Palia

Imagine grinding through every quest the game has to offer, finally earning a rare black horse with a flaming mane as a reward for your dedication… and then the developers turn around and say: “Nice horse, mind coughing up €25 if you actually want to ride it?” That’s honestly what Palia’s monetization feels like right now. Cosmetic cash shops are one thing, but locking features or meaningful rewards behind absurd pricing after players already earned them through gameplay just feels insulting. It completely kills the sense of achievement. EDIT: I think the developers listened... The new Riffroc mount is completely free to obtain and ride, which is exactly the kind of reward structure I wanted to see after completing a quest for it. I'm leaving the original review up for context, but this is a genuinely positive step and hopefully a sign of the direction they're taking going forward.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to Palia; I wish there was a neutral button for this one. I've been playing since closed beta, way before it was available on Steam, so I have hundreds of hours played beyond these 500h. I played on multiple accounts but Steam only allows you to link one, so keep that in mind. You can only create one character per account. I was really excited to get a "cozy MMO" that could give me a break from Warcraft. I spent a decent amount of time playing and participating in communities in the last -almost- 3 years and I dropped a decent amount of money in the cash shop as well. I know some people might disagree with this review, but it's just my opinion. This game has a very specific target audience and I just don’t seem to belong to it, so keep that in mind while reading this. It might help you make up your mind if you're not sure you're the target audience. A lot of people who enjoyed Palia more than me came from games like Animal Crossing, The Sims and other sim/cozy games. [h3]Cosmetic Collector[/h3] The gameplay revolves around decorating your plot and your character: - You level up skills to get medals to spend on the skill shop for blueprints, tools, and cosmetics. - You farm materials to craft cosmetics (furniture & decor). - There's an in-game cash shop that sells pricey outfits, tool skins, pet skins, etc. - There are events every hour (and also seasonal ones) where you can get... you guessed it, [i]COSMETICS![/i] You can visit other players' houses and vote for them, awarding nameplates (cosmetics!) to the ones that get enough votes. If you complete your weekly tour-related quests, you get tickets you can use to put your house on the front page so you get more visits, more votes and more cosmetics. You can also use those tickets to buy MORE cosmetics. [h3]Is it really an MMO?[/h3] An MMO is supposed to have thousands of players sharing the same world, but Palia has layers that can hold up to 25 people at the same time, so the world feels pretty empty. The multiplayer activities are basically joining a party to farm mats or gold faster. Communities can also only have 25 members, so most communities end up creating several different in-game communities and talking through discord instead. There's no purpose besides collecting stuff and looking pretty. I know it's a cozy game, but I've played other cozy games and they tend to, at least, have a point, a soft challenge/mission or an ending (when single-player). It's usually all about enjoying the journey, but THERE IS an end, a message or a point to it all. When Palia was conceived as a cozy “MMO”, they took that away from it. It’s like playing Minecraft in peaceful mode (no monsters, no survival) just to decorate your house and hoard mats. There's a reason why people do that for 2 weeks and quit; it's because after a while, it becomes boring. And Minecraft has huge randomly generated maps. Palia only has 4 maps. There's no combat so there are no dungeons, no raiding, no bosses, no PVP, nothing that gives you the feeling that you've completed or achieved something. Reaching the end of an 'expansion' means you collected all the new stuff. There are quests but you only need to finish some of them to unlock new maps and features. After that, it's about cosmetics again. There's no player trading or market like in other MMOs. [h3]FOMO[/h3] Everything feels like a competition to see who looks prettier or who has the coolest house. As soon as an outfit is out, the whales are swiping to get it and running around to show it off. People who can't afford $25 USD outfits end up feeling like they're "missing out". We keep on getting premium store updates every patch and they still don't have regional pricing. I understand the game is free and you don't HAVE TO pay for these skins, but the community creates this feeling of FOMO that makes you feel like sh!t if you don't. Mainly because the quality gap between outfits you can obtain in game and premium outfits is HUGE. You look like a hobo next to the magical fairy that leaves glittery traces as they walk, levitates while idle, flies when running and glows in the dark. Come on, guys. They recently added ranching where you might spend 100k+ gold buying random animals to get the aesthetic ones. You also need to log in pretty much every day or they go hungry and sad. Another FOMO inducing activity, but this time it’s a game mechanic. I didn't care about the color of my animals, I was just happy with getting the extra mats from them. I enjoyed decorating my house for a bit but never cared enough to finish decorating an entire plot. I bought some outfits I liked and that was enough for me. My point is: I didn't feel FOMO because I didn't care enough about the game, but I got to moderate a community for a bit and realized how badly this affected some people's mental health. [h3]The "Cooking Party" meta[/h3] Most people join cooking parties with 10-20 other people, where they stand in front of a cooking station and click once it's their turn to cook. This way, they cook a 20-step meal in just a couple of steps, cutting cooking time and costs and multiplying profits. You just have to click every 40 sec for 1 or 2h straight. [i]This is what most people log in every day to do.[/i] Most people don't even follow the story or complete quests or achievements, they just make gold to buy more stuff. In closed beta, cake parties were so OP they had to nerf them because everybody had capped gold and hundreds of cakes in storage to sell when needed. People will find whatever dish is most expensive and cook it for hours every day, recruiting people through 3rd party apps like PaliaParty and Discord. If you're a new player, you might not understand how tf people are farming 100-200k gold per night since none of this happens in game chat, but this became the default way of farming gold. You can make gold with any skill but never as much or as fast as with cooking parties. Selling a whole bag full of mats for a couple thousand gold (when buying one alchemist room is like 40k) might feel slow as hell. You also need hundreds of thousands of gold to unlock bag space, ammo space, plots, etc. They’ve tried nerfing this and making other skills relevant but this is still the fastest way to get rich. [h3]Community toxicity[/h3] I was happy because for the first time ever, this MMO's player-base was mostly women. It was definitely way less toxic than raiding with 24 apes in Warcraft, but women bring their own type of toxicity. The cliques, the fake positivity, the talking behind others' backs, and the constant need for validation. There are so many helpful players out there, but the more time goes by, the more impatient people get with new players when they don't know the "unspoken rules" we came up with years ago. Before you know it, you chopped down a tree and a mother of 3 is writing a reddit post to talk ♥♥♥♥ about you and about how 'new players don't care about etiquette' and 'people are so rude'. Like, relax Susan. They're not trying to be jerks, they just don't know. Examples of this: Trying to chop flow trees before 3am in game or seeing people catching bugs with lures and joining without asking or joining their party, etc. Susan will lose her ♥♥♥♥ if you catch her rare butterfly, I'm telling ya. [h3]Conclusion[/h3] If you don't care about decorating your space and buying premium outfits; or if you came here looking for an actual MMO, this game might not be for you. It's free anyway, so you can download it and give it a try. The beginning is fun because getting things actually takes some work. And as a totally random observation, because I'm knee deep here already: This game reflects what's happening with society nowadays. People who don't have a purpose are hyperfixating on how they look, because that's all they have. That's why 'looksmaxxing' is a thing now. They can only get validation from looking better than others.