Palworld is full of wildly popular but oddly-designed creatures to tame and train, but the popularity of one of the game’s biggest mascots actually came as a surprise to Pockpair’s head of communications and publishing, John ‘Bucky’ Buckley.
“For the record, this is my opinion,” Buckley makes clear while chatting to Gaming World Interviews about the Pals who surprised him the most. “It’s not the company’s opinion. It’s the opinion of me and me only. I never really thought Cattiva would be popular, like ever. Cattiva, Chikipi and Lamball were like the three-o in the beginning when you wake up on the beach.”
Buckley goes on to say he was always “pretty confident” in Lamball, the adorably fluffy sheep-y creature who somehow looks even cuter holding a deadly weapon with a smile on its face. Chikipi and Cattiva, though? Buckley thought the duo would “fade into – not irrelevance, either – but fade into the background.”
The Pocketpair lead acknowledges Chikipi has kind of “faded away” anyway. “It’s a chicken, right?” But Cattiva? The pink smirking feline who always looks like it knows a secret it definitely won’t share. “Cattiva is like the mascot.”
Buckley explains that Cattiva and Chillet have slowly become some of the survival game’s most recognizable faces, but Cattiva in particular is apparently “everywhere” in China. “There is a bit of regional difference with the Pals.” If Cattiva was such an unexpected surprise, perhaps Pocketpair should return to the “graveyard” of scrapped Pal designs it never got around to finishing in the first place. You never know – there might be another seemingly horrendous creature the fanbase falls in love with, for some reason.
As for 1.0 Pals, passion around Snock was a surprise to the lead dev. “Gamers are really into that snail or slug, whatever you want to call it.”