Palia has made a name for itself with its blending of cozy, slow-paced gameplay in an MMO environment. Having launched in early access in 2023, Palia has continued to release updates that have grown the game’s systems. While this was important in its first major expansion, Elderwood, the game is aiming even farther with the Royal Highlands expansion by adding mounts. Palia mounts have been a common request from the community, and for the game, they’ve fundamentally changed level design and more.
The second new Adventure Zone released, the Royal Highlands is a sprawling area that stands out against the other zones in the game, primarily because of how wide open it is. Mounts aren’t just being added to add a new traversal mechanic. Nope, mounts are also critical to developing the game’s breeding and ranching system. Couple that with the slow-paced gameplay and cozy setting, it’s perfect for horsegirls, and, well, horse enthusiasts.
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Or at least that’s what Palia’s Director of Production, Maxwell Zierath, said when we spoke with him after The Royal Highlands and Patch 0.202 launch. During our conversation, we discussed the next chapter of Palia and what this new zone brings with it. But mounts and their impact were something that we just kept coming back to.
“The team had been thinking about mounts for years. We knew the audience wanted that faster traversal,” Zierath shared, as he explained the choice to add mounts to the game. “We felt the world of Palia wasn’t large enough to support a mount experience [at first], and as a cozy game, we like slower pace gameplay. But since we launched it in open beta, we had been expanding more and more.”
Expansion has been constant with Palia, and not just in the form of new zones. Instead, the developer at Singularity 6 has invested time developing existing systems, making them larger and more interactive, and developing dynamic community events. This was most apparent when Palia added animal husbandry with its ranching system, allowing players to breed and raise their favorite animals from the world of Palia.
Palia’s growth continues to focus on leaning into its strengths.
The Royal Highlands, however, mark a turning of the page for the game as it embraces a larger world and a future with more zones. Continuing, “We [expanded the world] by adding things like the temples; we added Elderwood, and as we looked at the next major zone, we talked about what would be compelling and, in some ways, what might be challenging. How can we take all these learnings we’ve had about building things for Palia and push [it] further?”
Having been previously confined by development constraints, Maxwell Zierath shared that it was discussions with the tech art team and others that pushed the decision to add mounts. Why? Because the team needed to know that they could not only make Palia larger, but also give players the option to move through it more quickly. When they got the go-ahead, he explained, there was no looking back.
On the reasoning, Zierath said, “One, it’s fun, but two, we’ve always been looking at horse enthusiasts as a potential group that has strong overlap with our existing [players] today. There’s a lot [of horse enthusiasts] out there that are playing horse games, for lack of a better term, and as we look at those, we think a lot of [those horse games] could use more to them. We felt like maybe Palia can be a really good blend where we have that horse riding experience and the bonding [with the animal], and [animal husbandry], but also we have so much more that they could engage with and make it their space.”
Zierath continued to explain the connection he hopes will form between Palia and players looking for a game that lets them experience horses in a thoughtful way. “We felt like that was a really compelling fit,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons we decided to choose a horse up front as the first mount instead of another animal. All of those things come together. We felt like this could be the moment. Let’s go pursue this [community].”
If you’re unfamiliar with the specifics around the new mounts being added to Palia, players will get the chance to earn a mount through one of the new Royal Highlands new Main Quest additions. Right now, with the launch of the Royal Highlands, players will be able to get three horse breeds: Dawnspur (which is rewarded by completing the mount quest), the Akwindu Thoroughbred (unlocked through breeding), and the Phoenixfire Dawnspur (unlocked by progressing through Binnie’s side quests, with riding bought from the Premium store).
With the Royal Highlands, Palia is a horse game now.
To meet the horse enthusiast audience they’re reaching, each horse breed is inspired by real horses. The Dawnspur is inspired by the American Quarter Horse, and the Akwindu Thoroughbred is Arabian-inspired. Additionally, by locking the Akwindu behind breeding traits, players are encouraged to engage with their mounts beyond just riding them through the Highlands. These horses are supposed to be taken care of, and the ranching mechanic plays into that, helping build that bridge between the cozy MMO and horse enthusiast players.
But it’s not only how you interact with your horse in your stable; the connection to horse games is also shown through Palia’s unique riding mechanics, which Zierath shared he can’t wait to get feedback on from the community. Riding a horse in Palia is designed to feel realistic and give players the freedom to explore in their own way. Horses each move through multiple gaits, including walking, trotting, cantering, galloping, and springing, with your full control over acceleration and direction.
These specific elements of the horses also showcase how seriously the developers at Singularity 6 are taking adding another MMO mechanic to the game. While Palia may describe itself as closer to a life-sim, given the lack of combat, dungeons, and raiding that are hallmarks of the genre, its systems reflect the MMOs in the space. And with Daybreak Games as a publisher (the studio behind EverQuest), the MMO connection is clear. And for me, it’s always going to be a cozy MMO.
When asked about the impact of adding another MMO system into the game, Zierath responded, “We constantly are looking outside at different reference points to bring in and influence our own decision making. We have some very hardcore MMO players on the team. You name the MMO, and they’ve been not just players, but deep, deep, deep players in that MMO.
“In some ways, that’s great, because it brings some of that knowledge, and there is that overlap. We are a multiplayer game; we have communal aspects to it. Early on, we sort of recognized there is a split where we’re not the same [as an MMO]. We’re not the same as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV; we don’t pack 1000 people into a location, and so there’s something there that we have to work through and find our own blend of how we take slower pace activities while also supporting the multiplayer cooperative experience,” Zierath said.
Continuing, “Those are the things we often think about. I will say a lot of times we actually get a little more worried about becoming WoW than anything, so we’re cautious about bringing [certain mechanics] in. That said, the things we like about [MMOs] are a lot of the community systems. It’s really one of the top-of-mind things we have right now. How do we strengthen community systems in Palia for players? I think you’ll see over the next year that that’s an area we’re going to start strengthening a lot more on.”
Despite the MMO elements that run through Palia’s DNA, it still has to be fun alone.
But as much as Palia is a multiplayer communal experience, it’s also a game that crucially must be fun and engaging to play alone. “We have this core principle about any, any gameplay we’re adding, which is how do we make something good solo but better together, and that better together half we spend so much time on, like what are the mechanisms we could use to allow other players to come in and make that experience better for you, and also not make your experience bad.”
He concluded, “We really don’t want other players to come in and ruin your time. So that’s where we get a lot of iteration. Even on mounts, we were spending a lot of time thinking about how players can ride together. The worry that if you have different-speed horses and you don’t keep up with your friends? That would suck! We’re constantly thinking about it in our design and development.”
Still, Palia didn’t take the well-traveled path for its mount controls. And the Palia community is already talking about it. As Zierath explained, “We chose a very different approach than the standard [riding controls]. I think that’s something we’re reading in all the comments right now. Internally, we’ve got a lot of confidence in the decisions we made to create the experience we were striving for: we want people with mounts to sit back and enjoy the ride.”
But enjoyment through riding is all that the team at Singularity 6 wants. “We set an explicit design goal for mounts that we don’t want you to be on your horse at all times. If players are able to sit on their horse at all times, we think it’s actually a failure,” Zierath said, explaining the team’s approach to design. “Because it means you’re not taking your time in the game, and that is so critical for Palia. [Pace] made a lot of our decisions around controls for us.”
Palia mounts mark a turning point for the game, and Singularity 6 is excited for what’s next.
The accelerated pace with the introduction of a horse mount at the start is a concern that makes sense. Primarily because Zierath went on to explain how the team had to shift their design philosophy around the introduction of mounts, particularly in level and zone design. He explained, “I was sort of telling people, in my opinion, mounts are going to change the way Palia works forever. This is a moment when the game has completely changed, and that means we designed the Highlands very differently from our previous maps.”
Zierath continued, “We took a completely different level design approach to it to support something like mounts. Now this is where we’ll see how players continue to respond to it over time, but internally we think we made this [change] well, and we think the Highlands experience is the right path for us as we go forward. We want to carry that into the next spaces [we introduce].”
Palia mounts are a shift in the game, and the very different appeal of the Royal Highlands fell into place. He said, “[The Royal] Highlands is not just [a] smattering of gatherables across the whole map. It’s more condensed into locations where we want you to ride to, experience, hang out in, and do stuff in. We want to do more of that in the future. We have some plans for the in-between spaces, we’ll can’t talk about them yet, but some of those are intentionally crafted because we wanted an open space without things there, so we could add over time.”
Cozy, slow-paced, and now a horse game, Palia’s Royal Highlands expansion is a new chapter for the game. By introducing a traditional MMO mechanic, the game gets closer to the game type that it tries to distance itself from. Still, community in Palia means something slightly different from that in the MMOs that define the genre. Community in Palia is about helping and growing something together, as we’ve seen in the Community Events that they run. With a new chapter in the game starting, the Royal Highlands expansion aims to broaden its player base while still meeting the current community where they need it.
