Palia

Not Recommended Before I’d even properly got into the game, Palia was already lecturing me with its “Village Values”. You get stuff like: “We, the players, will work to uphold a welcoming, tolerant, and inclusive community, and reject racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism…” And honestly, I’m just tired of this sort of thing. I’m here to play a game. I don’t need to be given a diversity and inclusion speech before I’ve even started. I don’t need to be told what values I’m expected to uphold, what kind of community I’m expected to help create, or how I’m supposed to behave beyond the obvious. Just have normal rules. Don’t harass people. Don’t cheat. Don’t grief. Don’t abuse people. Don’t be a ♥♥♥♥. That covers it. Instead, it’s written in this weirdly forceful, patronising way where it’s “we WILL do this”, “we WILL uphold that”, followed by all the usual modern buzzwords about tolerance, inclusivity and identity. Then it gets even more patronising: “We believe in second chances and giving people the opportunity to learn to be better.” Learn to be better? I’m a grown adult opening a video game, not a naughty child being sent to the headteacher’s office. Then there’s: “We believe in supporting our neighbors through their hard days as we know they will support us through ours. Above all, we choose kindness.” Again, why am I being told this? If someone wants to make friends, support other players and become part of the community, brilliant. If someone just wants to log in, gather resources, build a house and keep themselves to themselves, that should also be completely normal. A game doesn’t need to tell me what kind of person I should be. Then, before I’ve even properly played, there’s an entire Consequences section explaining that breaking these “Village Values” can result in losing communication features, being excluded from events, being suspended from the game, or even potentially losing access to future Singularity 6 services. Why does a brand-new player need to be hit with all of that? Have a Terms of Service. Have moderation rules. Enforce them when needed. Every online game does. I don’t need to arrive in a cosy MMO and immediately be handed what feels like a mixture of a corporate diversity seminar, a school behaviour policy and a disciplinary procedure. Call it woke, DEI, progressive, whatever label you want. I don’t really care what people call it anymore. I’m just tired of being preached to and patronised by entertainment that I’m using specifically to get away from this sort of thing. And before someone deliberately misses the point, no, I’m not saying racism, harassment or abuse should be allowed. I’m saying you can ban bad behaviour without lecturing every new player about how they need to “learn to be better”, “choose kindness” and uphold your prescribed set of community values. I wanted to play a cosy MMO, gather resources, build a house and switch my brain off for a bit. Instead, one of my first experiences was effectively being handed the gaming equivalent of an HR induction and employee conduct handbook. That completely put me off. Uninstalled and put straight into my Not Interested list.

This was a great game until they instituted things like paid storage after having stated multiple times that paid items would only be for cosmetics. They then told us what a great feature this is. It is not a feature, it is a direction for the game that will continue taking it down a bad path and kill it. Please rethink this. I personally will no longer continue to support the game with this direction and I know many others feel the same.

It pains me to leave a negative review because I truly love Palia, but as of now I cannot recommend it. I love how the game pushed positivity with no PVP shoved in our faces, that we can help each other in different ways. I love the story, the art direction, the character designs, this game made me feel some kind of nostalgia for a world I have never been to before. I love the extra cosmetics, even though I find them quite expensive for a F2P games. But the first thing that started taking my joy away was how this game started turning into a FOMO fest : more time-limited events thrown at our faces, which most of them require intense grinding to complete and also ask for resources that you only unlock if you go through/finish the main storyline (as someone who likes to pace story progression, this felt awful). And all that just for the rewards to be an absolute "meh". Then they released the horse/ranch patch, and the overriding of my bindings made me stop playing for 2 months because that annoyed me more than it should have. My other complain is the lack of relationship contents as well, they are easy to complete and while we get several new cosmetics every patch, we don't get any new dialogue aside from new little side quests, turning the game into a FOMO where the environment seems like just stuck in time looping on the same dialogues, while farming the same resources over and over again, it made the game feel like a chore. And finally, they released a patch saying they added a bigger chest to store ressources in. I was so hyped, because this game limits you to 8 chests and I like farming (especially to make my big garden), so I was running out of space. Innocent me rushed to Tish' shop, trying to find the chest recipe to finally build it, like it was with any other chest. Alas, I could not find that recipe and ended up finding something much worse : you have to PAY to get the chest. A F2P game where one of the core mechanic is set behind a paywall. They didn't make their game sustainable on purpose, anyone who has been playing for years will eventually run out of storage space, and now they decided to make profit out of it ? So, you are telling your most loyal players will have to pay to DESERVE their items ? Singularity Six just reminded us that this company is made of people coming from AA/AAA studios, something we forgot for a while (or were in deny about), and now we got a terrible reminder of this.

It was just a year or so ago that I came across Palia and introduced all my friends to play it with me, initially thinking I'd spend several hours on the game and for awhile I did have plenty fun with it despite its bugs and glitches. Eventually, I fell out of the game and stopped thinking about it until semi-recent. I booted up the game and it was completely broken, the UI was messed up and I couldn't load into the world at. all. no matter what I did. So fast forward to even more recent, I try Palia again. Thankfully everything's working in terms of UI and the world not falling out of itself- and the updates to the UI were quite nice but I noticed the cosmetics were increasingly expensive to a degree that I genuinely couldn't ever justify? Granted sure, they're cosmetics they're not a requirement to play the game but it felt very unfriendly? I tried looking for anything cute or cool that was free or on the cheaper end but nothing caught my eye. Either way I tried to get into the game to play it again and just wasn't feeling it- while the world loaded in it was evident that the game was still extremely buggy. Fast forward yet again to today, I learn they're now monetizing storage which is arguably p2w and generally just not a good move tbh. This game feels so lifeless, it feels like all the focus goes into the expensive cosmetics with everything else just left alone because the gameplay itself isn't making the profit. I don't necessarily disagree with the concept of paid cosmetics but the way they're implemented here feels dirty amongst the piles of other issues like bugs & glitches and their reversal of promising to not paywall core elements of the game (such as storage) It's really quite unfortunate because the first time I experienced this game, there was a real sense of community and fun to it. I didn't get much of a chance to enjoy it as much as I think others have- and there are the positive reviews for those experiences but given the business practices I feel inclined to say something. especially if there's any chance of changing the course of this games development into something enjoyable for players but that's extremely hopeful thinking. Either way I really just can't recommend it as it is and I'm honestly irritated for the greater community because whether or not they pay for these things and are ok with that- its still just not right to them. whether they mind it or not that's just how I feel.

If you do anything before you fall in love with this game like I did, watch the Palia video by ADHDecent I have, for several reasons largely covered by this video, slowly began to play Palia less and less over my years with it. Originally, when solely owned by S6 as a development company, there was promise and the direction to do more. Now, development of new content has slowed to a snails' pace, and monetization has clearly become the priority. With MTX being one of the /most/ expensive I've ever seen in a game like this. It's no longer purely cosmetic either, as we were originally promised, it is now functional, pay-to-win style elements we feared would become the case when a larger corporation took over. Palia is a wonderful, gorgeous game for a lot of reasons, but its soul was cored out for profit and it is likely only going to get worse before it gets better. As someone who loves this game, try it if you like, but I can't recommend it in good conscience anymore as I once did.

saying "it's still in beta" when someone complains about a gamebreaking glitches, while treating it like a full relased game with packs, microtransactions and being on every platform at this point isn't a great look. oh and it's been in "beta" for 3 years

Glitchy and every cool thing is locked behind a paywall. I get its a free game but like dang there are no ways to get a pet without spending money. I mean its alright for a free game but just my opinion

This looks like a cute builder etc. Its not. The majority of the content is cosmetics/decor. No real custom home building, limited character customization (and the majority of content there is paywalled). And the only interactive structures are crafting units. Hundreds of decorative units and only a few crafting stations. Decor cannot be recycled or sold, only deleted or "gifted" once day to one of the npcs. Honeslty I'd put any open world game before this. But the closest comparisans might be Second Life and the Sims and both would be better considerably. If you want content flexibility go with SL (or maybe VRChat). If you want ease of play then go with the Sims. But either way they outrank Palia considerably.