Over the last few weeks, Palworld has become the hottest game on the market. The survival game from developer Pocketpair has been breaking sales records left and right, even becoming the most-played third-party game to launch on Xbox Game Pass. Because of Palworld's success on Microsoft's platform, the team at Xbox has recently committed to providing as much help as it can to Palworld. In practice, that should mean players will not only be getting updates more quickly but Xbox is working hard to get dedicated servers up and running on its platforms.

Xbox's Commitment to Palworld
In its release touting Palworld's massive sales numbers, the Xbox team said, "We're working with Pocketpair to help provide support for Xbox versions of the game. We're providing support to enable dedicated servers, offering engineering resources to help with GPU and memory optimization, speeding up the process to make Palworld updates available for players, and working with the team to optimize the title for our platform."

While all of that is important to note, the portion about dedicated servers is probably the most exciting. Currently, Palworld only supports dedicated servers on the Steam version of the game. Even if you're playing on a PC using Xbox Game Pass, you can't link up with other players on Steam. If Xbox can help Pocketpair overcome those hurdles and add the feature across the board, that will be a massive development for fans. If it's handled well, we might see another huge player base jump, as some are holding out of starting until the Xbox version has features on par with the Steam version.

That doesn't discount the importance of speeding up the cadence of updates. Palworld and developer Pocketpair have several features planned for the next year or so, and getting those out sooner rather than later will help keep hype levels as high as possible. If Xbox is able to speed that up even more and get those updates out on its platforms promptly, that can only be a good thing for Palworld players.

We’re happy to announce that, in its first ten days as part of Xbox Game Preview, Xbox players have made Palworld the biggest 3rd party Game Pass launch in history. https://t.co/yvw2al3jZ9

— Xbox Wire (@XboxWire) January 31, 2024

Palworld Feature Roadmap
As mentioned, Palworld has several things it wants to add during its early access period. Developer Pocketpair recently shared the first look at its roadmap, which outlines several long-term goals. It's hard to say when we should expect these to start coming to Palworld, but Pocketpair and Xbox seem dedicated to making it happen as soon as possible. Here's the full list of items on the current roadmap:

Addressing Critical Issues
Currently, numerous bugs have been identified, and we are prioritizing fixing those.
Sometimes, the world date may experience rollbacks.
The loading screen may persist when trying to load into worlds.
...and so on.

Improvements to Implement ASAP

Key configuration improvements.
Improvements to base Pal AI and pathing.

Planned Future Updates

PvP
Raid Bosses (End-Game Content)
Pal Arena (PvP for Pals)
Steam-Xbox Crossplay
Various Xbox Feature Improvements
Server Transfers and Migrations
Improvements to the Building System
New islands, Pals, Bosses, and Technologies.

Posted: Feb 05, 2024 8:54 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/xbox-helping-palworld-creators-get-dedicated-servers-faster-updates/