After a week in closed beta, cozy MMO Palia is entering its open beta phase today, welcoming everyone into its online life sim of gathering, gardening, and decorating. It's been a hectic week for the developers, who have been combating server issues all throughout the closed beta. Despite that, Singularity 6 is pushing its free-to-play game out into the public today with promises to continue working on fixes to the issues players have been experiencing.
The developers have been delivering server status updates to their Discord community over the past week, acknowledging issues like crashing, queue times, long load screens, and downtime for server maintenance. Some players were experiencing blocked progress, missing tools, and getting trapped on their housing plot. House arrest isn't really my idea of cozy, even with those bright blue skies.
"In the last seven days, we conducted a total of five hotfixes as our team tirelessly worked to solve as many impacting our Palians as we could," Singularity 6 said in its Discord today. "We won't deny that there are plenty of issues that still need to be resolved. And we won't deny the Palians who are still stuck, missing items, or otherwise are unable to play."
I was able to log in, start a new character, and hit the town without any issues today. I even ran into a friend of mine purely by happenstance, which is a pretty auspicious start to an MMO in my book. She had a bit more lag while leaving the tutorial area than I did and a brief encounter with a thousand-member queue that was resolved by exiting and reloading the game.
I spent a week mining, chore-ing, and decorating in Palia last month and it gave me high hopes for the future of cozy MMOs. It's set in a cute fantasy world and has done a nice job with the gathering and crafting rotation that's kept me busy. I'm still harboring hopes that the world itself will become more persistent with something like a world events system or other timed events, but that will have to wait until after the servers are well settled.
You can download the launcher by creating an account on Palia's website and play for free. Singularity 6 has not yet given a full launch date, but, last we heard, is expecting to launch on the Nintendo Switch this holiday season which is probably a decent hint.
