More Changes Are Coming To Palworld As Nintendo’s Patent Suit Continues

Today, Pocketpair announced another change coming to its open-world survival, critter collection game Palworld. As the company stated in a post on Twitter, the change coming in Patch v0.5.5 is another compromise intended to “avoid disruption to the development and distribution of Palworld” as the legal issues with Nintendo drag on.

This time, Pocketpair will be changing gliding in the game. It won’t be going away completely. However, players will no longer rely on their Pals to glide. Instead, they’ll be using a separate glider. That said, Pals will still provide passive buffs for gliding. Players will simply need a glider in their inventory in order to use the mechanic.

While the fact that players won’t be losing gliding altogether should be a relief, not being able to glide with your Pals does take a bit of flavor away from the game. The interesting thing is that other games have mechanics that allow players to use a companion or pet for the gliding function. In fact, Genshin Impact recently announced a character that does just that. Granted, most gliding in the HoYoverse action RPG is done using wings that the characters wear, but there are still characters with that mechanic. There’s also an entire region where the player takes the form of various creatures and can glide or fly that way.

The big question is how Nintendo's actions against Pocketpair are going to affect gaming in general. As the Palworld developer has pointed out, a lot of games have been using the mechanics Nintendo is suing over for a while now. Moreover, it's just a matter of fact that a lot of games share the same mechanics, whether it be because they're the same genre or for other reasons.