Palworld spent 2 1/2 years in Early Access - Long enough that plenty of players (including myself) wandered off, came back for an update, wandered off again, and forgot they'd ever had it installed in the first place. That's the natural life cycle of an Early Access open-world-survival-crafty game, so I'm not particularly surprised, and I don't begrudge them the wait. Now that it's up to a full, 1.0 release, what I do want is to answer a simple question: after all that time, does the 1.0 release actually feel like those 2 years were worth it?

I've spent the last few weeks back on the Palpagos Islands to find out, and the answer is definitely yes*. That's it, article done, you can go home now.

*Well, there's an asterisk here, because while there's lots that genuinely impressed me, there are a few things that feel like they needed a bit more time to cook, and a few bugs that had me checking my ping to make sure my router wasn't the problem. The article's still over but if you want to read the rest of this footnote, you're welcome to it.

Welcome to Sunreach

The floating islands of Sunreach are hard to get to, but easy to appreciate

The first big addition in 1.0 is Sunreach, a brand new region hovering over the waters of the southern sea. Where the previous regions rely on the stereotypical grasslands, desert, peaks, and big angry volcano, Sunreach feels like it was designed by someone who grew up playing Minecraft's various Aether-like mods and decided to port them over. Floating rivers dappled with sun-bleached ruins, colored in a fantasy palette of trees and grasses, make up the many-layered floating islands of the airborne archipelago. Getting up there is a fair bit of work if you're just trying to explore - I climbed up the masochist's path, with a low-teir flying mount and a grappling hook, but if you play through the "story" quests, you'll end up with a portal that saves you a lot of falling.

What really sells Sunreach is how it's built around verticality. You're not just running across rolling hills and cliffsides looking for the odd rare pal spawn, but instead constantly looking to move up and down between layered islands and rocky outcrops. The isles are dotted with hidden grottos and structures that reward you for actually looking up instead of just following the quest marker. It's the first time in a long while that a Palworld zone has made me stop mid-sprint just to take in the view, and that's something I appreciate in a game where I'm usually too busy breaking up a clipping-induced hunger strike to appreciate the scenery.

Onward to the World Tree

Sunreach isn't the biggest landmark dropping in 1.0. Looming over the islands since the earliest days of Early Access is the World Tree, and it's finally something you can actually get to legitimately, instead of desperately finding ways to glitch out of bounds just to see it up close. Getting inside the tree isn't a quick errand, however: Unlocking it means clearing the powerful Panthalus boss fight first, so when you're standing at its base it genuinely feels like a capstone rather than just another zone tacked onto the map.

Once you're inside, the World Tree contains multiple distinct sub-biomes, each with their own hazards and unique Pals, including a toxic section that'll eat at your health bar without a gas mask equipped, and a dark forest littered with floating mines. The whole area is clearly designed to feel like the peak of the game's exploration experience, a place where the mystery behind those towers you've been blasting for hours finally gets an answer. It's also, unsurprisingly, where Palworld puts its final boss fights, which brings me to the part of 1.0 I was most hoping would be improved from previous versions.

Boss Fights: Health bar goes brrr

I tried really hard to get Panthalus to hold still for a screenshot. He wasn't having it.

Palworld's combat has always been serviceable rather than spectacular, so I went into the new boss encounters with low expectations. The new bosses in 1.0 have exceeded my expectations, but for full transparency, that's only because my expectations were already set fairly low. Each tower boss has been updated with a few new attacks that sets them apart from your average pal encounter, but while these do add a bit of flavor, most every boss tends to boil down summoning your best pal & hitting it until it dies. The new attack patterns do mean you have to be mindful of your footing and move your pals around to avoid the worst of it, but in most fights this is more of a nuisance than a mechanic. The one standout exception would be the Panthalus fight, which gives you a massive enemy in an even bigger arena, and requires you to actually make use of your mobility options to avoid attacks. For me, Panthalus blew my expectations out of the water, and it leaves me hopeful that future updates might include other fights on a similar scale.

The World Tree adds both a true "final boss" and some other boss challenges, such as a boss rush, but most of them are still fairly trivial - you’ll just need to use your strongest pal and your biggest gun, with each fight having at most one or two attacks that require some degree of effort to evade. These fights are cinematic, but not particularly engaging. I did enjoy them but after the Panthalus boss fight, these fights felt like something of a step down in quality.

Exploration With a Purpose

One of my quieter complaints about early Palworld was that exploring often felt like busywork. You'd wander off the beaten path, find a chest with some ore in it, plunder a cave for some quick loot, and move on without thinking about it. 1.0 does a lot to fix that, though some of the repetition is still there. New dungeon designs are available, making them feel slightly less same-y, and dungeon loot tables have been improved to be more meaningful, so you're always on the lookout for which dungeons are open. The new Effigies also provide incentive for exploration, giving you a variety of permanent stat bonuses as a reward for sticking your nose into every little hidey-hole you can find.

It's a small shift on paper, but the change it brings to the world feels engaging. Instead of beelining to the next quest marker, I found myself actually taking extra time to look for ruins, rubble, and chests to fill out my inventory between objectives. It feels more like a world built with some degree of intention, rather than padding out the content to hit a size target.

New dungeons provide a welcome change from the more simple grid designs from previous versions

Now for the Grind

Here's where things are the rockiest. On default settings, the material costs for late-game crafting and building have crept up to a point where base management and resource gathering starts to feel like a full-time job. Upgrading gear & building out advanced structures both demand a steady stream of resources that take a long to craft at the base rate, even with highly-trained pals, and gathering the materials for those crafts means repeating the same dungeon or pal-farming loop over and over.

If you're playing solo, this hits especially hard. I would strongly encourage solo players to tweak the world settings, otherwise they may find themselves grinding hours whenever they unlock a new tier of armor. The good news is that world settings give you plenty of room to adjust drop rates and costs to something more reasonable, which is honestly the move if you want to actually enjoy Sunreach and the World Tree, instead of treating them as a part-time resource extraction job.

The Story Still Isn't the Point

Palworld has never been about narrative, and I don't think anyone expected 1.0 to change that. Even with that low bar, the new story content added in this update feels anemic. A handful of new cutscenes and some new lore drops give you just enough context to explain the Towers existing, but it never goes much further than that. If you were hoping the full release would flesh out the world's backstory or give the human factions more depth, you'll come away a little underwhelmed. Most faction’s and the boss's backstory will be given to you in 2-3 sentences by an NPC that you meet a few minutes before you fight the boss.

To be fair, I don't think this hurts the game much. Palworld's appeal has always been the moment-to-moment loop of build, catch, fight rather than the story stitching it together. Still, for a 1.0 release, a bit more narrative meat on the bone would have gone a long way toward making the new content feel like a proper story update instead of just a content patch.

Exposition, weeeee

So, Was It Worth the Wait?

Mostly, yes. The new zones are genuinely well-designed and exploring the map finally feels like it's rewarding your curiosity instead of your patience. The grind on default settings and the lack of difficulty are real friction points, and the story content still isn't going to win any awards, but none of that undoes the fact that this is the best version of Palworld that's ever existed.

If you've been waiting for the "real" release before diving back in, now's a good time. And if you've been meaning to drag your friends back into the Palpagos Islands to see Sunreach for yourselves, there's no better excuse than a fresh update to set up a server of your own.

You can get a Palworld server running in a few minutes through our newly-updated server dashboard, starting at $20 a month.