Anybody playing Palia, a "cozy MMO"?

Been playing since the closed beta, and I'm enjoying it. Runs very smooth for a beta, even on low-end machines.

It's a trade-skill grinder with personal housing and a simplistic story/questing system. I have built myself a big house and I farm crops every day. Community is 100% friendly.

The game has definite room for growth. Needs more mystery and less repetitive collecting.

Although I'm interested (I have been since I found out about it), I like to wait for games to have a full release. An additional few months for an MMO because if I'm going to commit to something so time consuming, I would like to make sure that it isn't abandoned too early (by the developers or the community). I'm already short on time as is. Putting so much time into something only to have the servers shut down or the world become empty just when I'm starting to make progress would hurt quite a bit. I don't mind a small community in an MMO, as long as it's stable enough to continue progressing.

I must admit my experience with MMOs and their communities have made me stay away from the genre in general but this looks really cool and refreshingly different. I guess as long as they don't introduce raiding and robbing other players, it should remain rather friendly too.
I may give it a try since I am done with Stardew Valley.

I can't remember where I heard of it first, but I've been waiting for its release for quite a while. Then it came out... and I was too busy to play ;_; Maybe after my game subs run out...

Been playing it. Started recently and really enjoy it. Nice cozy and relaxing game ^0^/

Money is a bit slow to earn but do not have that much of a gripe with it. Like the relaxing exploring and gathering recourses. Servers are in USA I believe, so have it sometimes that in Maji Market event I get outpinged by people who appear to be behind me xD

But overall a lovely game. Love the artstyle. Also, friendly community from what I have seen so far. Calling out rare resources. And if I had a question, it got answered. Some guy also took the time to help me with the quest location.

I played for a while and my main gripe is that it is way too time consuming/tedious to earn enough money. Some of the ores that you need are also very hard to come by. I love a good grind in a game, but this one felt like much too much of it for too little payoff. Apparently when you get further into the game, especially w/ farming, earning becomes less of an issue, but I didn't have the patience to hunt deer for hours and hours in order to get to that point. They just released a limited time event and I have read similar complaints about the amount of gold/grind it will take to finish it. The multiplayer is also a bit lackluster and makes it difficult to team up spontaneously in game (no proximity chat). I may pick it up again someday if they did some serious balance adjustments, but for now there's other cozy games I'd rather play (Wylde Flowers, Cornucopia, the upcoming Fae Farm).

Speaking of Cozy MMO, Im excited about this one. Never delved in the genre, but this game is too beautiful.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2325290/Sky_Children_of_the_Light/

I have been playing the game since the last wave of Alpha version in June 2023. The characters are fleshed out and have contextual depth for players to learn about them; there is even an ominous feeling to the world of Palia from reading notes and character dialogues that is not directly presented. Fetch quests appear in the game as daily items the NPCs want from the players to increase friendship and/or romance which do not interfere with the slightly different main quests that so far are puzzle-based. Other MMOs that I have played in the past mix main story quests with fetching items. A particular MMO that I fondly remember being guilty of this is Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean Online that shutdown in 2013. I would be be helping Jack Sparrow recruit pirates to maintain the Black Pearl by.... winning 1000 gold in blackjack or sink 10 East India Trading Company warships because of flimsy reasons. Objectives that feel like busy work rather than have specific relations to the overall story is a mood-killer for any MMO that I want to enjoy. Ending with that tangent, I am pleased to see the Palia dev team. Singularity 6, having selective judgement of what constitutes a main quest with lore substance. The writers are trying to add new lore while keeping it relatable to the existing lore set in the game.

World activities that exist in Palia are the basic foundations seen in other cozy RPGs such as My Time in Portia and Stardew Valley. Players can expect fishing, farming, mining, and crafting in a low-stress game environment. Palia does have more focus on customizing the player's own land plot and house with decorations. My biggest complaint in the activity department is although Palia is described as an MMO, the weakest part of the game is interaction with other players. Everyone is doing their own thing within the different open world zones. Group activities are lacking to motivate players to work together toward a common goal with the exception of weekly quests that reward tokens such as for chopping down a tree, cooking a meal, or fishing next to each other. Larger, more frequent events like a community festival is yet to be seen although Palia did receive a first community event called the Maji Market last week. Most of my experience was working by myself with others around me also doing their own work without outside help.

I played for a bit but it's unnecessarily grindy and lacks in options and the atmosphere gave me a bad vibe overall so no.

A friend pointed this out to me and I suggested it to another friend for once we beat a possible mp farming game xD

Palia is cute but it's not really an MMO, it's more like a single-player game with social aspects. Like Portia but with limited co-op.

It's really limited in terms of worldspace and stuff to do; there's only 2 small area maps, and if you don't like the endless grind in the first 15 minutes, you won't like the rest of the game because it's all just more of the same. There's farming, mining, foraging, bug catching, fishing and cooking minigames, house decorating, lots of fetch quests and later on, weekly achievements, but it all basically boils down to grinding daily meters for incremental progress.

The traversals and movement are kind of janky, lots of getting stuck on collisions, invisible walls, and strange stamina inconsistencies. Like how you can sprint forever but can only climb for about 15 seconds before falling, and you can glide forever but can't swim at all. Any contact with deep water teleports you to the nearest safe shore.

That said, the game is F2P, with only some overpriced optional cosmetics that aren't overly-aggressively marketed. The sound, art and animations are incredibly well polished, like AAA levels, and the snippets of voice acting are pretty good. There's no real limit on how long you can play, no mobile game trappings like p2w currency or 'daily energy meters.' It's the kind of game you could safely let a 6 year old play. It's not BAD, it's just slightly small and tedious and needs way more content to really be any sort of contender.

Not sure about the MMO part but do you know if you can change your race or is everyone just human? the cat-pet is cute but I don't see or know of anything about this farming sim that makes it stand out from the others.