machinery or perform tasks using their various, specialist skills and that more pals or higher-level pals make everything happen faster. 

It's true and the necessary corollary is that, without Pals, everything takes longer. Sometimes a lot longer. It takes an astonishingly long time to make some of the more complex or complicated items without the help of a Pal or two or at least it seems like an astonishingly long time if you're the one doing it. 

Thanks for the help, Sparky! Take as many red berries as you want.

If you want to go it alone, you can't just walk away and leave the timer to tick down, either. You have to sit there, holding down "F", for as long as it takes. For minutes at a time. A few minutes doesn't sound like that long? Try holding down one key for five minutes straight. See how you like it!

And that's what I've been doing. It's fine. As I said before, I'm rarely in a hurry. I sit and watch the little circle slowly edge round. I look out to sea. I enjoy the view. 

There are some things you simply can't do without the help of a Pal, of course. Anything that requires kindling, for example, like the Forge. You need a fiery Pal to breathe into it or it just won't work. For those, I just summon one of the five Pals on my travelling team and have them do it. Then, when they're done, I recall them and I'm all alone again.

Future Plans

At level 25, it's become very clear to me that Palworld is a true sandbox. I'd been so wrapped up in my own little projects it took me a while to realise just how long it had been since I last received any kind of hint or suggestion on what to do next. Nothing's even sent me to another tower to fight another boss. 

There's no shortage of progression but none of it feels directive. Most of it barely even feels obligatory.

Heat Resistant Metal Armor modeled by Flora

Motivation and direction evolve much more organically than by following a narrative or even working your way up a ladder or down a path. One time, I went exploring and I found a ruined city. I wanted to explore it but when I got there it was too hot to stay long. As soon as I levelled up far enough to be able to make some armor better able to resist the heat, I went hunting for the materials to make a set. Once I had it, I went back and explored the city and after that, a volcano. 

From the volcano I saw a tower to so I flew up to it and from the tower I saw an island and glided down. The island turned out to be a sanctuary with rare Pals but they were too high to capture so I marked my map for later and carried on.

Everything seems to happen that way. I go exploring, find something interesting, realise I need some new gear or item or levels to get any further with it and that gives me another goal. There are no tasks or missions or quests but it never feels like there's no structure let alone nothing to do. 

And After That?

How long all this can go on is less than certain. The world is curated not procedurally generated. Given time, I'll have cleared all the fog from the map, captured all the Pals, learned all the recipes... or I will if I stick around long enough. That's unlikely. I'll be surprised if Nightingale doesn't nudge Palworld into the background and after Nightingale there's going to be another game and another...

I read an interesting opinion piece at Gamesindustry.biz, making the case for the "Live Service" model being all but played-out. It appeared, presumably not at all co-incidentally, just after a news report on the same website revealing that 95% of games studios are currently said to be working on a Live Service game. 

It almost seems a shame to build here. Almost.

Palworld, Nightingale or Valheim may not be Live Service games in the sense of having "seasons" or "battle passes" but I feel much the same law of diminishing returns applies to open-ended, exploration-driven survival sandboxes. They're fantastic for a time - and it can be quite a long time - but after a while there's a definite feeling of being done with them. Not forever but at least for a while and once you move on, will you return? And if you do, for how long?

My future plans for Palworld and all games like it are much the same: play them while they're fun but if something more interesting comes along, play that instead. Interest and involvement can run extremely high for a while; comittment, not so much.

I've been used to MMORPGs, which tend to set their hooks much deeper. My time with a favorite MMORPG is often measured in years. Even a dalliance can claim months of my life. Survival games, in comparison, might only expect to hold my favor for a few weeks. 

For now, though, I'm playing Palworld and liking it a lot. This won't be my last post on the game, I'm sure of it. I barely got through half the topics I wanted to cover today and even then the post ran long.

Then again, I could say that about pretty much every post here...