Palia sounds like the perfect MMO for Animal Crossing fans – slated to enter Alpha in 2022

On December 18, 2021By Garmin Philip

Palia is a new MMO that focuses primarily on the cozy and social aspects. You can optionally go hunting for animals, but your house, your neighbors and activities such as cooking or fishing are in the foreground. It is being developed by former employees of Blizzard and Riot Games. The first alpha is scheduled to start in 2022.

What exactly is Palia? In Palia you play people who are “legendary people” in the game world. Because at the height of their creative power they suddenly disappeared and nobody knew why. Now people have suddenly reappeared after thousands of years and you have to create a new home in the unknown world.

To this end, Palia relies on various activities that you can experience alone or together with other players:

There is housing with thousands of different items. Your friends should come over and help you decorate.
Activities such as fishing, cooking, cutting wood, chopping stones or setting up your own farm are among the core content.
You can change the appearance of your character all the time and give him cool outfits.
You can forge friendships and relationships with NPCs in the area.

In Palia there should also be the possibility to fight against creatures from the environment, but that should be purely optional. It is mainly about special hunting quests. It is not based on classes, but on a system of different skills.

But if you want, you can forego fighting completely. There will be no PvP at all.

This trailer from June offers you a first glimpse into the world of MMOs:

Trailer for Palia, one of the most interesting upcoming MMOs

A perfect MMO for Animal Crossing fans

What content will there still be in Palia? The new MMO was presented for the first time in June 2021. Since then, there have been several interviews and Q&A sessions in which the developers revealed more details about Palia:

Your houses should be in real neighborhoods, small or large, so that you can interact with the same players in your area.
When you leave your cities, you enter the so-called Adventure Zones. There you should be able to explore a wide variety of areas and biomes, discover secrets and also be able to go hunting.
In the open world there should be hidden lore items that players can find to learn more about the story.
You will be able to eat and drink in the game. This shouldn’t be absolutely necessary, but it has advantages and should make cooking more interesting.
When cooking there should be mini-games so that there is an experience similar to the real world. But there will also be crafting content where you just drag items into an interface.
Dungeons are planned for the future. What these look like and whether there is fighting or rather puzzles was not revealed.
Also for the future “different possibilities” are planned to be able to present your successes and collections.
You should be able to have fun and complete tasks on your own, but Palia still relies heavily on interaction with others.
Role play is said to be an important part of Palia.
There will be own key bindings.
Over time, the world and history of Palia are said to keep evolving. Many updates are also planned after the release, because the game should keep its fans busy for “decades”.

What makes Palia so interesting? The basic idea of the MMO is based on the fact that the players have a world that they can immerse themselves in without too much work or too much stress. Palia should therefore be a relaxed balance to normal everyday life.

The developers want to achieve this through their special gameplay. Because a lot of the content, such as cozy housing, fishing and cooking as well as the interaction with NPCs and other players in the world immediately remind you of Animal Crossing. And that was after all the most successful new game in 2020 (via GamesWirtschaft).

In terms of graphics, Palia is located in a similar world. So if you are looking for a relaxed MMO with lots of opportunities to interact with other players, you could find your home in Palia.

Pre-Alpha for Palia was a success, with Closed Alpha set to start in 2022

How is Palia developing? In July, the developers announced that they had received investments of 25.3 million euros to advance the development. New developers for the game were also regularly sought out over the year.

The pre-alpha took place in September, but with an NDA on it. In conclusion to the pre-alpha, the developers wrote that the players “78,650 beetles caught, 76,431 fruits harvested, 128,952 beasts hunted, 153 cakes baked, an immeasurable amount of area worked and invaluable system errors identifiedrt ”.

In addition, there should have been a lot of valuable feedback on which further development should be based.

Who is actually behind Palia? The Singularity 6 studio was founded by Aidan Karabaich, former developer at Carbine Studios (WildStar) and lead designer at Riot Games (LoL), and Anthony Leung, former development director at Riot Games.

On board they have:

Evan Hill, Level Designer von The Last of Us Part 2
Jeremy Fenske, former ESO concept artist
Jon Davis, 10 years programmer at Respawn Entertainment (Call of Duty)
Other former developers at Blizzard and Riot Games

According to the developers, not only should the gameplay be important, but also the atmosphere. In line with this, the first soundtracks have already been shared on Twitter and YouTube.