Palworld Seriously Needs Photo Mode ASAP

Even in its Early Access state, Palworld is a beautiful game. With over 100 Pals to collect, they’re all, somehow, endlessly adorable. There’s so much that makes it clear to me that Palworld needs a photo mode as soon as possible.

Pocketpair Let Us Take Pal Selfies

The number one reason I can think of for adding a photo mode to Palworld is to flood the internet with cute (or horrifyingly capitalistic) pictures of you and your Pals. Even better, the in-game UI wouldn’t be in your way. There are enough environments that you could conceivably have, say, Chillet looking adorable everywhere, from the frozen mountains to the fields of lava. Why you’d want him in the lava, I don’t know, but you could do it.

A good photo mode also usually comes with some posing options. While creating several hundred unique poses (a few per Pal) would no doubt be a lot of work, I think the payoff would be well worth the effort.

That’s not even taking into account the skills that digital photographers can bring to the table. Sure, I can flood my friends and family with pictures of Chillet looking dopy. But someone with skills in Photoshop, Blender, or any number of professional photography tools? It would be a night and day difference.

Ideally, a Palworld photo mode would let your character pose with your creatures. Pal Selfies, if you will. This could open the opportunity for nice combo shots or snaps of you and them watching the sunset. If developers were to go the full distance, they’d let multiple Pals be adjustable in the same picture, letting you stage epic battles or show off their skills.

You would, of course, take curated shots of the assembly lines and unpaid menial labor we’ll undoubtedly put our Pals through. I mean, the game requires you to build multiple mechanical monuments to late-stage capitalism to improve your base. With the sheer amount of crafting materials needed, you must put these poor creatures to work for no benefit of their own. Besides a comfier bed and nicer hotspring, I suppose.

Take Stunning Landscape Shots

As empty as the setting of Palworld can sometimes be, it’s still a set of exotic and tropical climates smashed together in an otherwise natural environment. Personally, I never get tired of watching the sunset on a partly cloudy day, so I’m a sucker for a good picture of a beautiful horizon. On the flip side, images like the ones that come out of wildfire season here in the US are as fascinating as they are terrifying. Capturing Palworld’s lava flows in the dark of night with the right setting would be stunning, I’m sure.

Wildlife photography is also huge in the real world, so why not put it in a game like Palworld? Capturing a group of Pals going about their day or just wandering sounds like a fantastic way to pass the time. As with the portraiture or photos of Pals specifically, getting more traditional wildlife shots in the hands of people with far more skill than I sounds like a dream.

The same is true of the landscape work. I have hope that the developers enliven the world of Palworld, as it’s very sparse right now. Sure, gameplay is king, but any title where the environment can be a star is a win in my book.

When Will Palworld Get a Photo Mode?

So how long would photo mode take to implement, and when would it be worked on? There’s already a lot that Pocketpair has planned for the future.

Immediate concerns are, of course, bug fixes to the many critical issues any early development build deals with. However, there are also more Pals, more endgame encounters, PvP, cross-play, more islands, and even additional technologies on the way. Something like a photo mode would probably take a back seat to all of those other priorities. As such, it might not be a feature we see until much closer to a 1.0 release.

A photo mode might create far more issues in-game than amazing photo ops. If I know the gaming community at all, they’d find a way to get out of bounds, clip into dungeons to dodge their internal timer, or heaven knows what other weirdness.

I don’t know how it would be possible, but photo mode might even mess with Pal AI or their model skeletons if it’s possible to access or alter that data with the mode. And as strange as such an issue would be, I’ve long stopped ruling out the kinds of strange happenings that occur when a game gets a new feature.

All that is purely speculation on my part, but I can say with certainty that adding a photo mode to Palworld (at least one not riddled with bugs) would be a massive net benefit to the game. When it arrives is anyone’s guess, but I’m hoping sooner than later. In the meantime, check out our growing guides hub for the game.