*** Foreword ***
When Blaugust began, I thought I'd be very clever and write a few extra posts to keep in my back pocket for the inevitable days when I didn't have the time or the energy. That strategy has served me well so far, removing all of the stress I felt last year, when I just relied on being able to wing it. Not that there was all that much stress but none is better than even a little.
As I was writing ahead, there was one problem I didn't foresee. Now we're half way through the month, some of the posts have dated quite badly. Yesterday's post was one of those. This is another.
I wrote both posts more than a couple of weeks ago, at which time I'd just started playing Palia and had been playing Dragon Nest 2 for a little while. I imagined I'd be playing both of them for the whole of Blaugust but I was reckoning without Dawnlands, which grabbed my attention from the moment I started playing and all but pushed Palia, DN2 and even Noah's Heart out of the cozy rotation I had going for a short while.
- I haven't played Palia in over a week
- I haven't seen it under Open Beta conditions
- I haven't seen the new content patch
- I would have written this whole post very differently if I'd also had Dawnlands to compare and contrast because all these games have a lot of synergies.
With those caveats, here we go...
When Belghast put up a post about the Palia beta yesterday, he gave it the telling title "Stardew Landmark Crossing". When I left a comment there, I got myself all tangled up trying to make a comparison of my own and somehow ended up with a non-existent game called "My Time At Palia". As I'm about to demonstrate, it was a felicitous mistake.
It's apparent from the early impressions I've been reading that everyone is seeing whichever previous cosy collecting and gathering game they've played before, closely replicated in the form of an MMORPG. That, presumably, was the developers' intention and it raises a worrisome question not just about this genre but all of them.
I've heard it said many times (I may have said it myself on occasion.) that if you've played one fantasy MMORPG you've you've played them all. That's demonstrably untrue in close-up but harder to argue with when the focus pulls back.
As I said in
my post
about the MUSIC test, the more you know about something, the harder to
please you're likely to be. That goes for just about everything but it might
go double for video games, or at least you might think so if you'd been been
reading the same gaming websites as I have.
Similarly, as I was saying in that other post, the opposite also applies. The less you know about something, the lower your standards are going to be when you come to judge it. With fewer examples to compare it with, anything that seems at all enjoyable will also benefit hugely from feeling new as well.
I'm not sure how many games like Palia there are but I'm betting it's a lot. It reminds me somewhat of Landmark (the look of it and the gathering mechanics, specifically) and of Free Realms (The aesthetics again, only more strongly this time, but mainly the relentless cheerfulness and as Tipa pointed out, the job-swapping mechanics.).
It also reminds me, more faintly, of Yonder, largely because of the lack of threat and combat, and there are some faint tinges of Valheim in the mix, but by an order of magnitude at the very least, the games it most reminds me of are My Time At Portia and its sequel My Time At Sandrock. That's why unintentionally calling it "My Time In Palia" felt less like a mistake, more like a handy thumbnail review.
At this point I might begin to list all the ways the Portia and Palia games appear to converge. I will, later. First, though, I'm more concerned with how similar the pair of them might be to a whole load of other games I haven't played.
I'm aware that I have no personal experience of the best-known games in this genre, which I'm assuming would indeed be Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. I also have only the vaguest understanding of how large the genre is or for that matter what it's even called.
That level of ignorance makes me ill-equipped to comment on whether Palia is a
particularly good example of this kind of game. I can say if it's a good or
bad game per se but not if it's unusually good or bad by the prevailing
standards of the genre .
Chances are I'm going to think it's better than someone who's played a lot of this kind of thing. I'm more likely to be impressed by things that are new to me, even when they may not be all that well-done, than would be someone to whom they were more familiar. I'm going to be gosh-wowing all over the place, when someone more inured to the tropes of the genre would be yawning and making their excuses.
Without that depth of experience, I'm not even sure whether the very marked similarities I'm seeing between Palia and Portia are suggestive of an unusually congruent design document or whether they're merely features and mechanics common to almost all games of this type, the way "kill ten rats" quests or raids predominate in MMORPGs.
It's probably time I listed a few of what seem to me common aspects of Palia and Portia that make me occasionally forget which of the games I'm actually playing. I'm not talking about the absolute basics like both having trees you chop down with an axe or rocks you break with a pick. That'd be like saying all games that have monsters you kill are alike.
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It's things like the world being filled with ruins from a mysterious social
collapse that happened so long ago no-one really remembers anything much about
it. It's the presence of robots who persist from the before-times but don't
want to share any information about the past. It's the necessity of recovering a
technology that's long been lost.
It's the design and even the names of the machinery you make and place on your
housing plot and it's the specific mechanics of how they work. The way you add
materials via a notice board or a hopper. It's the way you have to wait for
real-world hours to make a stack of bricks.
It's the way you build up relationships with the locals by talking to them and giving them presents. It's the personalities of those NPCs, the kind of things they say. Even just walking around the town feels like walking around Portia.
I find it uncanny and a little unnerving but I don't really believe that Palia is any more similar to Portia than WildStar was similar to World of Warcraft. I think it's more that, just as someone unfamiliar with MMORPGs would see a lot more in common between those two games than someone steeped in the genre, I don't know enough to be able to say why Palia is wildly different from Portia.
It reminds me of how general chat in every new MMORPG always used to fill up claims that the game was either better or worse than WoW, even when it wasn't very much like WoW at all. It's just that, when WoW is the only benchmark you have, every other virtual world looks like Azeroth.
I trust that as I play more I'll see less of Portia in Palia. I hope so, if only because at the moment one of the issues I'm having is that playing Palia keeps reminding me I bought an Early Access copy of Sandrock at the earliest opportunity and I've barely logged in since. I keep wondering why I'm not playing the game I paid for, since I seem to be playing it anyway in this beta.
Of course, the real diffference between the two is that Portia and Sandrock
are single-player games, while Palia is an MMO. And that's something else I'm
having problems with.
As I've said many times, I hugely prefer playing online, among others, even when all I do is solo and never talk to anyone. I've said that just knowing a game-world is shared with thousands, even millions of people makes everything I do there feel more meaningful than if I was playing wholly alone, entirely unseen.
Playing a game that feels like My Time At Portia, into which I put more than seventy hours, but playing it in a persistent and public arena rather than in private ought to feel both more significant and more satisfying. At the moment it doesn't, quite. Quite the opposite, in fact.
For possibly the first time ever, In one recent session I found myself wishing I could play Palia on my own, with no other people around me. I don't think that's ever happened to me in an MMORPG in more than twenty years.
Oh, I've wanted to have parts of an MMORPG to myself so I could get on with things and not have to compete for spawns or mobs or nodes. I've wanted to avoid other players because they were all trying to kill me or steal my stuff or just because they were being bloody annoying or offensive. We've all wanted that.
But all I wanted then was for the annoying players to bugger off and do something else in a different part of the game. I never wanted to kick them all out of the game altogether so I could play it on my own.
I've tried playing MMORPG-style solo games and it's always been a
disappointingly flat experience. If an MMORPG I loved shut down, I'd happily
take a single-player version just so I could log in sometimes and remind
myself what it used to be like but I'd only want it for a keepsake. I wouldn't
put in hundreds, thousands of hours, playing it on my own.
I'm sure I'll get used to it. I'll have to. Palia is an MMORPG, after all. And if I stick with it, soon enough I'll have played it as long as I played Portia and eventually I'll have played it ten times as long. Seventy hours is a good run in an offline game but a few hundred hours in an MMORPG barely gets you started.
One thing I really can't imagine doing at the moment, though, is playing both
Palia and the Portia sequel, Sandrock at the same time. They're just too much
alike. That could be awkward. I hear Sandrock is set to leave Early Access for
a full launch in September. I was planning on starting over and playing it
properly when that happened.
I might well be done with Palia by then but even if I am I could have spoiled my appetite for another game so similar, so soon. Or maybe I'll have seen enough to know the difference and it won't bother me any more. I hope so.
They say the more you know...
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