Palworld fans waiting on the next big content drop may want to adjust their expectations. In an interview with MP1st, Pocketpair head of publishing and communications John “Bucky” Buckley said the upcoming 1.1 update is coming, but it is not a huge one.
“While 1.1 isn’t a massive update, we do think players will be pretty happy with it,” Buckley said, adding that the studio isn’t ready to tease it yet and declining to reveal the highly requested feature it will add. There is no release date for 1.1 so far.
Buckley was also clear about expansions. Pocketpair has supported Palworld with free updates and hasn’t felt the need to change that. “We wouldn’t completely rule out the possibility of something larger, like an expansion, in the distant future, but we have no specific plans to announce and it’s not something we’re actively working towards right now,” he said.
He pushed back on the idea that Palworld is a live-service game at all. Rather than locking into seasons or a set monetization model, Buckley said, the team decides what it wants to make first and then picks the format that suits it. That also explains the spinoffs. Instead of turning Palworld into an all-in-one, Fortnite-style platform, Pocketpair is building separate games such as Palfarm because some ideas work better as standalone titles. “The main Palworld game remains extremely important to us, and these spinoffs are not intended to replace it,” he said.
On new Pals, Buckley said the studio wants each addition to be memorable rather than simply padding the roster, and it reviews player data and feedback for balance whenever new creatures arrive. He said Pocketpair wants to keep giving long-term players goals without undermining the freedom at the heart of the game. Asked about the ongoing legal dispute, he said the studio can’t comment.
It is a different approach from some recent creature-adjacent games. Game Freak, for example, ended Beast of Reincarnation’s regular updates about two months after launch, while Pocketpair says Palworld version 1.0 is a foundation it plans to keep building on.
