The Daybreak Home For Failing Games Is Delighted To Announce A Grand Re-Opening Party: Guest Of Honor - Palia.

The most unexpected gaming news of the week has to have been the gathering of Palia developer Singularity 6 into the welcoming embrace of Daybreak Games, an enfoldment only made possible, as Wilhelm was at some pains to point out, through the opening of EG7's wallet. Then again, with EG7 arguably in the process of being consumed from the inside by the company it thought had devoured and digested, the point may well be moot.

I think it's safe to assume we won't be seeing a similar parasitic assimilation this time around. The announced intention and best case scenario would appear to be Singularity 6 continuing in the current direction of travel, driving its own bus in the proven manner long established by Standing Stone Games, the ostensibly independent owners and operators of Lord of the Rings Online, while somewhere in the back, Ji Ham calls out course corrections and tells the driver when to pull over for a comfort break.

Palia is one of many - almost certainly too many - cozy crafting titles, development of which seemed to proliferate following the Great Sequestration at the beginning of the 2020s. The popularity of sitting indoors pretending you were walking around doing the kinds of simple, natural, soul-regenerating things that had suddenly became forbidden in real life - things like meeting friends, swapping gifts and romancing strangers - made a disturbing amount of sense in the plague years but it was always going to be a risky proposition when the masks came off and hands got dirty again for real.

Palia had a good head of steam behind it when it went into open beta less than a year ago (Really? That recently? Seems like a lot longer.) but the game as it could be played then turned out to be a lot less compelling than many had hoped or more likely imagined. I spent a few hours trying to like it and didn't make too much progress, either in the game or with my feelings for it.

Curiously, in about the only substantial post I wrote about my brief experience, I went on at some length about the existential difference between playing a game solo with other people around and just plain solo. Online or offline, in other words. That is also what I came here to talk about today.

When I heard that Daybreak had taken custody of the failing property, alleged to be teetering somewhere between maintenance mode and utter extinction, my immediate thought was to wonder what the heck they thought they were going to do with it. 

On the surface the acquisition makes sense. Their business, going back through ancestral roots with Sony Online Entertainment, revolves entirely on building, buying or curating MMOs of various kinds and Palia is supposedly an MMO. 

In my admittedly brief time with it, however, my overriding impression was that it neither felt like nor needed to be one and that I wasn't sure I wouldn't prefer it if it wasn't, something about which I was quite conflicted:

"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."

I'm not sure I feel that way any more. What's more, in ceasing to be convinced of the innate superiority, let alone necessity, of a shared, online existence when it comes to playing games, I may be not so much changing my coat as readjusting it to fit the zeitgeist.

A few years ago, all talk was of Live Service. Everything had to be online, always. From the player's perspective, the idea seemed to be that, once you began playing a game, you'd never have to stop. From the business end, expectations revolved around locking players into an eternal purchasing cycle, mostly involving Seasons, that would mean no-one would ever need to make a new game again.

That never-ending search for the Forever Game seems to have morphed into a peculiar form of mutually assured destruction, with swarms of players descending on every new hopeful just long enough to strip it bare and spit it out before swirling up and away towards the next. Developers are indeed freed from making new games but only at the expense of desperately trying to pump out new content for the only one they ever did make fast enough to stop the last few customers abandoning them forever.

Now everyone's had the chance to see how Live Service works in practice, it seems the story has changed. Like gamification and the metaverse it's no longer a buzzword, more of a curse. Of late, we've begun to see not just resistance but active push-back. The pressure may finally be starting to generate a response.

A couple of formerly multiple titles that each built a similar momentum to Palia's before most people could play them - Nightingale and Wayfinder - have each removed the requirement for an active internet connection while playing.

 Airship Syndicate claimed they were responding to "a shift in the industry where players are OK paying for a premium title if it means respect for their time and wallets". Inflexion made it clear they were responding directly to player pressure, saying "We’ve seen a lot of discussion in recent days around our decision to make Nightingale online-only at our Early Access release. We understand that this can be frustrating..."

The upshot in both cases was to take the games offline or at least offer an offline option. Arguably neither was a full MMORPG but another recent title, Islands of Insight self-professedly was and now that, too, will be adding an offline mode in a week or so. Meanwhile, Amazon Games has been tying itself in knots attempting to rebrand New World for console as an "action RPG". They aren't atually taking the game offline but you get the feeling they wish they could.

Everything has its day. Maybe even the Internet. Tobold seems to think so and he stopped playing MMORPGs ages ago, perhaps in preparation for the day when it would all fall apart.

I'm not quite ready to settle down in my bunker with a diesel generator, a console and a stack of cartridges just yet but I do think the online honeymoon is probably over. The days when it seemed like magic just to be there, wherever there was, alongside hundreds, even thousands of other people, all doing the same imaginary things in the same imaginary space, are long gone. 

Now, when you hear people talking about what it's like being online, they're mainly complaining about how awful it is or reminiscing about how great it used to be. If anyone talks about the "magic" you can bet it's the magic of nostalgia. The zeitgeist seems to be in retrograde right now as people rediscover the ownership rights and privacy they thought ten years ago they'd never need to think about again.

I don't think time rolls back that easily. I suspect internet denial will be a niche movement for the rest of my lifetime, at least. Always online though? Live service? I suspect those will slowly go the way of so many other trends that once seemed unstoppable but which now need to be explained to anyone who didn't happen to be around at the time.

Palia, to swing back to where we began, looks to me like the very sort of game that would be well-served by an offline mode. If you google it you'll quickly see I'm not the only one who sees it that way. 

Daybreak seems to be one of the companies least likely to facilitate such a change of direction. As SOE they first had a reputation for keeping dead games online and then for mercilessly shutting them down but they've never been in the business of packaging them up for offline play. DBG has mostly concentrated on curating the games it acquired after SOE cut back the deadwood.

The upside of that downbeat projection is that they've done a pretty good job of it. DBG are MMO specialists and they seem to have the knack of keeping the games at least ticking over to the satisfaction of enough players to keep them commercially viable. If Palia is going to make it, somehow, as an MMO, they've gone to the right place. 

The question remains whether there's really enough demand for a massively multiplayer gardening game or, as Singularity Six prefers to put it, "A cozy community sim MMO for you and your friends". If I had to bet, I'd say there may be - but if there is it won't be this one. 

Still, at least now the game is under the Daybreak umbrella, it probably means I'll at least be checking in now and again to see how things are going. That'll be one more for the MAU.

Are we still counting those?

I wouldn't have said that a couple of days ago.