I think when I really want to like a game, I'm way harsher on it than if it's just not my game.
Palia is an MMO that doesn't want to be one.
The NPCs have to stay on their routes on the map(s) they are allowed to be on. They'll delay a bit for talking to players but by and large they have a schedule and they stick to it.
And it really undercuts every single quest I get to look for an NPC who is standing 10 meters away. Because they can't not be there. But the story is trying to tell me that Chayne must have died and I track him down... standing in the tavern next to the guy who was concerned about him. Hassian sent me to find his dog, that was standing right next to him while he gave me the quest.1
@toyourstations has a post that dives into a lot more details about the weird world, and where it intersects with my ramble here is when they talk about the changing of state due to, say, Chayne actually dying of old age or the players getting married since romancing the NPCs is a thing.
I've seen the changing state in an MMO before. Star Trek Online had a massive rewrite/retcon that tied most of the original storylines into a larger epic culminating in a large scale war. One major milestone of this plot line -- which you can still play through, it wasn't an Event -- was the attack on Starfleet's Earth Space Dock (ESD) which resulted in it being exploded. A fantastically diegetic way to replace the old ESD with one that is much more streamlined for use as a hub world. But it works over there because if you come in fresh you can play through that plot line, and see the old thing, and run through it2, and largely not worry about the timeline.3
But that worked because:
- it was a location
- you can still go through the plot
- and therefore see the old location
- up to you if you're okay with a wibbly floating timeline since you were in the new hub before doing said plot, but it's not really a huge deal (you certainly don't spend as much time on it doing as many tasks as Palia's town, for instance)
In Palia you're sharing the world, and its state, with everyone else on the instance you happen to be on. So we have situations like this:
- whenever someone meets you at your plot -- or anywhere outside their Routine -- they are simultaneously also wherever they normally would be, because they can't be not there
- during the Night Market event, the event appeared to be sharing the same zone chat as the main town map; if it's the same map, then everyone at the market is also simultaneously in town, on the same map, as opposed to existing simultaneously on two maps.4
- the biggest freaking polycule is forming with NPC relations and you don't even know who the others are
At the start they lampshaded the idea that lots of new humans were incarnating lately, and it's periodically alluded to since, but none of the things you'd expect from a few grillion humans popping into existence outside a small town of like, I dunno, 24 people including the doggo.
I feel like I'm running around a singleplayer game that has weird co-op mechanics stapled on top of it and some knowledge that it isn't singleplayer, but can't bring itself to fully embrace the idea.
It's supposed to be a social game, but a lot of people act like they Do Not Want Help. On average, people seem to want to play alone or with established friends only. I was playing tonight and most of the call-outs for the flow trees were followed by kind of bitter or even nasty comments about how they weren't going to join in, which is quite the change in how it went only a couple weeks ago.
I know it's "only beta"5, but it seems like it should have been at most a self-hosted co-op game. Conan Exiles has numerous flaws6, but they have self-hostable private servers and still managed to sell costumes.
I guess we'll see where it goes. But the more I keep playing, the more it's feels like it's clashing with what it wants to be, and what it is.
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Which, I'll admit, he is a special case where on average he is not with his dog: they tend to desync due to player interactions stalling him.
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Admittedly, more on fire than when it was the hub map.
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There's too much time travel anyways.
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Which does happen, when Hassian is delayed from changing maps by player interactions, you can race him over to the next map and once you're there he'll already be wherever he should be in his routine, barring any delays from interactions on that map.
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Which, given the history of free-to-pay7 MMOs, means nothing. I've played many that were beta a decade ago, and I don't know if any of them ever stopped being beta and implemented the features teased in their original pre-rendered hype trailers.
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Besides the baggage that comes from being derived from Conan source material, I mean.
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No, I did not accidentally a letter.