Palworld makes further design compromises as a result of Nintendo lawsuit

In the wake of Palworld’s explosive success last year, Nintendo wasted no time in suing the developers – Pocket Pair – due to the game’s Pokemon inspirations. With the proceedings still ongoing, the company has had to make further adjustments to Palworld – including an odd change to the gliding mechanic.

While much of the discussion surrounding Palworld was in its similar character designs to Pokemon, Nintendo opted to sue studio PocketPair based on patents it owns for particular game mechanics instead.

As a result, while the lawsuit is still ongoing, PocketPair have announced some changes coming to the game, writing: “On November 30th, 2024, we released Patch v0.3.11 for Palworld. This patch removed the ability to summon Pals by throwing Pal Spheres and instead changed it to a static summon next to the player. Several other game mechanics were also changed with this patch.”

They continued, “we regret to inform our players that with the implementation of Patch v0.5.5, we must make yet another compromise. From this patch onward, gliding will be performed using a glider rather than with Pals. Pals in the player's team will still provide passive buffs to gliding, but players will now need to have a glider in their inventory in order to glide.”

While there could be an argument to make that the designs of the ‘Pals’ are inspired by Pokemon, Nintendo was far from the first company to use mounts/gliders in order to fly in a game, and so many of these changes feel unfortunately unnecessary.

Assuming the lawsuit goes their way, hopefully PocketPair will be able to restore these mechanics back to their original state at some point in the future.

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