Marketed as a free-to-play cozy MMO, Palia presents a fun wholesome aesthetic that’s basically Stardew Valley with an internet connection. Players can farm, cook, build homes, hunt bugs, and befriend a colorful cast of characters who reveal a complex, multidimensional post-human world. You can even strike up romances with a few of the characters or help to pair them off with each other to a limited degree. However, behind the cozy facade lies a grind-heavy horror of tedious repetition and artificial scarcity.
Leaning heavily on time-gating, RNG mechanics, and progressively rarer material being needed in higher and higher quantities to complete quests, the game was clearly built with a grind in mind. A game getting harder the longer you play isn’t news. If there wasn’t a continued challenge, people wouldn’t play, so players likely expect Palia to be designed to drive habitual engagement. That’s why games have weekly challenges, like gifts for NPCs or bonuses for hunting particular items any given day. Another problem is the monetization model lurking in the background.
Of course, Palia doesn’t hide that there are in-game purchases. If you want any of the best-looking outfits or home decor, you have to spend money to get in-game currency which isn’t otherwise available. An entire NPC exists to constantly encourage players to revamp their wardrobe by spending money in game. Is Jel one of the best characters based on his Victorian glamor design? Yes. Is his friendship with the endearing Tish and his new potential romance with Reth something that has drawn me to play almost daily after the grind had me slowly losing interest since completing the Elderwood artifact hunt and all current quests? Yes.
But pay-for-aesthetics is vastly different from play-to-win mechanics. Rare and epic items are far more frequently found and collected by those who have spent money on extras than those who keep to the free items. If you’ve made it to the Elderwood, I’d suggest striking up a conversation as it is frequently discussed whenever someone needs a black pearl or the Inyrevn mermaid. From what I’ve gathered, the average non-paying player has a 1 in 500 chance of getting the mermaid, assuming that they have all the right tools and are fishing in the right spot at the right time. Comparatively, players who have bought Palia coins and spent them have a more like 1 in 100 chance with some even claiming to have only fished 20-30 times and pulled multiple. While this could be just the luck of the draw, the regularity with which paying players find rare and epic items compared to non-paying players is heavily leaning toward abnormal.
If you play with a friend and one of you has spent money and the other hasn’t, you’ll likely be more aware of the difference in the frequency for rare items. As players can gift items in game, there’s ways to work around the issue, especially with the community itself generally being more on the generous side; however, it would be nice if the developers owned up to the frequency variation between before and after you’ve spent money in game. By all means, give advantageous to those who support your efforts financially. Gaming is an industry. Most gamers aren’t going to fault folks earning a living but be honest about it. Heck, if they varied the states between outfits and advertised them as modifiers, they’d probably sell even more.
If you don’t want to spend money, Palia can still be a fun game, but you will be grinding in the later quests unless you request items of other players. It’s up to you whether you want to spend, grind, or interact, but players should go into the game with open eyes.
Do you play Palia? If you’ve made an in-game purchase, let us know if you noticed a difference in rare item frequency before and after. Share your thoughts and join the conversation on Boss Rush Network’s Discord and Facebook.
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