Welcome back, Palians, to the Fall’s Faire edition of the Palia Path Roadmap! It’s been quite a while since we last took a stroll down the “The Path,” and we’ve got plenty to share about what’s arriving this fall, what’s coming soon, and what we’re building toward for the future of Palia.
Our Director of Production, Maxwell Zierath, returns with a look at new ways to come together as a community, fresh stories and relationships, more ways to express yourself and share your creativity, and a few bigger ideas taking shape behind the scenes.
With autumn nearly here, let’s get the Faire underway!
The Fall’s Faire Palia Path Roadmap video covers a lot of ground, so we’ve harvested it all up for you here:
Fall’s Faire: Petals & Portraits (Patch 0.206)
Fall’s Faire kicks off with Petals & Portraits, bringing new stories, new ways to collaborate with Palians around the world, expanded customization, a new Home Line, Photo Mode improvements, and more. Here’s a peek at what’s falling into place:
Civic Project: Kilima Docks
Taylin Friendship Quests
Lunar Path: Path of the Great Sage
Queen Ushindi Home Line
Player Titles
New Eyebrow & Eyelash Customization
Photo Mode Free Cam
Expanded Server Player Counts
…and more!
We’ll dive into greater detail in the Petals & Portraits patch notes, but one of the biggest additions arriving this season is Civic Projects, a new type of shared global quest where Palians everywhere can work together toward a common goal. Our first project begins close to home: Ashura will rally the community to rebuild Kilima’s long-neglected docks by crafting and contributing supply kits. Complete the project with Palians from around the world, and you’ll permanently open a new route directly to the Royal Highlands, while earning individual rewards for your own contributions along the way.
Before we look further down The Path, we want to address the Ormuu in the room. Recently, Palia has experienced more game-impacting bugs and crashes than any of us would like. We know how frustrating it is when a bug gets between you and the game you want to play, and we’re not satisfied with those experiences either.
We want to continue pushing Palia forward with new features, improvements, and experiences. Sometimes that requires significant changes to the systems underneath the game. One example is our ongoing work to make Palia feel more populated and social. Starting with Petals & Portraits, Home Plots can support up to 30 players, while larger spaces such as the Royal Highlands can support up to 50 players at once. We’re continuing to optimize the game around these increased player counts while also improving collaborative experiences such as Chapaa Chase.
Changes like these inevitably introduce some risk. Our teams put every update through multiple rounds of testing, but Palia is a large game played across many platforms, configurations, playstyles, and behaviors. This complexity makes it difficult to predict what could go wrong, even on the best of teams, and unfortunately several of our recent issues involved scenarios that only became visible once an update was live and exposed to the full scale of the Palia Community.
To share an example of this, in Patch 204, those of you who play on controller might remember an issue where the game would “freeze” and your input would no longer respond. Our team immediately jumped to begin trying to reproduce the issue in our test environments. But after several hours we still had nothing; so we jumped onto live and began trying to see if we could mimic what players were reporting. It took less than 20 minutes, which was both great and discouraging. Then came an extensive, multi-day effort to connect development builds up to live, profile and debug in real time on live servers trying to catch the issue and figure out exactly what was causing inputs to stop responding.
Eventually it led us to find that the UI element for Player Titles was the culprit. That’s right - the same Player Titles that are launching in 206 were causing trouble all the way back in 204 despite being hidden from view. The UI element was set to be activatable, which normally wouldn’t be an issue. However, because Player Titles live above a player’s head in the world rather than attached to the edge of your screen, our normal UI layer settings didn’t have control over this one. That meant you could be in dialogue with an NPC, but if another player ran by you, your controller may secretly try to focus on that hidden Player Title. Talk about a confusing experience. The fix was easy, a simple checkbox, but finding it was a multi-day affair trying to figure out why UI would lose focus in some instances. And although our QA team does check in-development features, including Player Titles, to ensure they’re not accidentally accessible, specific case required behaviors that really only come up with many different players pursuing many different things simultaneously.
This context isn’t being given to create an excuse. We want to catch more of these problems before they ever reach you and we’re currently working on improving our development processes and building additional tools that can help us identify a wider range of issues before launch, while also strengthening our ability to diagnose and respond when something does go wrong.
There will always be some risk involved in evolving a live game as large as Palia, but we believe continuing to improve and expand the game in tandem is important to Palia’s future. We also know that progress only matters if Palians can reliably enjoy all the new content.
In short – we’re working on improving both fronts.
Looking Ahead
Petals & Portraits is only the beginning of Fall’s Faire. You can expect the spooky Spiritfest-themed Frights & Delights (Patch 0.207) in October, while we give thanks in the Hearty Homecoming update (Patch 0.208) landing in November.
Slated for winter, we’re working on several new experiences that expand Palia’s lore, creativity, and the ways you can choose to play, including telling the next chapter of Palia’s main story, where you can explore themes around sacrifice, guilt, responsibility, and what it really means to share someone else’s burden.
We’re also working on shared housing design features, where players group items together on their Home Plot, save their design and placement, then share that creation for other Palians to discover and use.
We know many of you have asked for ways to enjoy Palia exclusively with your closest friends. We’re experimenting with features that enable Private Server rentals where a group of Palians can create unique gameplay possibilities, such as the ability to bring furniture out into an Adventure Zone and decorate. This feature is still early in development, and we’d love to hear what you’d like to see possible on Private Servers.
Additionally, we’re taking a fresh look at how Palians connect with each other. Communities have been part of Palia for a long time, but we know the current system doesn’t live up to its potential. Although we had many ideas for what Communities could be in Palia, the game has evolved so much over the (three!) years that those original plans no longer feel like the right path to take. We’re in the early stages of rethinking Communities as a true social hub that makes spending time with your friends more engaging, rewarding, and meaningful. This is a longer-term project, so don’t expect the revamped system before next year at the earliest… but we want the community involved as we define what it can become. So share your thoughts on what you would like to see from Communities!
And of course – goes without sayin’ – but we’re going to say it anyway: we’re working on the next Adventure Zone. We can’t paint a picture of it for you just yet, but we can’t wait to share more soon!
Final Thoughts
Palia has always been about giving you the freedom to spend your time in the way you want. Some Palians decorate for hours. Others quest, hunt, fish, ranch, explore, collect, or simply hang out with friends in-game (and in Discord!). As the game grows, we want to keep adding new experiences that give dedicated Palians more to love while also providing experiences that welcome new players into the community you’ve built.
That doesn’t mean every new feature needs to be the favorite for every player. Ranching gave animal lovers a whole new mechanic to enjoy, while Mounts introduced a unique way to explore the world, whether you’re a die-hard dressage fan or casual pony prancer. And even if one of those aren’t your favorite, we want you to feel like you can share what is exciting about those features to people who might have an interest. That’s why we often try to share more about our goals behind features and what we’re trying to accomplish.
As we continue expanding Palia, our goal is to create more ways to welcome players home without changing the freedom to play Palia your way. Whether it's a minor tweak to a line of dialogue or the introduction of a whole new skill, we plan to design and implement each new feature with care and respect for all you Palians.
We hope you enjoy all the new content we have lined up starting with Petals & Portraits and beyond. Most importantly, thank you for continuing to play, create, explore, give us feedback, and make Palia the warm and welcoming place it is. We’ll see you in-game as we walk down the Palian Path together.