Palworld Devs Scramble To Fix Major Bugs As Popularity Continues To Skyrocket
We reported yesterday that the indie title managed to hit the #1 spot for concurrent players on Steam, not only currently, but in fact the highest concurrent player count of any paid game in the history of Steam. More than a million players logged into Palworld simultaneously on Saturday night, and that number has only continued to grow. The developer, Japanese studio Pocketpair, tweeted last night that it has sold 5 million copies in just three days since the title entered Steam Early Access.
This really is unprecedented success for a game with as small of a development budget as this title had, and it really shows how much pent-up demand there was for a game like this. People have been joking about the immense popularity of a hypothetical Pokémon MMO for literal decades, and while Palworld is neither a proper MMO nor an actual Pokémon game, it hits close enough to both marks that it is reaping the oats that Game Freak sowed.
Despite Palworld being in early access, the launch has been relatively trouble-free. In fact, many players have commented on how well the game works considering all the factors at play: the immense depth of its systems, the surprising degree of freedom it gives players, and the size of the studio that made the game. Early on, there were some major network issues due to the game's popularity overflowing expectations in such a big way, but those seem to have been resolved after an "emergency meeting" between Pocketpair and Epic Games.
That's not say that there haven't been any bugs at all, though. Palworld has a major problem right now that the developers have made a specific advisory about, and if you don't heed their warnings, you could end up with your character in an unfixable weakened state. An item called "Memory Reset Drug" that's intended to allow you to respec your custom character may not give you the correct stats after usage, and there's currently no way to fix this. In other words, you could end up with permanently-reduced Capture Power on that character, with the only solution being to re-roll and start over—a time-consuming endeavor.
There have also been some issues where players lost their save data entirely. This is apparently fixable; while Pocketpair hasn't explained why it happens, it seems that the game stores backup saves that players can restore. There's a detailed guide on how to do so as well as a great and succinct FAQ in a Google Docs document prepared by the game's developer; you can find that information in English at this link.
If you do experience a bug in Palworld and would like to help the developer fix it, there's actually a window in-game to do this. Click on the Contact button in the Options menu (pictured above) to send a message to the developers. The company also says that it is monitoring the Steam discussions, its Xwitter page, and also an official inquiry e-mail, all of which you can find in the Google document linked just above.
