Palworld released in Early Access one year ago today and, to celebrate, developer Pocketpair has revealed its 2025 roadmap includes crossplay, a final boss, and more.
An X/Twitter post revealed the “future roadmap” and then asked fans to continue supporting Palworld in its second year, suggesting all of this will arrive in 2025 (and perhaps the first three weeks of 2026). “We’ve been updating the game since the start of Early Access, and we’ll continue to update Palworld as we prepare for the official release,” Pocketpair said.
Alongside cooperative crossplay and a final boss and “ending scenario,” Pocketpair revealed “world transfers for Pals,” further ways to strengthen and improve Pals, “various new content such as new Pals and technologies,” and game collaborations such as the one with Terraria.
Also coming are improvements to world object placements, improvements to base Pals, improvements to optimization, and improvements to the user experience.
Pocketpair obviously didn’t mention what could be its biggest event of 2025 — the conclusion of its legal battle with The Pokémon Company and Nintendo.
Palworld, an open-world, multiplayer survival game dubbed “Pokémon with guns” by some, gained a staggering 25 million players in one month when it launched last year. Many drew further comparisons between it and Pokémon upon release, claiming various Pal designs were practically direct copies of official pocket monsters.
The Pokémon Company said in January 2024 that it intended “to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights” but went quiet for months after. Finally, however, in September 2024, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced it had launched a patent lawsuit against Pocketpair.
The developer didn’t appear particularly deterred by the lawsuit, initially saying “we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon” before going on to release Palworld on different platforms afterwords, and even release one of its older games on Nintendo Switch.
It later revealed the lawsuit was directed at patents that involve a catching mechanic: Pokémon are famously captured with Pokéballs, and Palworld are caught with a spherical object called a Pal Sphere.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
