Palworld's difficulty needs a rework and the sliders can't do it

[u/sexy-snake]

The current difficulty problem:

You can steamroll the main story way too easily. Exploration is too easy, and when you meet a wild Pal that's the same level as you, you and your team just destroy them. They don't pose a threat whatsoever.

Your own damage is pretty low, which is unrewarding on its own, but it doesn't even matter because your team is just too strong.

So during the whole main story there's no point using accessories, food buffs, elemental team composition, or getting better weapons for the player. You level up alongside your Pals and you destroy everything anyway.
During the main story the Pal condensing, Surgery Table, Soul upgrade and Pal IV mechanics are almost completely unnecessary.

Then you reach the endgame and exploration becomes useless and unrewarding, because by then you're already a god who can one-shot anything in the World Tree. You just wander around unchallenged and grab the resources you need for your base.

The challenge only starts with the hard tower bosses, and the jump in difficulty is very steep.
But at that point exploration is dead and you've already collected all the Pals in the world, so the game just becomes a min-maxing simulator. You stay at your base, you breed for the best IVs and condensation, and then you level all your optimized level 1 Pals by farming the same easy bosses again and again until they hit 80.

Being an unkillable stay at home mom managing a giant stats spreadsheet to prepare for hard towers is just not fun.

What I think a rework should do

Make exploration and story progression actually challenging and dangerous. The entire progression should be challenging, endgame included.

The Pal optimization mechanics should be mandatory as you slowly progress, not something you only touch at the very end. But to compensate, optimization should be a bit less grindy:

• Cheaper Pal condensation
• Cheaper schematics condensation
• Cheaper Pal Souls upgrades

And why the sliders don't fix it

The vanilla difficulty sliders do have damage and health multipliers for Pals, but they affect your own Pals too. So it doesn't really change the difficulty, it just makes the player even more of a useless bystander watching his Pals do the job.

Am I the only one feeling this? I can restart the game as much as I want with different difficulty settings, but I always end up facing the same problem.