Daybreak Backs Expansion For Unfinished Game

Anyone remember Palia? It was going to be the Next Big Thing for a while and then, like Nightingale and so many others, people got to play it and suddenly no-one was all that interested any more.

Like many of those under-cooked, released-to-soon titles, it's been plodding along, catering, I imagine, to a small cadre of die-hards, who find in it something they can't easily get elsewhere. Along with the regulars, in these half-forgotten games there's also usually a trickle of returnees, coming back to see if anything's changed.

Well, it has. Quite a lot. In fact, Palia just got its first expansion. It's called The Elderwood and here are the bones:

The Elderwood Expansion includes an entirely new Adventure Zone, our first since we launched, which contains a whole new map filled with new content for every skill in the game, new gameplay systems for players to experience, and another chapter in our main story.

At the highest level, this update brings the following changes to the game:

• A new map, the Elderwood, a lush overgrown forest seeping with magic.
• A new chapter of our Main Story.
• A new Villager joining the cast of Palia.
• The introduction of Infected Essence, a major focus of the gathering experience in Elderwood.
• The search for Artifacts and ability to craft Relics, a new equipment type that provides buffs to not only yourself, but your party.
• New Gatherables, including a new wood type and forage you can knock down.
• Changes to mining, making Palium a more abundant resource and introducing dedicated mining nodes for Gold and Silver.
• New Huntable Creatures (and plushies!)
• New Insects, including a frog-like critter called the Rockhopper.
• New Fish, including some ferocious sharks.
• New garden crops found within the Elderwood.
• A new set of Cooking Recipes that make use of everything in the Elderwood.
• Our largest single patch of decor, including multiple new furniture sets.
• The introduction of Courier Pets to the game.
• And last but definitely not least, decor limits have increased on the housing plot from 3,000 to 3,500!

If you need more, the full - very full - patch notes are here. 

I've been looking for an opportunity to mention Palia for a while now, ever since I bookmarked this post at MassivelyOP. I've had it on the shortlist for a Grab Bag for a month (To the day, in fact.) but so far it hasn't made the cut. Today's the day.

The pull-out quote from Bree's interview with Palia's developer, Singularity 6, which she used as the title of the piece, is "Daybreak made Elderwood possible". Gee, it's just like the good old Sony Online Entertainment days, isn't it? Remember when SOE was the place old MMORPGs were put out to pasture? And then, just as they thought they were safe, "sent to the farm" when the Sony Home Office finally noticed what was going on...

Actually, did they ever buy any third-party games other than Vanguard? I know they published a few but that's not exactly the same thing.... 

Scenery looks great.
My character looks plastic.

But this is all getting a long way from the point, which is that, thanks to Daybreak stepping in, Palia isn't just plodding along any more. It's growing. A new expansion and new platforms, too. The game has been available on the Switch for a while but as of this week you can also play it on PS5 and XBox X|S. 

IGN re-reviewed it very favorably a couple of days ago, calling it "endlessly relaxing and incredibly hard to put down" so it seems to be getting fresh attention, something it certainly needs. The game currently doesn't even have enough critic reviews for a MetaCritic rating and that only takes four. 

After two years, Palia has just two professional reviews listed at the aggregator (Presumably soon tobe three if that  new one at IGN counts.) Both are for the Switch version. The PC game hasn't received a single review from a recognized critic or publication in a year and a half but then the game is still in Beta so maybe everyone's waiting for the official launch.

Which makes me wonder. Can games in Beta or Early Access get expansions? Is that possible? Isn't anything added in beta just more core content? Do any of these labels even mean even anything any more?

Don't know and frankly don't much care. Whatever it calls itself, Palia is doing okay. Better than expected, certainly. As I write, there are just under twelve thousand people playing it on Steam. The game hit its Steam peak concurrency with the launch of Elderwood two days ago - 17,508, which is five thousand more players than it got on its original opening day.

I was one of that first influx of excited players back in late 2023. Well, I was more curious than excited, I guess. I was looking forward to playing, anyway, but although I gave it a few sessions, I never really got on with the cozy sim part of the game and there wasn't a lot else going on. I could overlook the  unfinished feeling, naturally, the game being in beta and all, but it felt dull and that's much harder to forgive at any stage of development.. 

Ididn't uninstall though and I have been back once or twice, just to see if it felt any better. When I did, not much seemed to have changed, so I wasn't expecting a lot when I patched up and logged in today. I was pleasantly surprised.

I don't remember fast travel from last time I played. Sadly, still no actual horses.

I'm not going to do any kind of "Second First Impressions" on either the expansion or the game. I haven't seen enough for that. I did go to the new zone to take a look around and I even picked up a few quests there but I only played for a little under an hour and a half. And of that, at least half was spent handing in old quests, claiming the huge amount of freebies waiting in the mail and fiddling around with my house.

I do have a handful of observations to make, even so. Firstly, as you may be able to tell from the screenshots, the new zone looks radically different from the old ones. Much more dramatic, weird, colorful and fantastic. It's also very dark by comparison, although darkness is a relative term in Palia, where you can always see pretty well, even in the dead of night. 

Elderwood felt more dynamic, too. There seemed to be a lot of mobs moving around and doing things other than running away. A whole load of large salamander-like creatures kept spitting huge gobs of green goo over me for a start. Palia doesn't have any actual combat per se (As far as I know...) so it's not like I was at any risk while I was exploring but it did feel different, having monsters behaving aggressively, even if there didn't seem to be a lot of bite in their attacks.

A talking chair gives me a quest. (Actually it was a tiny piksii hiding in the upholstery.)

The whole vibe of the game felt somehow different in a way I couldn't quite pin down. I know I was only there for a short while but not once did I feel the kind of ennui that, in the past, has swept over me within minutes of logging in. 

There seemed to be a lot more to do, for one thing. I didn't have to go looking for quests or speak to everyone in town to find someone who wanted something. I picked up several quests just from examining objects in the world and I found a couple of chests that needed some climbing and scrambling to reach. 

Because I've barely touched the game since the first month, I have no idea how much of the change in atmosphere is down to the new expansion and how much come from incremental changealready in place but whatever the provenance, the game certainly feels different. It feels more alive but also more like a game. 

I don't imagine it's going to be enough to encourage me to keep logging in but that has more to do with my current disinclination to play games in general than any shortcomings in Palia itself. Based on my brief dip into the game today, though, I would say that if anyone's been thinking of giving Palia another try, this might be a very good time.

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.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

Friday grab-bag on Friday! Amazing! It was going to be a music post, mostly because I checked my files and found nearly sixty tunes queued up in there but that's going to take a deal of winnowing and I don't have the time right now. 

Then again, if I leave it, it's only going to get worse...

Never mind. On with the motley.

Nice Hat!

Speaking of motley, I got my jester's hat for completing the new Bristlebane instance three times. That was easy. The hard part is going to be figuring out who's going to wear it. You have to have a certain kind of personality to get away with a look like that and it's not the kind I like to promote in my characters. Still, I imagine there'll be someone.

Sticking with EverQuest II, how about that Producer's Letter, eh? It doesn't add a huge amount of new information to the last one but boy, does it slap some hefty content on the table. 

I've been flipping through some of the threads on the beta forum for the upcoming Game Update 125 aka Darkpaw Rising and the vibe is positive. Someone's done a rough guide to the content, which I won't link to because I think the beta forums are supposed to be Members Only, and it sounds like there's a lot. Apparently there are a couple of dozen quests and they can't all be completed in a single run through the new instance. There are more than thirty named mobs in there with drops, too.

Interestingly, there's also a tradeskill questline and some of the aforementioned named mobs require crafted items just to reach the locations where they hang out. The whole thing is set in the Splitpaw dungeon from the eponymous adventure pack that came out in 2005. That place was always a nightmare to navigate but it was also very popular. It'll be fun to go back and do it all over again but differently.

The Big News, though, has to be the new Time Limited Server coming in May. It looks disconcertingly like EQII's own version of WoW Classic, if you squint. When you look closely, though, you'll notice it isn't taking us right back to the start of the game because, frankly, the game when it began was a mess. I was there and unlike some I do not want to relive that difficult, exhausting, distressing experience.

Luckily for me, the new server is skipping right over all that and settling on the recovery that took place a year or so later, after Scott Hartsman had been parachuted in to save the game. As I remember it, things were still have pretty tough even in 2006 but the most unforgivable of the short-sighted design decisions had been reversed by then, or at least had their vicious spikes blunted and the roughest of the rough edges sanded down, so it was possible to imagine you were engaged in something that was at least intended to be entertaining.

We'll see how it stands up to my memories, although I note that a careful reading of the announcement indicates that "gameplay will be reflective of the 2006 era" (My emphasis.) so anyone expecting a perfect, note for note recreation had better keep working on that time machine.

Either way, it sounds like an opportunity not to be missed. I'll be there for the event if nothing else. I can guarantee it will be packed at launch, both with bitter vets looking to pick holes and with rose-tinted nostalgists seeking to regain their lost youth. How long any of them will stick around is another matter but WoW Classic did alright so it might work...

I Keep On Knocking...

I spent much of this morning first trying to log into and then working through the introduction of the third beta test for Once Human. Although I had no trouble downloading the new client, I had a heck of a job getting the new Netease launcher to play nice. I really dislike these Publisher Portals. They're never any better than a straightforward , dedicated game launcher and all too often worse.

While I was looking up old passwords and trying to work out what email address I used last time, I did at least manage to solve the issue of why no-one had bothered to tell me, a registered player in the last test, when, or even that, another beta was coming. Simple answer? They did send an email but it went into my spam folder. Why that happens to some emails, when other emails from the exact same address, covering almost the exact same topic don't, I have no idea but it's very annoying.

Not as annoying, however, as having to spend the best part of half an hour fiddling with settings and trying everything from Google to Discord to get the launcher to accept my login. In the end I got in via Discord, which probably means I'm now on a new account. 

That wouldn't matter much in a beta except that I believe there are thank-you freebies waiting for anyone who played in the previous test. I might still get those - I do apparently have mail waiting for me in game -  but Once Human takes a very old school stance on in-game mail. You have to go to an actual mail-box to collect it. Since the first one I know of is in a town you don't see until you're about Level 10, it might be a while before I collect whatever's waiting for me.

Wary of the proposed cut-off for making characters (Midnight tonight or after the first 150,000, whichever comes first.) I rushed through character creation as soon as I was able to get in, figuring I could always come back later and make someone I was happier with, if the first didn't work out. OH's character creation is pretty good, though, so I was able to get someone I liked well enough in a matter of minutes. Well, a quarter of an hour, which is lightning-fast for me...

Having logged in, I couldn't stop myself from playing through the excellent introduction, which doesn't seem to have changed much since last time, although I'll have to go back and read my First Impressions pieces so I can compare. I do know I had no trouble at all finding a place to set up home this time, something I remember being a right pain back in December.

After about an hour and a half I had to drag myself away to make lunch. I was very impressed with Once Human last time around and I fully expect to be even more so this time. I think it's likely to be pretty successful come launch, unless they get too fancy and over-complicate things.

Tempting, but...

The two games that occupied most of the first quarter of this year for me, Palworld and Nightingale, both dropped updates this week but I can't see either of them enticing me back, at least for the moment. 

Nightingale's was just a small patch with some bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements but one of those QoLs was pretty huge: 

"Removal of 'Death Chests': dying in 0.1.3 will now only cause loss of durability, food buffs and time. This should make death/respawning less frustrating for Realmwalkers"

Stripped of the jargon, that means no more corpse runs. Latterly, I haven't been dying much - or at all - so it's a moot point for me now but in earlier stages, getting my stuff back was a major pain. Not sure why any dev team ever imagines it's a mechanic players want. I think just about every game I've ever played that had it at the start either took it out pretty quickly or made it optional. They could save themselves a lot of grief by just leaving it out in the first place. And I say that as one of the minority that somewhat enjoys a good CR!

Palworld's update was a lot more substantive. I read the full patch notes yesterday and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, from numerous bug fixes, graphic and audio improvements to significant  improvements to gameplay. The headline though is the introduction of the game's first Raid Boss.

Unless it was mandatory, non-consensual PvP, I find it hard to think of an addition to the game that would appeal to me less than a Raid Boss. For one thing, when I was playing I was playing solo on a private shard so who would I raid with? For another, I already find the combat the least interesting thing about Palworld. Why would I want more of it but harder?

Luckily, I don't have to log in and try it out for myself to report back on what I don't like about it. I can just link to Tipa instead. As she found out, a "Raid" in Palworld doesn't require any other real players. Just you and a small army of Pals. It sounds about as much fun as those really irritating "base raids" I turned off after the first week, only not that much fun. 

I won't be picking Palworld back up to try it but I am a little more inclined to imagine a return when Pocketpair drops the big one this summer. 

 "We are planning a larger, more content-packed update for summer 2024.
Enjoy never-before-seen scenery and thrilling adventures on a new island, home to many new pals.
In addition, we plan to add a large amount of new content including new buildings, weapons, and tower bosses."

That does sound tempting, providing I can overcome my moral discomfiture with the game in general. I was a little surprised to hear they  were going to leave it that long but I imagine the runaway success of the game took them by surprise and now they're scrambling to come up with a forward plan.

Talking of moral quandaries, that other supposedly cozy, non-combat game, Palia, where I spent most of my time shooting deer, looks like it might be in trouble. The sheer number of cozy/twee/crafting/survival games flooding onto the market right now makes it hard to stand out but Palia did have a lot of positive hype pre-launch so if it's under-performing it's most likely down to the less-than-compulsive gameplay. There's cozy and then there's stultifying.

Well, It's Artificial, I'll Give You That Much

Survival games do look like the exact sort of thing you could train an AI to produce, don't they? Even as made by humans they do all have a very similar look and feel. Before long, I suspect we might look back on this time of glut as a trough not a peak.

Wilhelm posted an excellent rant on the current state of AI, which then generated a mighty comment thread full of essays and personal statements. I imagine everyone who comes here has already seen it but if not, you have a treat in store.

I thought I was done writing about AI at least until something new turned up and I was... but now it has so here we go again. I like to finish up these portmanteau posts with a tune. This time I'm going to throw in a couple I wrote myself although I guess "wrote" should be in quotes there.

I've tried a bunch of AI music generators over the last year or so and they've all been disappointing. This one is not. It's called Suno and it's terrifying.

Here's the first song I made with Suno. It's called Lazy Sunday in Seaside Gray, which is a name Suno made up, not me. I typed in "Twee/C86 style song about a slow Sunday at a decaying seaside town" and in about thirty seconds, here's what came out. 

Firstly, I was impressed it even knew what I meant by "Twee/C86". I bet most people reading this blog don't, unless they learned it from reading this blog. If you're not familiar with the genre, it sounds pretty much exactly like that.

Secondly, I was a lot more impressed by how convincing the AI was. I'm pretty sure I could make a quick video for that song from some old camcorder holiday footage, come up with a likely band name (The Wood Anemones, perhaps, or The Closed Wednesdays.) and slip it into one of my music posts and no-one would be any the wiser.

By far the weakest element is the lyrics, although I've seen plenty worse written by supposed human beings. That part gets farmed out to ChatGPT and comes back exactly like you'd expect. I believe if you subscribe, you can upload your own lyrics and just have Suno do the music and the singing, which is a service I might even consider paying for.

I've played around with it a bit since then and the results are disturbingly consistent. I didn't rate the attempt at hyperpop all that highly but the sixties' girl group and seventies' funk numbers sounded unnervingly authentic. 

You get enough free credits to make several songs a day and each prompt returns two options, one of which always seemed obviously better. You also get a nice little AI illustration to use on your imaginary record sleeve. I did try to find out more about how it all works but the makers are keeping unsurprisingly quiet about the precise details.

What's clear is that a process like this could flood the existing streaming platforms with ersatz music of every genre to the point that no-one would ever be able to find anything real again. I imagine there are guards in place to stop that. 

There must be. Right?

Here's another I made earlier and then I'll get out of your hair. 

Sign-Up Season Begins

You don't see a sign-up form for weeks and then three come along all at once...

Tarisland Revs Up

For launch. Sometime. Would be nice if we had an actual date but you can't have everything.  According to MassivelyOP we can rule out 14 June, at least. Hardly surprising since that's a Friday. When did any game ever launch on a Friday? (Cue comments listing all the famous games that did indeed launch on a Friday...)

I'm not sure I'd call June "near" but I suppose its all context. Everything is context. Since I was already registered from the closed betas last year, I wasn't sure if I'd need to "Sign Up" again but I figured it would be best to check. 

Just as well I did. I used the same email address and my application was accepted as if it was the first time Level Infinite had ever seen it so I'm guessing we're starting over as though we've never met.

I'd make some observations here about whether or not I'm likely to play Tarisland and if so how seriously and for how long but June might as well be the year 3000 as far as that goes. If I'd made book at New Year on what games I'd be playing until Easter I'd have lost my Gunsmith Cats tee. Come the launch, I could be playing anything so I'm making no promises.

That said, I did like Tarisland quite a bit. It's retro enough to feel nostalgic but modern enough not to come across as old-fashioned. It does feel a bit generic in places but it zips along and it's fun to play so why not? Also, I imagine it will be the new hotness for at least five minutes and I'd like the blog to bask in that heat, so it'd take something big to stop me at least giving it a run, I think.

Throne and Liberty Goes West

Apparently a lot of people have been angsting about not being able to play this one since the it launched in South Korea last December. I can't say I've been paying much attention although I did vaguely remember the name. Yesterday there was finally news of a playable opportunity for everyone outside the current launch region as sign-ups opened for a global closed beta starting on 10 April. 

In something of an autonomic reaction I immediately went to register but balked at having to input my Amazon account details. I'd completely forgotten the game was being published by Amazon here. While I was checking it was all legit, I discovered the beta is under NDA so that was the end of that. 

If I was desperate to play I'd have sucked it up and signed but given the only reason I was even looking at the beta was in the hope of squeezing a few blog posts out of the experience, there really wouldn't have been much point. I'll wait until they drop the NDA or go into open beta or maybe even actually launch the damn thing.

The whole thing did have the effect of making me curious about Throne and Liberty in a way I wasn't before, so at least there's that. As far as I can tell the game still has no launch window more specific than "soon". I'm wondering what the heck they need to do to it to make it ready, given it's already up and running in some territories.

I watched the trailer, flipped through the screen shots and read the description on Steam. It looks like every other imported MMORPG of the last six or seven years to me, albeit marginally prettier. My PC doesn't meet even the minimum specs but then that's true of plenty of games I play with no issues at all. I got very lucky with my CPU, it seems. It always outperforms benchmarks.

I'll give T&L a go when it comes out of NDA, anyway. It's on Steam and it's free so why not? Can't imagine I'll play for more than a handful of sessions but at least it'll give me a chance to write some First Impressions posts. I do love doing those.

Palia Steams In

Whoop, and if you'll pardon me, de-do. I mean, I'm not complaining. As we've discussed before, it's very handy to have all the games under one roof. I am a Steam convert if not actually a Steam fan. 

I haven't played Palia since... hmm. Let me check... looks like last August. If you asked me I wouldn't say I'd given up on it but I never seem to find any reason to log in. Until last night.

As soon as I saw the news, I went to Steam to download the client and... it wasn't available. I was too early! I added it to my wishlist and forgot about it... for all of five minutes, after which I got an email from Steam telling me it was available. That's what I call service!

I started the download running but what I wanted to know was whether I'd have to begin again from scratch or whether I'd be able to transfer my existing character and progress to my Steam account. I spent a good while googling that without finding any useful information at all so when the big, green PLAY button lit up I thought I'd just click it and see what would happen. 

It wasn't as though I'd gotten very far last time. Or at least I didn't think I had. I couldn't actually remember how far I had got. Anyway, starting over didn't seem like it would be much of a problem.

As it turns out it wasn't any kind of a problem at all because I didn't have to do it. You can indeed carry on from where you left off. Steam pretty much does all ther admin for you, too. A window popped up asking if I wanted to link my Steam and Singularity 6 accounts. I said I did, found my old login and password, entered them in the relevant fields and that was all there was to it. Slick and quick.

If there was a problem, it didn't come from the process. It came from the game. I can't recall the last time I logged into a game I haven't played for a while and felt my mood slump so fast. Almost from the moment I was in I wanted to leave. 

So I did. My current played time for Palia on Steam is five minutes. It may well stay that way, possibly forever. There's nothing actively wrong with Palia that I can put my finger on... I just find it stiflingly dull. 

Dull to look at and dull to play. I don't even think it's an issue with the implementation; I think it's the genre. 

According to the description on the Steam store page, Palia is a "a cozy community sim MMO made for you and your friends". I don't have any friends to play Palia with and frankly I don't want to get any. I find it hard to imagine how doing the things you can do in Palia with other people would make doing those things any more interesting than doing them alone. They just aren't very interesting to me, period, and that's an end to it.

It's not that it's the kind of gameplay I find intrinsically uninteresting. Other than the lack of combat, there's little fundemental difference between the activities on offer in Palia and those in Nightingale. There is quite a difference in the visuals and the setting, though, and it's clear that Nightingale's world appeals to me aesthetically in a way Palia's does not. Palia's world is also tiny compared to Nightingale's, which makes the explorer in me sad. 

Still, I think the real difference between them lies in the word "cozy".

I love being cozy. I like to sit in my comfy chair with the fire blazing and Beryl snoozing on the rug beside me. It's the very image of coziness. Virtual coziness, though? Is that appealing? Isn't it literally emulating on screen what I'm experiencing in real life? Don't we play to experience something different? Something thrilling, even.

I know I frequently claim I don't appreciate challenge in my games but what I mean by that is challenge that makes me tense, anxious or stressed. Challenge that falls well within my capabilities feels satisfying. Palia, from what I remember of it from last summer, manages to be both unchallenging and yet still  low-key stressful by way of its annoyingly awkward gameplay, while not providing much in the way of intellectual curiosity, emotional engagement or excitement by way of compensation

It's not so much cozy as dull, that's how I remember it and five minutes there last night brought all of that dullness back. I'm not saying I won't play it any more but I can't say I have any immediate plans. Still, it's there on Steam if I want it, now, which has to increase the chances somewhat.

Now if Once Human would just... oh, wait a moment...

Embarassment Of Riches

An actual Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday! Can it possibly be true?!

Yes, it can. As we cruise towards the end of Blaugust I have a couple of completed posts in the bank and no work to get in the way because I'm home for two weeks recuperating from my recent minor op. Consequently, I feel quite confident in throwing away a few ideas I could potentially have blown up into whole posts. 

First I Look At The Purse

Case in point: I spent half an hour last night cobbling together this awkward composite of my currency window in EverQuest II. I had it in mind to write a piece about how out of hand these special currencies can get in long-running games.

That's a lot of tokens, tickets, coins and crystals. Seventy-four, to be exact. I very much doubt I could tell you what more than half of them are for without looking it up. Whether they're even valid any more, whether the vendors who take them are still in game or whether, if they aren't, they'll be back again next year, are all questions about which I have even less of a clue.

I was thinking about it because I logged into EQII last night in the hope of doing the new quest that got added for Oceansfull this year, only to find the event finished on Tuesday. I'd been so wrapped up in Dawnlands I forgot all about it.

The end of Oceansfull also marks the end of the Summer Jubilee but the vendors are still up until the end of the month, in case you want to spend whatever tokens you still have left. I was going to do that, which is how I came to be looking at my currency window in the first place.

It occured to me that, more than most MMORPGs I can think of, EQII thrives on excess. In other games a panel like this might be considered an embarrassment; in EQII it's more of an endorsement. This, after all, is the game where damage numbers are quantified in the quadrillions. Blizzard might feel the need to squish big numbers; Daybreak just changes the notation.

The current EQII playerbase just dotes on really big numbers and vast amounts of cruft. It's absolutely alienating to incomers but who cares about them? Fortunately, as with most MMORPGs, if you don't go looking for the hidden nine-tenths of the game, you'll never even know it's there, lurking in the deep, dark waters down below. 

Speaking of which...

It's in the trees! It's coming!

Not having to deal with a huge bunch of outdated content is one reason we all gravitate towards shiny, new MMORPGs, right? It's not that they're any easier to understand but at least we can all be ignorant together. 

Once I'm in, it doesn't take much more than the lure of some new systems and mechanics to get me started but there are a lot of new games these days. In what is fast becoming a looser, sloppier genre as boundaries between MMORPGs, survival and crafting games shift and blur, there just isn't time to try all of them.

When you see a trailer like that one, though...

I imagine everyone's getting Secret World vibes but looking into it further it would seem to be a mash-up of TSW and Fallen Earth. I was a little surprised NetEase would want to go there. I mean, the whole post-apocalyptic "all the nightmares came today" routine hasn't exactly set the genre alight thus far.

The website looks slick but isn't as encouraging as you'd hope when you take a closer look. Yet again, the translation lets the whole thing down. It really is starting to bug me, the way even major players in the market seem incapable of finishing the job when it comes to editing the text. I'm pretty sure no-one would let an artist get away with a six-fingered hand so why is it okay to sign off on mismatched grammatical numeracies like these?

Build home, create team and fight monsters...

Plant, animal and human infected by Stardust will transform into disfigured monsters called Aberrant.

It's like no-one knows the differrence between singular and plural - or that there even is a difference. 

Other than a dodgy translation (And when has that ever stopped me playing anything?) the main strike against Once Human is that it seems to be a shooter. I am not keen on shooters although at least it's a third-person shooter which, if I have to, I prefer. 

The official gameplay trailer that came out a few days ago makes the whole thing look a lot less inviting than the one I embedded. It's way too dark and most of it seems to be cut-scenes not gameplay anyway but I've pre-registered and wishlisted it on Steam, anyway. We'll see what happens. 

No Secrets

For the first time since the game launched back in 2012 I declined to pre-order the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. It went live yesterday and I still haven't bought it. 

I was very amused by Paeroka's admission that she had to look up the name of the expansion before she could write her post about it. When I first heard what ArenaNet had chosen to call it, I thought it was a truly terrible name for an expansion and it really hasn't grown on me since. 

Being charitable, it sounds more like a parody than anything, but I very much doubt ANet are playing meta games with their livelihood. That leaves the distinct possibility that someone genuinely thinks "Secrets of the Obscure" is an awesome thing to call a game. If that's true, I really hope that someone is about fourteen because if they're any older it would be really embarassing...

Leaving aside the name, there's nothing much in the package that calls to me. I quite like the sound of the rifts, even if it is a feature we've seen in multiple mmorpgs already. I'm mildly curious to see what's inside the floating wizard tower. The easier access to a flying mount is overdue but welcome.

Watching the launch trailer, what really surprised me is how old the game looks. It really seems to hark back to another era. I'm so used now to cleaner, flatter surfaces with less clutter. All the extraneous detail I used to think exemplified the art team's stellar reputation now reminds me of those long, instrumental passages in prog rock epics.

GW2 looks like a very adolescent game from a team with a very adolescent outlook is what I think I'm saying. I never really noticed it while I was playing but it's hard to miss now I've had a lengthy break. Sometimes you need to go away and come back before you can see what's right in front of you. 

Tell 'Em Eda Sent You

Singularity Six certainly aren't sitting back and letting things ride since Palia's reasonably successful and passably well-received launch earlier in the month. I was quite surprised to hear about the game's first holiday event, Maji Market, which begins in just a few days. 

On the face of it, the event looks lore-appopriate, accessible and entertaining, which is pretty much all you could hope for from something like this. I hadn't been planning on going back to Palia quite yet. It's altogether too similar in some important ways to Dawnlands, which I much prefer, and also to Valheim, which would probably have been next on my list of games to revisit, following the long-awaited (By me, anyway) Hildir's Request update (Of which more later. Although not a lot more...)

I was going to wait until I heard something definite about the squashing of the "You just lost all your progress" bug, which is kind of off-putting, but this little affair looks like fun so I might risk it. The event runs for almost the whole of September, so there's no rush. 

If It Wasn't For Bad Timing I'd Have No Timing At All

Had Dawnlands not happened along, this is what I'd almost certainly be playing right now. From the moment I heard Iron Crown planned to hand control of challenge and difficulty in Valheim over to the players, I had it in mind to start a new playthrough. Later, when I recklessly charged into the Mistlands and lost not one but two corpses there, along with my best and second-best armor, I made a back-up plan to reset my original world when the update arrived, should that prove to be possible.

Now, it ought to be said that Valheim has always allowed players to get their hands on the controls the devs use. There are console commands that let you change the game in all kinds of ways. Using those is a bit like delving into regedit, though; not for the faint-hearted or fat-fingered.

The new version should be much simpler and more straightforward. Whether I have the interest or the will to start over, especially now I'm basically playing Valheim with an anime skin in Dawnlands anyway, very much remains to be seen. Valheim does strike me as one of those games you're never really quite done with so I wouldn't discount the possibility. Not going to happen for a while, though.

I would have confirmed a few more of the details on this entry only Steam seems to have choked on the download and it's looking as if I might need to uninstall and reinstall Valheim before I can check it out for myself. That's definitely not happening today.

At this point, which is the end of the post, traditionally I'd slip in a music video. As it happens, one of those stashed Blaugust posts I mentioned right at the top is my latest "What I've Been Listening To Lately" collection and I pretty much threw everything good in there. 

Give me a minute. I'm sure I can come up with something... ah, ok, here... how about...

Real Life - Art School Girlfriend

That should do it. All good now? Okay, then.

Bye!

My Time At Palia

*** 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 had been planning on posting some more about Dawnlands today but instead I've decided to get this post out of draft before it dries up and blows away. There's still some juice in it but bear in mind 

• 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.

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.

And I don't really want Palia all to myself, either. The thing is, at the moment is it feels so much like playing Portia, I forget I'm even online. Every time I run into someone when I'm out exploring it feels as though there's an intruder in my private garden. It's disturbing and I don't like it.

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...

The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game

In the same post that inspired yesterday's ramblings on magic and realism (Damn! That's what I should called the bloody thing!) Tipa makes a potent argument against hunting in Palia. Using EverQuest as an example to describe what is surely the gameloop of most MMORPGs, she neatly sums up the entire genre in a sentence: "all anyone really wants to do is kill stuff."

We could easily consider ourselves entitled to expect more from a self-described "cosy" game than the usual indiscriminate slaughter and yet the repeated, rote killing of wildlife is very much a core activity in Palia, just as it is in the huge majority of fantasy or science-fantasy titles. (Palia is very definitely science-fantasy, by the way.)

Hunting is one of the eight available Skills in the beta, the ones you can "Focus" to level up. The full roster comprises foraging, mining, insect catching, gardening, hunting, furniture making, cooking, and fishing. 

It's notable that, while hunting is there in the list on the official website's Skills page, it doesn't get a mention anywhere in the introduction on the landing page. I guess it's covered, generically, by "Live off the land any way you like" but the words "hunt" or "kill" are nowhere to be found.

Once you step inside the game itself, however, there's no such coyness. Hunting is introduced in the tutorial along with all the other skills. You're sent to speak with the stereotypically gruff and suspicious huntsman, Hassian, a moody fellow with a distinctly dark-elven look about him, although his grimdark demeanor is heavily undercut by his cute, blue wolf companion, Tau. 

Despite his disdainful manner, Hassian wastes no time in giving you a bow and arrows and sending you off to kill some animals. He's not particularly bothered which ones although when you return with the evidence he's quick to take you to task for killing deer or, rather, Sernuk which, for no obviously good reason, is what deer are called in Palia.

Deer are indigenous to the area and to be treated with respect, apparently, unlike the Chapaa, for which Hassian has no time at all. He clearly considers the small, cute-looking creatures to be an invasive species and he's more than happy for you to kill as many as you like. All of them, if at all possible.

But of course, it's not possible. Palia follows the rules of almost every MMORPG since Ultima Online's famously disastrous experiment in quasi-realistic ecology which, back before the turn of the century, led players gleefully to instigate the genre's first extinction event. You can kill as many chapaa as you like; there will always be more.

Chapaa are very easy to kill. They sit up like rabbits and sniff the air, just waiting to be popped. I started by killing them but before long I was killing Sernuk instead. Sernuk are considerably harder to hit (Pro tip: always shoot them as they come towards you, not from the side.) but they drop hides when killed that can be turned into leather and leather is what I needed to make my hang-glider.

Already, as you can see, the seeds of destruction are being sown. Palia may advertise itself as a cosy game with no combat but death there is as much a part of life as in any other survival game or MMORPG. I won't go so far as to say if you don't kill, you don't eat, because you can eat mushrooms if you like, but if you don't kill you won't fly, that's for sure.

The thing about killing, though, as many a serial-killer will attest, is once you start, you find it hard to stop. You get a taste for it, you know?

Hunting in Palia is one of the more enjoyable versions of the sport I've encountered. You have to aim your bow. There's no auto-targeting. If you miss, your prey flees. If you get too close, it spooks. Sernuk gallop off into the distance; chapaa burrow into the ground.

I found chapaa easy prey from the start but Sernuk were hard. At first I was lucky to kill two or three with a stack of twenty arrows. I persisted, not because I needed the pelts but because I was enjoying myself. Now, several sessions later, my hunting skill is closing on level five and on my last hunt I killed eighteen Sernuk with twenty arrows.

Here's the thing. I've seen quite a few people already complaining that there's not a whole heck of a lot to do in Palia. I'm curious about that. There are those eight skills to raise to level ten. There are all of the villagers to ingratiate yourself with. There's a story to follow. There's your house to build and a largeish number of recipes to gain and craft.

It seems like a lot to me. At the rate I'm progressing, I imagine it would take me a few months to run through all of that and I'm fairly confident Singularity 6 will have added something more for me to do by then. It seems to me that there's plenty to do in Palia - if you don't mind doing much the same thing over and over and over again and if you only play for an hour or two each day.

The question for me doesn't seem to be so much "is there enough to do?" as "is it amusing or entertaining?" and I'm guessing that's where the problem lies. For me, so far, Palia's scoring higher than expected on that index. It's not that it's offering me anything new - it categorically is not. It's that the familiar activities have been implemented in a way that makes them intrinsically enjoyable.

Hunting is a great example. As we've agreed, almost all games of this kind send you out to slaughter the local wildlife, often ad infinitum. It's the ones that make doing so engaging in and of itself, not just for the numbers-go-upness of it all, that make you feel like taking a half hour extra just to go kill some more critters.

For me, at this stage at least, hunting hits something of a sweet spot. I'm getting better at it but not just because my in-game skill has gone up - my player skill has improved as well. And it feels satisfying. It feels very much like when I was in my teens, spending hours throwing darts at a dart board. You practice, you get better. Hitting what you aim at is fun.

Cooking in Palia is marginally similar. Making vegetable soup involves a mini-game where you chop vegetables as the pot simmers and you have to get them done in time to throw them in before the stock is spoiled. Probably other recipes will require similar hands-on application. 

That's all very well and I did enjoy it but somehow you just know dicing up a mushroom is never going to be as much fun as hitting a moving target with an arrow. I don't believe the target needs to be a living creature but it has to be something you can creep up on and surprise and for a developer, wild animals just fit the bill too neatly to ignore, I guess.

In a game as supposedly "cosy" as Palia all that slaughter does pose a problem. It doesn't help that the animals you're offered as targets are either cute or shy or terrified of you or all three at once. I can see where some people coming to this game specifically for its niceness might have a problem with that.

There is a workaround for the bow-shy and it's an odd one. I'm not even sure if it's a feature or a bug. When I was out hunting yesterday there were at least three other players doing the same thing in the same spot and I began to wonder why they didn't seem to be picking up the drops from the Sernuks they killed. 

I also began to wonder if you could pick up other peoples' loot in this game. I've never been averse to a bit of scavenging in an MMORPG but I didn't want to make it look like I was poaching, so I waited until I saw someone kill a deer and run off, obviously not intending to come back, then I sidled over and picked up the bag they'd left behind.

That was how I got most of my pelts yesterday. I must have looted a dozen, at least. It seemed crazy so many people weren't interested in their loot, especially because in Palia your hunting skill only ticks up when you press F to collect the drop, not when the creature expires. If they didn't want the loot or the xp, why were they killing them at all?

Eventually I came to the conclusion that it had to be part of the "shared loot" system I'd read about somewhere. I knew that players could engage in activities and all get the same rewards but I'd assumed they'd need to be grouped together in some formal fashion. It seems not. It very much looks like as long as you hang around there or thereabouts in the same place as someone who's hunting, you'll be entitled to the same share of the kill as they are.

Way to go to spread responsibility for your actions! It adds a whole new moral dilemma to the process. Is it just as bad to share in the spoils as it is to fire the killing arrow or is it perfectly fine because the deer was going to die whether you picked up the loot or not?

Honestly, I don't care. There very much was a time when I would have cared.  I might even have kept myself awake at night worrying about it. I took this sort of thing very seriously when I first played EverQuest. 

Too bloody seriously, I realise now. I'm less intense now. And less crazy.

It's still an interesting wrinkle in a complicated fabric of intent, all the same. Hunting does seem like an odd choice for a game like Palia but a glance at Hassian's stock (His high moral tone is somewhat undermined by his willingness to make a profit selling hunting gear to anyone with the coin to spend.) reveals it's no after-thought.

I was very surprised to see you can buy arrows that "disrupt the magical abilities of powerful creatures" and a Hunter's Horn that "allows you to track rare creatures". That suggests we won't just be hunting a few deer for pelts to make leather; we'll be making something of a career out of it. Just like Hassian has.

In a game that otherwise offers very little in the way of action, perhaps it was predictable, if not inevitable, that we'd end up hunting something. The non-lethal smoke bombs that stun the insects you can collect and keep in terrariums in your home seem more in keeping with the cosy concept than copper-tipped arrows. On balance, though, I'm quite pleased the developers let a little of their bloodlust seep through.

It's not that I have anything against the cuddly little critters, you understand. It's just that it's so much fun when they run...