With the launch of Palia on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, Singularity 6 has reached one of the most significant milestones in the game's ongoing journey. What began as an open beta on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023 has since evolved into a fully cross-platform life sim adventure, shaped as much by community feedback as by Singularity 6's vision for Palia. Now, more players can enjoy the game than ever as it arrives on next-gen consoles alongside its biggest update yet: Elderwood.
The Best War Games recently interviewed Palia director of production, Maxwell Zierath, about the game's console launch and the long road it took to finally get here. During the interview, Zierath went into detail about technical hurdles encountered during Palia's console development, accessibility on consoles, and what the future looks like for the game. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Developing Palia for Modern Consoles
Q. Palia’s console launch is a major milestone for the game. How does it align with your original vision for Palia?
A: When we launched our open beta in August 2023, we made a promise to work with players to guide the creation of the game, and it's fun to reflect on some of our original ideas versus what we've since built. There are still many features we think are important to deliver in Palia — such as our community feature — but also many we've built that we never expected, such as Home Tours and the concept of Plushes as a chase item in the game.
Q. What were the primary technical hurdles encountered in adapting Palia for consoles, especially concerning cross-play and cross-progression features?
A: Palia has its own account systems, data persistence, and server infrastructure (which you can read more about in our AWS blog post). Because of this, our main challenge when bringing Palia onto a new platform is how our various services interact with the platform's own rather than something like gameplay networking. From our perspective, it would actually be harder at this point to create a Palia that is isolated from other platforms. There are some common problems, such as entitlements, where Palia has its own entitlement system, but needs to recognize purchases made on the PlayStation Store, for instance, and then provide the appropriate entitlement.
Where things get much more complicated is around things like Parties. Not only do we have to consider the player's Palia identity and interactions like "Kick" from the party, we have to ensure that each platform's requirements are considered so that the platform version of that Party operates the way players expect. So, for instance, on PlayStation, players who are playing in a PlayStation Party can invite their friends to Palia, who will join the Palia party. Then, if a player leaves the PlayStation Party, they also leave the Palia party. What about Palia Parties that contain one Xbox player, one PlayStation player, and one PC player? This creates a lot of complexity when we need to make changes.
Q. How did the team approach optimizing performance and controls for console players, given Palia’s PC foundations?
A: I'll take this in two parts. On the performance front, Nintendo Switch really pushed our team to make Palia scalable across a broad range of devices. It was a constant process of profiling the game and identifying areas that could be improved. I would always joke when someone would ask me, "Where's your bottleneck," because the answer was — everything. Early on, you start to see pretty rapid gains. There might be easy adjustments you can make globally to texture resolutions or LOD settings. You find some very poorly optimized systems that you can rewrite and save you several frames.
In parallel, we undertook a large effort to optimize assets manually to ensure that the visual look of Palia could hold up. Eventually, you get to the point where you're at 30 FPS (or 60 FPS on PlayStation and Xbox)...standing still. As soon as you move or a player runs across your screen, frames start to drop. Then you start the process of finding where spikes occur. For Palia in particular, we also had major memory issues early on due to hard reference chains that contained most of the assets in the game.
So a player would load into a map, and suddenly most of the game would be loaded into memory. Over time, we started to move to a lot more soft references and async loading of assets, but it comes with the downside of hitching or race conditions (i.e., crashes). This process of profiling and tweaking, profiling and tweaking, can last a very long time if you don't build with performance in mind. Thankfully, over the past few years, our team has learned a lot about how to manage hardware limitations, and we put a lot of those learnings into the Elderwood, which had an incredibly smooth development from a performance standpoint.
It was nice with PlayStation and Xbox. By and large, we didn't need to spend much time on performance. Those devices are powerful and, instead, we mainly focused on ensuring we could have a smooth 60 FPS at 4k. On the controls front, this was another challenge when we first started making Palia work for the controller. The biggest hurdle was our UI, and we ended up effectively rebuilding Palia's UI from the ground up. The reason for this is the concept of focus for controllers. On a mouse, you know what you're about to click on because your mouse pointer shows you. However, on the controller, players need a constant visual aid to know what is selected, and need to be able to anticipate what their next button press will do. Anytime there's a disconnect, it can be disorienting.
We had to rethink how we represent states on buttons, and in some cases, we needed to change our paradigm. Players who play on both controller and PC will notice the difference where, on PC, you might see a button on the screen that you click to do an action, will be replaced by a button bar that communicates a controller button that will do that action. Another interesting problem is the limitation of buttons, which we ran into and resulted in us creating the "Menu HUB" on console, where players can access things like Inventory, Quest Log, and Social Menus.
Q. How has player feedback from PC and Switch influenced the development and features of the console versions?
A: One of the most impactful problems, in my opinion, is the difficulty those on gaming controllers have using chat. In a game where players on the server are consistently talking to each other, it can be very challenging to type a message using a controller. On many platforms, that keyboard also takes up a significant portion of the screen. One solution we prioritized was our Sticker feature, where some of the Stickers will also immediately send a pre-defined chat message.
Q. What steps were taken to ensure that Palia remains accessible and welcoming to new players on consoles?
A: Every feature we build goes through a few major questions — how does this work for mouse and keyboard as well as on controller, and how do new players encounter this feature? This means we take a great deal of time thinking about how someone new to the game is going to encounter all of our features, and we think that's critical. Since we launched in Open Beta, Palia has consistently seen a very healthy number of new players join every single day. This makes it a little hard to give specific steps because, instead, the solution is embedded in our process and applied at a per-feature level.
Q. Were there any significant changes to the user interface or user experience to cater to console players?
A: I mentioned a few in the earlier question. There are a few key changes we make to cater to players with controllers. First is what we call the "button bar," which is a bar that runs along the bottom of the screen on consoles that shows some actions that are directly bound to a few buttons on the controller. This is a way to remove some of the trickier navigation that would be required if the player needed to select a certain on-screen button (a good example is the search bar in storage).
Second would be the "Menu Hub," a central screen that brings together a few separate menu systems into a single button press. This was necessary in order to give us more buttons during normal gameplay that we could use for actions. The last one is about the controller itself — supporting things like controller vibration, and, for players on PlayStation 5, adaptive triggers. These don't have a direct influence on the mechanics we design, but they definitely elevate the experience.
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What Lies Ahead for Palia
Q. With Palia now on multiple platforms, how do you plan to roll out future content updates?
A: We're committed to every platform having access to the same version of the game at the same time. To do this requires finding and designing solutions that give us confidence that the game will operate similarly on different platforms.
For example, input mappings using an abstraction layer between the controller and how we assign actions. This means if we decide to set up a new menu with new button binds, we don't need to check every gaming platform to ensure the action is set up correctly (though it would be good practice). This philosophy has to apply across the whole game, or a team of our size would not be able to maintain the game. We still have some areas that are split, and each of those is painful for us to work with because it nearly doubles the effort when working on a feature.
Q. Are there plans to introduce any new cross-platform features or events to unify the player base?
A: Palia is an online experience, with community at its core. We believe it's important to provide experiences that bring people together regardless of where they are. We tend to think about every feature and consider how it can be better with other players. So, in some sense, every feature we work on is a cross-platform feature.
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Q. Where do you see Palia in the next 2-3 years, especially concerning platform expansion and community growth?
A: Elderwood is our first major expansion to the game, and we believe bringing the game to new platforms at the same time is the best way to build excitement among the whole community. As we look ahead, we think there are opportunities to strengthen the resonance of the game in various regions of the world, and those are more likely opportunities for us to pursue at this moment. Though sometimes I think it's fun to imagine what Palia in VR might be like. Can you imagine that? I'd be sweating from all the wood cutting.
Q. On a personal note, what has been the most rewarding part of bringing Palia to a broader audience?
A: Getting to talk to the community about the game. I love the passion that so many of our players have for the game and getting to talk about all the nitty-gritty details. It's inspiring how much time people put into the game, and their excitement for new things always keeps me energized.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 78 /100 Critics Rec: 67%
- Released
- August 10, 2023
- ESRB
- E10+ For Everyone 10+ Due To Alcohol Reference, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Tobacco
- Developer(s)
- Singularity 6, Inc.
- Publisher(s)
- Singularity 6, Inc.
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 4
- Multiplayer
- Online Co-Op
- Number of Players
- 1-25
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Simulation, MMO
