Hey, Gamers! So, I’ve been playing a free MMO called Palia quite a bit lately. I’ve played it every day since I started, and have over 100 hours on it. The game is currently in early access and is available on PC and Switch (the latter being what I’ve been playing on for the last few months). I’m not the most dedicated player. While I do play it every day, I’m not following the updates closely or spending half the day on the game. I just play it because I think it’s fun and I think that’s where a lot of the player base will come from so I thought I’d write a post on it. It feels weird to be playing a game in early access since I’ve never done that before. I expected glitches and bugs, and my expectations weren’t too high, to be honest. So, let’s talk about Palia: The good, the bad and the ugly of early access.
The Good
Man, this game is great. That needs to be my first point. The best thing about early access was that this game was available (and free) when I was looking for something just like it. If I had to wait until December when it comes out, I probably wouldn’t have followed the game and would have forgotten about it. It’s not that it didn’t stand out, but there’s so many games now, it’s difficult to keep up unless something really catches your attention (and even then, it’s usually triple A games with enough advertising budget that it’s always thrown in your face anyway). Having access to this game sooner than later is best for me, so yeah, +1 point there.
The next point I wanted to bring up is how often this game gets updated. I don’t know if this is normal for a game in early access – like I said, this is my first rodeo – but it feels like we get a new update like every other week. Every time, the servers go down and you usually get a little in-game gift as compensation. Josh seems to think this was normal, but I just really liked that it seems like Singularity 6 really cares about the game and what the players say. Bugs get fixed quite often (which is good, because there tends to be a lot), and improvements are made to make the game run better.
Similarly to that, they add new things to this game all the time. Since I’ve been playing, they’ve added a new shortcut so travel is quicker; more temples (big puzzles that are kinda like the point of the game); and more character stories (they’ve added rank 5 for three characters, with it coming for the rest of the characters in future updates). Like, they actually add more to the story. It’s so exciting for me because I’ve never experienced something like this before. And while playing, you can tell that each new thing they add has been crafted with love. They’re slowly learning what the players want (people go crazy every time they add some clutter to the game), and they try their best. I have a lot of respect for them for that. There are a lot of studios that completely ignore their player base, no matter how vocal they are. So uh, Singularity 6, if you’re reading this… please add books so I can fill my bookshelves.
The next great thing about playing Palia in early access is being a part of the community that ultimately shapes the game. As a whole, the Palia community is hit or miss (we’ll talk in detail about this later on), but Singularity 6 is doing their best to listen to the community and that really shows. The most recent examples that the community has impacted the game that I think matter the most is… slightly negative. Okay, no, it just comes from a bad thing, but overall it’s a good thing. Since Palia is an MMO, you can talk in the chat and it’s pretty common to do so. You call out if you see a rare resource, or if you find the grove that happens at midnight. However, some non-English speaking (or, I guess it’s more writing in this case but I digress…) players were talking in the chat in their own language and some English speaking players had a problem with that. They ended up yelling and trying to say that you can only speak English in the Palia chat. Obviously, that’s not okay. Palia really pushes for inclusivity in the game, so it’s not okay to just try to exclude someone just because they don’t speak your language. In one of the more recent updates, there’s a little box at the top of the chat that says something along the lines of “Palia is a place for everyone. People are allowed to speak whatever language they want, please don’t cause conflict”. I just thought that was such a nice addition. I mean, it’s sad that it had to happen but it’s nice that they cared enough about it to add it in. The incident I spoke about happened multiple times, from what I could see on Reddit. It just shows that 1) the community really does have an impact and 2) they really care about making this game as inclusive as possible.
The bad.
We have to talk about the things we don’t really want to talk about. I never like being negative, so it’s more of a criticism if anything. Man, I already feel bad about this.
Glitches. There’s so many glitches. The worst one for me was the ones involving the skills hunting and bug catching. Sernuks disappear out of thin air (and no, not the Proudhorn that is meant to do that, the regular ones in Kilima), bugs randomly disappearing, things like that. This was more frustrating during the early game, but you do get used to it pretty quickly. It just sucks because it’s quite discouraging when you’re trying to increase the skills and get more bugs/prey but it feels impossible. The hunting and bug catching skills are my least advanced for this reason, and it sucks because I’d love to make Auni happy by advancing more in bug catching.
Now let’s talk about playing with friends! It’s… hard. It took Josh and I about half an hour just to add each other in Palia due to menu bugs and general confusion. We’re not used to these types of games, so that might be on us. But then, we tried to join each other’s server. We couldn’t. It felt impossible. This was weeks ago and we still haven’t done it. It’s actually put Josh off the game altogether, which is really sad because it’s one of my favourites.
The Ugly
It’s the players. The players can either be amazing and super nice, or the awful human beings who don’t understand how to share a community. There’s no in between. I obviously don’t blame the studio for this, and they are trying to implement things to make the community a better place, but this is such a big problem that it cannot go unsaid. The Palia community as a whole have developed rules on how people play, but if you’re a new player, you’re obviously not going to understand or know about these rules. The basic rules are if you find a grove of flow trees, call it in chat and wait for anyone who wants it to come before you start chopping it; call out Palium if you find it (I think it was also wait to mine it but this might have changed recently); use flares of specific colours for specific things, etc. A lot of people are quite harsh if they see someone breaking these rules. I had an experience a few weeks ago where I was mining iron and someone saw and was convinced that it was Palium. They called me selfish in the chat, and a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon. I tried to explain it was iron, that I hadn’t found any Palium in days, but they refused to listen. I guess this just depends on you, but it did upset me at the time. Now, I just roll my eyes and do whatever I want. The thing is, you can largely play Palia as a single player game and I feel like a lot of players struggle to remember that some people prefer to just go around and do their own thing. They make it insufferable sometimes. It’s particularly in the Bahari Bay area as that’s where the rare materials are. I feel so bad for all the new players who have been turned off this amazing game because of the experiences they’ve had in chat. For goodness sake, it took me like a week to just work out how to use chat on my switch, nevermind all the rules that the community have made to go along with it. But yeah, as of right now, the community is definitely the ugly side of this game and that’s really sad.
But that’s it for this post, Gamers! Have you tried out Palia yet? Let me know in the comments (and drop your username in my DMs if you want to add me!). Speaking of Dms, add me on instagram to keep updated with when I post and also I sometimes post some random gaming stuff there too (sometimes you’ll get a sneak peak into what I’m playing). If you liked this post, give it a ‘like’ and share it with a friend if you feel like sharing. See you next post, Gamers!
Eleanor Rees Gaming 