Well, I meant to spend a bunch of my free time last weekend getting through as much of Dragon Age: Origins as I could, since that is my book club assignment for the month of August (we’ve had to shuffle some things around a bit due to us both being busy). Instead of doing any amount of that, though, I wound up getting back into Palia again. Super heavily. Hours upon hours, most of which was spent blasting through quests, digging back into building and decorating my house, investigating all the fun new features that have been introduced since I last played in April, and spending some real-world money on the game so I could experience a little bit of video game-based gender euphoria (or at least as close as I can get to that, given to my general lack of feelings on the matter). It was a bit more than I probably should have spent, but I decided to just use my July video game budget and take the rest out of my “fun big purchase” account (which is slowly beginning to recover from buying my new gaming PC). Also, I played it for the first time on maximum settings and the game looks so much better when everything is dialed all the way up. It’s a really fun, gorgeous little game. Well, little for now. It has grown a lot in the year since I started playing and all signs point toward it continuing to grow. I’m not sure how fast that growth will happen given that my current sense of it is skewed by being away for four months, but it feels like it has been pretty fast.

The potential for playing with your friends is still one of my favorite parts of the game. It’s so easy to link up with people and the game has changed to encourage grouping up more than ever since I stopped playing in April. Now, there’s XP bonuses for being near allies, better loot drops for collecting things (sometimes, anyway, since it isn’t a constant thing but more of a “critical hit” type thing that happens occasionally), and an even better system of shared loot dropping (again, based largely on proximity). Now, all you need to do is hang out near your friends when they catch something, harvest something, or drop something and a little loot icon will appear on your screen, telling you there’s something for you to pick up. Everybody gets a cut now, even if you didn’t swing the tool yourself. Which might make for some uneven early resource gathering since you can (hypothetically, since none of the people I play with are in any of the earlier tool tiers) just let your more experienced friends do all the work of breaking resources for you to collect, but since most of the production of turning those raw resources into workable materials is gated behind skill growth, recipe collection, and good financial management, it doesn’t completely break the game. It probably speeds up the early stages of the game, but I think that’s a good thing. No one wants to be stuck in the low levels, broke as hell, for terribly long. Even if it feels a little bit cheat-y to follow people around and pick up stuff they’ve gathered, it’s still better than counting your gold to see which tool you can afford to upgrade or if you have to wait for a new recipe because your tools are too busted to carry on and you need that money to pay for long-delayed repairs.

The NPCs and your character’s situation in the world are still my favorite part of the game, though. The NPCs have gotten even more lively while I’ve been gone, with new levels of friendship to explore, new dialogue options, and even some dialogue throughlines that they will return to, referencing answers you’ve given previously. There’s always been some of those (at least while I’ve been playing), but the new ones seem more complex and nuanced in interesting ways. Given that I’ve only played for a weekend at this point, there’s still a ton for me to find and explore (especially since I still have a lot of NPC relationships to deepen), but I really like what I’ve seen so far. It is making me genuinely interested to putter around the game again, a feeling I haven’t had about a game in a while. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy the other games I’ve been playing, just that I always feel like I need a mission or a reason to play. Palia, though, is just fun to exist in, the way Animal Crossing used to be, and the way Breath of the Wild still often is (though the 600ish hours I’ve spent on that have left me more interested in spending my time elsewhere, even if I still deeply love that world). Plus, Palia keeps adding new friendship levels, quests, and content to the game. Sure, some of it is gated behind some grindy work (fishing for rare fish is the bane of my existence and enough to send me dozing off after the first fifteen minutes have passed), but most of it is pretty fun and predicated on just exploring the world or becoming friends with the characters in the game.

I’m not sure what the future holds for Palia, given that it has the hallmarks of a long-running online game. There’s all kinds of rumors about it and my tendency to participate and let things come to me (as far as video games go, anyway) rather than seek out every scrap of news I can get my hands on means that I don’t really know anything beyond the rumors and the speculation of my friends who play the game. There’s plenty of in-game implication that other areas will open up, that some kind of plot is developing, and that new characters will continue to be occasionally introduced, but there’s really no knowing how long the runway is on this game. Eventually, the developers will let it go and it will coast until it gets taken down due to server and code maintenance costs being higher than any revenue it generates, but that will hopefully be quite a few years down the line. With the way the video game industry is going, though, there’s no telling what might happen. It’s entirely possible a larger studio or publisher will offer them enough money to sell, bring the company under their wings, lay off half to two-thirds of the staff, and then shut the game down abruptly when it stops performing as well as it did when it was properly cared for. Which is a bleak version of the future to envision, but given the number of layoffs in the industry since the start of 2023, it feels foolish to not consider it. Still, given the pace of the game and the constant if not viral attention the game gets, I’m hopeful that it will continue to run for years to come. It’s always fun, after all, to look back on games several years down the line and remember where you where way back when you first started playing it.