Announced in March 2023, Pax Dei will formally go into early access on Steam on June 18, 2024. I was allowed to look at the game and get an understanding of its goal by developer Mainframe Industries prior to the Founder’s Packs being live and gamers swamping the servers.
We would be underselling Pax Dei if we called it an MMO. Players may choose their server, which is a portion of the 400 square kilometer area that is accessible at launch, after they log into the game. Players may collaborate to construct settlements on each server or shard, but not in the manner you would anticipate.
How the sandbox MMO is being redefined by Pax Dei
Based on private alpha testing, Mainframe Industries CEO Thor Gunnarsson described the game's operation. Content producers get access to them as well as codes to distribute to their communities. Thousands of people were drawn in as a result, and they all formed communities on servers where they proceeded to construct the necessary infrastructure and develop towns, villages, or cities.
For instance, the structures were often designed by an architect. Because every single item in the building menu is modular and may be customized to meet your requirements, this is a somewhat demanding task. I was shown a massive castle set into a mountain and a guild hall with a goat head gazing out into the horizon. In Pax Dei, a society with a goal can do anything..
But in order to construct, you need materials. This isn't Minecraft, where you can just take anything you need and enter creative mode. Players must instead form groups by themselves. In the perilous Wilderness region, some will gather wood, others stone, and still others will raid dungeons in search of gold and other uncommon commodities.
As long as everyone in the community pitches in, a settlement gradually comes together. It makes me think of medieval England, or at least of the depiction of it that I sometimes see in literature such as Pillars of the Earth. Everybody wants to contribute to the larger project, which is why they each have a position in a community. Farmers provide food to the peasants, hunters provide meat for the pub and hides for the tanners, miners provide the valuable construction materials for every house, and so on.
Even if working as a stone or wood cutter may not seem like the most exciting thing to do online, the fact that you're contributing to the creation of anything should thrill you. Three years later, you may have a mining corporation that organizes stone for trebuchets for the war effort, but on day one, you might be the lone miner. You may always exchange something for something else, and you never know where your path will lead you. I'd rather like to be a traveling trader myself, charging aristocrats who have the funds to pay for gossip as a side gig.
Pax Dei's ambitious experiment
Gunnarsson calls Pax Dei right away. "A grand experiment," it seems like the ideal way to put it. The game will not have all of its features when it launches in early access since the developer wants to grow it in collaboration with the people who use and like the environment it creates. A basic roadmap will guide the addition of new features, but the community's preferences and the path they take the game in will also be taken into consideration.
Before further construction mechanisms or PvE objectives are added to the game, the system will probably be altered if, for instance, players start to focus more on PvP and develop an economy out of the loot around. Players may select where they want to push the game the most, in a sense, since Mainframe Industries is keeping a close eye on things and wants to make it possible for more dynamic, community-driven gaming to occur without continual oversight.
This reminds me, as a parent, of putting up stations with groupings of toys for your children to play at. Similar to the players of Pax Dei, some children may play for a long at a station before switching to another, while others will cause havoc by mucking about with the toys in a more expansive game. It's all about having fun, playing, and creating an interesting environment for everybody involved, but each person is free to use the resources at their disposal to play as they see fit.
But not everything in this life is harmony and wealth. Players construct their communities in the Heartlands, which are secure havens free from enemy attack. If you're not interested in dungeons, PvE, PvP, or fighting, you may spend all of your time in these areas.
As you leave the Heartlands, you'll arrive at the Wilderness, where you may engage in PvP and fight NPC foes. You will get meat from animals and treasure from dungeons in this manner. During an initial test, users even managed to construct a free-for-all PvP zone in the middle of the map where you could test your builds and see how many people you could kill before losing your life.
It's really more reasonable to keep all of stuff optional than you may imagine. Of course, there have always been outlaws and criminals on the road, but for the most part, people have adhered to their responsibilities. This also applied to knights and nobility, thus it's possible that in Pax Dei, people who specialize in player-versus-player combat may show up to defend communities and do nothing else than volunteer their services to ensure the safety of the other players.
The Eve of the Pax Dei
It's intended if this sounds a lot like EVE Online. For several years, Gunnarsson and a few other Mainframe Industries developers worked on that game, and they were impressed by the emergent narrative it allowed to happen. It used to be hard to discuss games without bringing up the amazing corporate espionage stories from EVE Online. For Pax Dei, Mainframe Industries is aiming for something like to this.
Corporate takeovers are most likely far off in the future, but Pax DeiThe world is full with opportunities for spontaneous, imaginative storytelling. It is possible that when you enter a dungeon, you may come across some raiders from a nearby community, whom you will kill and loot. The next thing you know, you may be facing a bounty or, alternatively, you can start to amass more superior equipment to the point where you almost own a dungeon and can charge players to try to take goods from it.
I got a nice example from Gunnarsson of how something similar occurred in one of the game's alphas. Because of a bug that allowed players to construct barriers beside routes, every server automatically placed checkpoints and imposed fees on users for visiting each area of the map. It was originally believed that gatehouses and admission costs would change as the game's civilization developed, but this demonstrated that, given the necessary resources, players could and would do anything.
A split second
During my last conversation with Mainframe Industries, I was given a tour of a server that had been kept in its original alpha condition. Regular server wipes will ultimately be a component of the game, but for the time being, this village has been preserved as an example of the creativity shown by players in a short amount of time. The community was developed by a single professional architect who was also essentially snatching up all the resources players brought from across the globe to integrate each construction in a manner that made sense and created a pleasant flow through the place.
A grand hall, a guild hall, furnished residences, and other smaller buildings that could house different enterprises or be used for storage were all there. Lights glowed in the distance as the sun set. Since you can see across servers in Pax Dei, each light in the distance represents a genuine player's construction plot or structure that has been built anywhere on the enormous globe map.
It made me feel so very little to see this. Even if your character can chop wood for hours on end, it won't be enough to complete the massive projects seen in games like Bellwright or Valheim. Alone, you are nothing, but in concert with others, you create a whole that has the potential to really matter. Because the ultimate objective that your little community shares does not exist or cease to exist on your shoulders alone, you will not inherit your priceless city upon your death. Others will join you if you're driven to keep constructing, and together you'll create something commendable, menacing, or breathtaking, depending on how your goals as a community develop.
Although specific specifics are not yet planned, Mainframe Industries is undoubtedly considering going to war. In the game Pax Dei, small-scale disputes are meant to escalate into continental conquests. It will not be long until gamers get sufficiently enraged when someone ruins their village.