It’s been a great few years for cozy games, games where you settle in, build relationships and home, farm, fish, and create a life you’d enjoy. While most of these are single-player games or have a basic multiplayer element, a cozy MMO just opened up its beta, albeit with mixed success: Palia.
Made by Singularity 6, a team made up of Activision Blizzard and Riot vets, Palia aims to bring a cozy, community-driven MMO to players. They’ve promised not to monetize through tricks and to make sure the community is a ‘cozy, welcoming, and friendly’ place. On top of that, there’s a hope that this is something like Glitch 2.0, or a Stardew Valley MMO, because that’s along the lines of what the trailers seem to offer.
As someone who played Glitch, has poured far too many hours into Stardew, and has been in the closed beta for Palia I can say that some of the bones are in place for what they’re promising… but definitely not all.
Palia delivers the cozy vibes
The first place where Palia nails its vision is with the NPCs themselves. Each NPC feels like they belong in the world, with clear and distinct personalities of their own. This is an NPC community that the players are joining, which lines up with the story Singularity 6 is trying to tell.
While Palia excels at establishing its NPC village, it does lack in allowing players to create their own community. There’s no local chat, just global, private, and community (Palia’s name for guilds/clans.) If you want to say “Hi” while fishing next to someone, it gets blasted out to the entire shard of around 25 people.
On the plus side, if you’re fishing next to someone, you get a buff, and if you mine a rock/chop a tree/cook a meal with other players, you both get the resources. There is potential here.
So far, messages I’ve seen in-game and in the official Discord have mostly been along the lines of cozy and welcoming. There’s been a toxic rabbit trail every now and then, but generally the community has been good. It’s not on par with Glitch levels of good just yet, but Palia chat’s a far cry from the mess that is WoW or Overwatch chat.
Palia’s Shortfalls
There are two big problems facing Palia - monetization and customization.
Part of a cozy game is expressing yourself through your character. While they’ve thankfully not gender-restricted hair or clothing, there aren’t a lot of options for making yourself. There’s more customization in Dark Souls than here, and that’s not a dig on Dark Souls. You’ve got one top slot, one bottom slot, a headwear slot, and an eyewear slot, all with very limited color options. There’s no color wheel.
Also, speaking of eyewear and headwear, let’s leap into monetization. In a recent developer journal, the leader of S6’s business team promises there will be no tricks. That’s very much not the case, as Palia’s shop incorporates one of the more predatory practices out there.
First, you have to buy a unique premium currency, obscuring the true cost of your purchase. Second, none of the pack sizes of the currency line up with outfit costs, which is meant to get you to buy more coins than you need. That’s meant to make you worry about wasting your leftover coins so you’ll buy even more coins. There are a lot of people who have pointed out how harmful and predatory this is, including James Stephanie Sterling.
Then you have further issues in how the ‘bundle pricing’ is a flat-out lie. It shows the price for if you bought each of the three pieces in a set for ‘full’ price and then has that next to the price for buying them all together, except that’s not how it works. Take the Soothsayer pack, for instance. The shop image suggests that the three variations would be 2,550 coins each, but if you bought all three you could save and get them for 5,100 coins total. In reality, if you buy them separately, the first is 2,550 and the other two are 1,275 each. There’s no discount for buying three. But the way the shop is displayed makes you feel like you’d be wasting coins by only buying two, encouraging you to spend 5,100 instead of 2,550 or 3,825.
But what is the actual cost? 5,350 Palia coins are $49.99 US. Three outfits are the same price as a full game. If you want one of those outfits, you can’t buy the $20 2,050 coin pack. No, you have to buy the $35 3,650 coin pack. There are some less expensive outfits on there, but the least amount you can spend on coins if you want to buy any cosmetics is $20.
Related:
Preview: Palia Absolutely Nails The Cozy Vibes
I believe in supporting free-to-play games. I learned a very crushing lesson when Glitch closed because it couldn’t cover server costs. But this entry point is too high for me and many others as seen on Palia’s Discord server. I’ll easily spend over time if there are $10 purchases that seem neat, much in the way I had a WoW subscription for years, but I can’t mentally justify buying things in game that cost the same amount as an entire different game.
Singularity 6 raised 49 million dollars for Palia according to Crunchbase. They’ll have to pay their investors back while keeping the server running, but, the way it seems to me, they’ve already broken one of their promises against tricks made, as promised in this quote from their Monetization journal (emphasis mine): “We don’t want to monetize through tricks. Our products should be able to stand on their own as valuable purchases. In general, our store will have items that are directly purchasable and available all the time. There may be exceptions to this, but there will be specific reasons why in each case.”
That, combined with the high price of the only additional clothing options in the game (and there’s currently no other way to earn clothing, not through achievements, relationships, or crafting) is not a promising beginning.
All told, I do like the concept and in some areas Palia’s promising and for those I’ll keep playing and watching. Others aren’t good, but we’re still in the beta. There’s time to change.
