Building A Cozy Sim MMO

The servers are getting warm, the tea is heating up, and Kilima Village is preparing to welcome you into the Palia Closed Beta tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. PT. On the eve of Beta, we wanted to share a little more on why we created Palia, how you can engage with the world, and what we aspire to achieve as we bring this game to you.

TL;DR

• Palia is a community sim game at heart
• Palia is an interconnected world where players can play solo or with friends
• Palia aims to blend cozy sim and MMO elements to brings the community and players together

A Community Sim at Heart

Palia is our team's love letter to the community sim genre, born from a collection of personal experiences farming, fishing, and mining across many of these games.

We brought these familiar and beloved mechanics, added our own little spin to them, giving you a fresh and unique new experience for this genre. We started by creating this riveting new world with a rich storyline (that starts with you!) to give you an increased sense of immersion, freedom, and exploration.

Humble Beginnings

Your first adventure in Palia begins in the quiet and quaint little town of Kilima Village. As all of you (newly formed humans!) start appearing in Palia, this charming village and its townsfolk will warmly welcome you in. Humans can get overwhelming sometimes (as we all know…) so it was important for us to get the balance of villagers to players right, to match the cozy experience we’re aiming for.

We envisioned the entirety of Palia to be a vast and wondrous place. As we open up our world in the future, there might be new areas which will feel more densely populated and teeming with people, such as a bustling main capital city* or a busy port town*. It’s important for us to match the fantasy and intended gameplay of the space, while still keeping the cozy vibe that is unmistakably Palia.

Note: these are not confirmations of future locations!

An Interconnected World

Most of the time, you’ll find yourself in the same world as your friends, along with others who you might serendipitously come across. Our goal is to allow you to play alongside anyone currently online. In the event you are not in the same world, you can always ask them to invite you over, or invite them to where you are.

We want to make it easy for people to meet and play together. This is why we wanted to remove as many boundaries as we can: from making this game free-to-play, not locking you to any specific server, working towards cross-play for future platforms, and having one of our core game pillars be fun solo but better with friends. We hope that this approach can foster stronger and lasting communities.

Something Known, Something New

We found that cozy sim games have created a deep sense of community within their own worlds, even as solo experiences! From lovingly crafted lore and villager backstories, to fighting against mega corps – these games exuded that neighborly charm we strive to recreate in Palia.

Now imagine if we could capture that same feeling, and then elevate it by putting that in a shared world that can play host to you and your friends? This is why we wanted to make Palia an MMO.

MMOs just have a way of bringing people together. The most memorable experiences in gaming we’ve had are often not the games themselves, but the friends we’ve met, made, and kept along the way.

We know we are doing something different. We are not a traditional MMO, nor do we aspire to be. Heck, we’re still trying to figure out what a cozy sim MMO is! What we do know for sure is that, for us, what we’re building is all about you as our players, and the community that we can help bring together.

The Adventure is Just About to Begin

As Aidan said in his letter — the best version of Palia is always going to be ahead of us.

Palia will have an evolving world story, featuring an epic fantasy adventure that will take years to unravel. This will include learning about the rich history of the world, finding out what really happened - and eventually, you becoming part and parcel of the people, the world, and the story of Palia itself.

What’s coming tomorrow is only the beginning. We hope that when you join us in the beta, that you’ll love it as much as we loved making it, and help us make it the best it can be. And who knows? Maybe this new cozy world might just be exactly what you need.

Saying goodbye to the Stress Test - Screenshot by Juna / Syren