In an era where big-budget multiplayer titles fail spectacularly, it’s interesting to see efforts like Helldivers 2 and Palworld experience such incredible success. The former crossed 15 million players last November and sees about 2.5 million weekly. Meanwhile, Palworld crossed 32 million players as of February.
Despite the differences in content models – live service vs. early access – both face pretty similar issues when it comes to adding new content. Palworld community and publisher manager John Buckley spoke to GamesRadar as part of a larger piece about what people get wrong about game development, noting, “I think people have very unrealistic expectations of timelines.
“I play an unhealthy amount of games myself. I understand the need for more content quickly. But I think people really misunderstand how long it takes to make things.” Upon seeing games like Fortnite and Call of Duty receiving so much content, there’s the perception that Palworld should do the same.
“So they come into something like Palworld. They play it for a week, they love it, and then, they go, you know, what’s going on with this? There are so many people saying we’ve dropped off, we’re dead, or we’ve run away with the money, we’re not working on it. We are, every minute of the day, working on this game, but it takes weeks and months to make stuff,” said Buckley, who revealed that a new island in the game takes six months to create.
“And when it comes out, people are super excited, but you just get so many nasty comments before that about these things. And you try to explain it, and there’ll always be a few gamers who get it, and they really appreciate that dialogue, but quite a lot of them don’t. They just don’t get the timeline. So I think development timelines are very misunderstood, and it’s something that would be cool if more people understood, but I think it’s hard to accurately explain.”
In the same piece, Arrowhead creative director Johan Pilestedt also outlined how difficult it is to add things to a game, even if they appear relatively simple. “If you think about when movies are made, you get an actor and they’re there and you tell them what to say.
“But games are so meticulously crafted. You have to build the actor from the ground up for them to even be able to perform those lines. People say, can’t they add this or do that. Most of the time, all of the decisions that you make, especially the larger the game gets, have so many consequences that cascade, making something that seems easy really hard, or something that seems really hard to be super simple.
“It’s unintuitive unless you’ve worked in games to see how they’re created,” said Pilestedt.
Pocketpair is working on its ending scenario for Palworld that allows players to explore the World Tree, though it clarified that this is “by no means the end” of support. Helldivers 2 recently saw its Heart of Democracy update, which led to a surge in concurrent players across both platforms.
