Palia recently launched on Xbox alongside its brand new Elderwood expansion, and I’m hooked. I mean, in a "100 hours in two weeks" level of hooked. I can’t wait until I can stop playing other games to play Palia. And yet somehow, I have not even made it to the end of the game’s prologue yet.
That’s at least due in part to Palia’s MMO design. The game boasts a sprawling world with multiple maps, and the update that brought the free-to-play wholesome life sim to Xbox added on yet another new world full of surprises that built upon the existing story.
With the completion of the Elderwood expansion, players will finally reach the finale of Palia’s prologue. That said, you’re going to need an insane amount of time to get there.
When I launched Palia, I went in with zero expectations. It was a free-to-play MMO, which is generally not one of my favorite genres. I don’t enjoy being griefed by other players stealing loot or intervening in a fight to steal the glory of a hard-fought battle at the last minute.
I also prefer to stick to my small group of friends for cooperative experiences, and the thought of sharing a world with large groups is just an anxiety attack waiting to happen.
But Palia has proven to be different. When my friends and I are close to each other, we can share loot and boost each other’s chances of getting those rarer items that we’re struggling to find.
Other players engaging with the world around us have not negatively affected our experience, as we reap the rewards of our efforts, regardless of who deals the final blow. Despite accepting an agreement to be wholesome before launching into the character creator, I was shocked at just how welcoming and friendly the actual community has been.
It wasn’t always that way, and a quick scroll through archived posts on the Palia Reddit shows numerous complaints surrounding the game’s initial launch of player griefing.
Palia launched in an incomplete state, starting with a beta period, and it has continued to grow and expand as the developers take player feedback into account. While there’s still room for improvement, the current state that Palia is in as it creeps to 1.0 is actually pleasant.
Like any wholesome life sim, you find yourself in a quaint little village full of townsfolk who can use your help.
Things are a little different here, though, as the town is post-human. There are relics of human civilization still around, including these giant temples (from which you arrived, no less), and by exploring the three different biomes — Kilima, Bahari Bay, and Elderwood — you can learn more about the civilization of the Majiri who inhabit the world and the humans who came before.
You have your home plot, complete with a little dilapidated house that can be added on to, improved, and even fully rebuilt to be bigger and better if you so choose. You can expand your plot to fulfill all of your favorite hobbies. Because hobbies are what Palia does best.
Players need to forage, farm, fish, build furniture, and collect bugs to fulfill quests, but not every player enjoys every part of the grind. The game provides the option to focus on the skills that you enjoy the most, and you can level those skills up to unlock more skill rewards.
However, if you don’t enjoy a particular gameplay element like hunting or bug catching, you can put out a request to the server, and another player can give you the item you need. Careful, though. You can only have so many requests per day.
Right now is an excellent time to dive into Palia if you’re looking to experience some cozy, wholesome farming and house building with your friends without becoming overwhelmed by all there is to discover.
Singularity 6, the developers and publishers behind Palia, have already shared plans for the next big update for the game. Patch 0.192, dubbed Radiance Rising, will introduce free courier pets, new dynamic events for Elderwood, and much-needed upgraded storage solutions. There are even plans to add one of the community's most requested features, animal husbandry, according to the extended roadmap for Palia.
It’s a tall ask to carve out hundreds of hours of playtime in a free-to-play MMO when there are so many incredible games like Expedition 33 and South of Midnight sitting in my backlog still. But the ability to just load in and casually run around mindlessly, collecting bugs and fishing the day away with my friends in Palia is the relaxing time-sink I’ve been missing lately.
Palia is cross-platform compatible, with players using a dedicated account that allows progress to be shared with PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.
Unfortunately, Palia is not Xbox Play Anywhere compatible, but using cross-platform accounts does allow players to switch between Xbox and the Steam or other console versions. The game is free-to-play on all platforms, and there are platform-specific rewards that can be unlocked for a limited time.
