Pax Dei Guide – Everything we know so far about this new MMO

This is a complete Pax Dei guide; everything we know about this new MMO so far, including alpha testing, developer Q&A, and general info.

The information below was mainly sourced from the Pax Dei Discord server. Special thanks to Nymia and Phoenix for compiling the information.

Also see: Pax Dei Release Date, Alpha, Features & Trailer [2023]

Game Information

What is Pax Dei?

Welcome to a vast, social sandbox MMO inspired by the legends of the medieval era. Here, myths are real, ghosts exist, and magic is unquestioned. In this immense, open-world playground, you choose the role you want to play.

Immerse yourself along with thousands of other players as you explore the land, build your home, forge your reputation, and craft your own stories.”

What does Pax Dei mean?

Pax Dei means “Divine Peace”.

Can solo players play Pax Dei?

• “You absolutely can play alone and take your time doing things on your own. There will be plenty of soft incentives to cooperate allowing you to choose how much interaction you like (like doing some occasional trading) but none of it is forced by any means. Surviving alone in more dangerous areas obviously is more difficult but nothing forces you to interact with others.”

Will there be pay-to-win/time skips/p2w?

• “While we’re not yet ready to communicate about monetization, I can say we’re most definitely not building Pax Dei to be pay to win and we won’t be selling “time skips”.”

• Hey… this is a medieval fantasy, an adventure, an escape from the mortal coil we have to deal with every day, a brave new world for people to love and  live in as their hobby, where the most valuable asset you can have is the good people you are fortunate enough to meet and play with.

Of course it is not going to be pay2win.

How much will it cost? Will there be a monthly subscription?

• “Monetization is something very important to live service titles, and we want to make sure we get this right. At this time, we’re not ready to discuss this. We will have more to come on this as more from Pax Dei is shared.”
  
• “I cannot reveal now how players will pay for the game.  What I can say is this:
  
  We are well aware that people have different opportunities and preferences when it comes to paying for a game like this.  Our aim is to have a flexible system that allows anyone who wants to play the game, to be able to do so and contribute in a way that fits them.”

What games are most similar to Pax Dei?

• “Collectively we who are making this game have played an absolutely insane amount of games of all genres the past 20+ years and worked on hundreds of titles. Everything we have ever done in this vein, educates our work today.
  
  Also, when I mention a game that we take inspiration from, it does NOT necessarily mean we do a feature like it was done in that game, but very often it means that we have learned from the mistakes that were made and we believe we have found a way to implement it in such a way that we do not fall into the same pit.
  
  Having said all this, I can mention a few games that have been inspiring:
  – EVE Online – the emergent patterns of social and political groups and structures
  – Valheim – Creation of home/base/bat-cave and the joy and comfort that brings
  – EverQuest – early open world static dungeon gameplay (think Sebilis for example) and the nice and cozy feeling of tucking away somewhere with your group of friends , camping stuff.
  – Ultima Online – some social aspects and PvP elements.
  
  ALL MMO’s ever… what they did right and where they failed. A lot of us literally have years of 24/7 playtime clocked in some of them, either just playing or leading all sorts of player guilds. I could probably continue a list like this for some time, but I hope this gives you some idea.

Game Balance for casual players?

• A couple of additional points here:

The reply to the question is a bit dependent on what you mean with “casual”.  Do you want to make a home, grow things, forage, hunt some boar or deer, chase mysterious shadows in the night and be famous for producing the best sausages in the valley?  Play a bit every now and then, but mostly in a low intensity setting? 

Or do you want to log in once a week and do hardcore raiding or even high adrenaline PvP with your Clan for a few hours?

The answer to the first one is easy.  Yes, this is totally something we cater for in all sorts of different ways.

The second one sounds more tricky, but a good part of the solution is to embrace the idea of creating mechanics where a player in need can easily be done favors by Clan mates and friends.  And I know, perhaps it sounds a little backwards thinking about it like that, but when you are designing a game that is not focused on the Hero´s Journey, but rather the quality of human interaction (Like an MMO should always do), that angle gives you a lot of good answers.

An example of this is to make all items in the game tradable. Simple, real, non abstract solution. If you have a friend who needs a leg up, you simply give him what he needs.  You become the hero, he is grateful and now you can go and enjoy whatever adventure was planned, together.

Another simple thing is horizontal progression.  I.e. if it is relatively easy to become good at one thing, while specializing in all-the-things takes forever, anyone can quickly become an important part of the company, casuals and new players alike.  The casual player has his role, knows what it does and can do it well, the 12+ hour one is not necessarily much better at that one thing, but he can fill all sorts of different roles that may be needed.

A third thing is to tie a part of the progression and the options you have in game, to the place you have built and call home. Either your private house or a house you share with friends, but also whatever it is that your Clan is building.

I could go on like this… but my point is, we have put a lot of thought into exactly what you are asking about and we really want to cater to casuals, just as much as anyone else who would like to have this game as a hobby.

And lets face it, everyone becomes a “casual” every now and then. People get busy in RL and have to reduce their playtime for periods of time.  It is essential to cater for them to be able to ramp up again and dive into the world they love with friends they enjoy, when time allows them to.

What can we expect Pax Dei to have that differs/improves upon the social aspect of MMOs?

• Hi! Yes – the team has developer with very varied backgrounds, with AAA developers from Remedy and other studios and MMO devs like Reynir Hardarson who’s credited as the original creator of Eve Online and Sulka Haro who worked for a long time on Habbo Hotel. We’re very intent on making a game that maximizes human interaction. Most MMOS consider things like players being able to trade items an annoyance that breaks the game economy, but we’re a polar opposite of this and want to have the least barriers to players enjoying Pax Dei together. We think a new player being gifted gear to get started is a wonderful thing. Being able to build houses cooperatively is fantastic. And crucially we want to make an environment where a new player and someone who has been playing the game for a long time can meaningfully play together, which is not possible in most MMOs. So yes – we’re looking into the best of breed for games that strongly encouraged and enabled players to play together and socialize and have this as the core principle we’re applying into all of the game design.

Do you plan to release a local client on steam for PC users?

• “Current plan is there is a PC client that does local compute, yes.”

Will Pax Dei be playable on MacOS?

• Sadly we won’t initially be able to support MacOS.

Concerned about latency, how will Mainframe handle that?

• “Latency is always a problem, agree. And what contributes to latency is very complex, this not just the connectivity speed. Let’s just say we’re very aware of latency and have some pretty good people working on this.”

Will Pax Vei be playable on VR?

• What we have said is that we want this game to eventually be played on any device. VR is however not necessarily “a device”, but rather an ui/ux interphase that assimilates your consciousness into the game world 

 I guess you should wait for the tech AMA with that question.

Do mainframe have a plan for dealing with Cheats and related bugs?

We will have ways to deal with any sort of cheating and unfair exploits, yes.

Strategies are multi pronged 😉

Development Information

On which game engine will Pax Dei release?

• We are using Unreal Engine 5 to create the world of Pax Dei.
• Current version is 5.1.

How long has Pax Dei been in development? 

• Per the Mainframe website, since at least March 2019.

How far into development is Pax Dei?

• “I am sure that if we were desperately doing a finance drive as we spilled the beans about our project, we would have made a “pretty CGI/“in-engine” trailer”.
  
  The fact is that the game simply is at a stage where we want to expand from F&F pre-alpha tests with maybe a hundred people running around in there, to an open Alpha with thousands or even tens of thousands of players.  And to do that successfully we needed to reveal the game.  So we made an in-engine trailer, without any CGI smoke and mirrors. The only post edits made were in order to add the logo 😆
  
  And as you can see in the trailer, there are several things we still are working on, it is very honest about that.  We are for example working on combat, have not updated that for a long time and we are adding loads and loads of content and animations etc.
  
  But yes, this is the place we are at at the moment. It is a competent team, confident that this timeline we have decided on will result in a great game for all of us to enjoy.”

Who is funding Pax Dei / Mainframe Industries?

• Some organizations that have funded, pulled from the main site:

• Maki.vc
• Play Ventures
• Sisu Game Ventures
• Crowberry Capital
• a16z
• Riot games
• Twitch
• King co-founders
• Microsoft

What is the current state of the game in development?

• We are coming up to a stage where we think we can offer a large number of Alpha testers an enjoyable stay in a relatively stable client, with enough to do to start feeling at home in the world of Pax Dei. But obviously there are a lot of things yet to be implemented and a huge amount of content that needs to be produced for a full and proper launch.

We have been doing smaller play tests for a long time now, only by invite and under NDA and we will be expanding on that in the coming weeks and months. I cannot say right now when we let people in by the thousands, I would not be doing anyone a favor, but we want people into the alpha client as soon as we can be relatively sure they are not going to be frustrated by server and/or game performance.

There is no decision yet on when we will start expecting players to pay for the game, or how. It all depends on when we feel we have enough value to offer and are sure our players are happy with what they are getting in return for their money.

Having your gamer profile will give us more colors when analyzing either the in game data or your surveys response.

Design Philosophy

• Each game is its own and no solution is good in a vacuum.

The first thing I learned when I started working in game design, late last millennia… was that ideas are the cheapest and most abundant things in the world.  Everyone is full of them, and in the right context and at the right moment, all of them are good ideas.

We have been inspired by a lot of great games, we have also been inspired by brilliant implementations of obscure little things in games that were as a whole… less great :p

What we have tried to do is making a set of features and solutions that are multi faceted, interdependent and fit not only with the other solutions we use, but also the overall goals of Pax Dei as a game (one of which is of course being Awesome!  )

• I think the mission statement was something like:

Landscape as we know it can be described as a few interesting, picturesque places with a lot of uninteresting and dull things between.  Lets concentrate on that first… thing.

If you are asking about variation, then yes.  There is.

• I would rather say that the philosophies and fundamentals that were core elements in EVE was how that game brought people together, had them cooperate and benefit from economical and political ties across the galaxy.  That is what is great about EVE online: The economical and political sandbox and the social emergence that results from it.

But yes, in human society there will obviously always be shadier elements that utilize the situations that arise in unorthodox ways.  It will not doubt happen in Pax Dei too.

How immersive will the interactions be?

• When we started collecting ideas and writing down design pillars for the game, Verisimilitude was one of the first things we noted down. We wanted this world and everything in it to have the quality of seeming true and have the appearance of being real.

From this process, we ended up with a handful of design dogmas that everything is viewed through at some point.  The idea of verisimilitude survived and is applied to everything in the game. And as you can imagine, the type of immersion you are talking about is a big part of this believability.

• When I say “verisimilitude” I do not necessarily mean the visual representation of things or entities, anyone can make a set of picture perfect assets and put them on screen.  What I mean is how they feel, how they behave, how using common sense should help you discover how to learn things, do things and use things.

Alpha Information

When will Pax Dei launch?

• No ETA yet.
• Test phases will be thorough to ensure a smooth gameplay experience. You can sign up for the alpha right now at playPaxDei.com

When does Pax Dei Alpha/Beta testing start?

• No ETA for either as of 3/3 at 11 AM CST, complete your profile after signing up for Alpha testing! https://playpaxdei.com

How many players will be able to test in alpha?

• “The current dev world is not large enough for 20k players, so right now less.”

Alpha Player Count & Friend Codes

• We are way, way past the wildest ideas of how many people would sign up for the Alpha.  So, no, that is not holding anything up.

What we do want to make sure is, that the next Alpha will be stable enough and contain enough content for people to immerse themselves in the game and have fun doing it.

AFAIK the only purpose of a “friend code” is to automatically allow people who are a part of the same player group and want to begin their journey together, to start in the same location in the world.

What is Pax Dei’s Combat type?

• “We’re doing action combat and aim it to be more strategic than reactive so the decisions you make before combat (gearing up – knowing the weaknesses etc) are at least as important than the ones you make during combat. It won’t be hotkey smashing but not super timing sensitive either as the goal is to make anticipation and reading the encounter more important than reaction speeds but we do want to have room for mastery.”
  
• I have talked a bit about this elsewhere, but let me repeat:
  
  Pax Dei does not create molds.  We create a sand for players to fill into their own molds.
  
  Obviously players know the classical combat roles.  Lets take Tank for example.  Players know what a tank is supposed to do.  They know the tasks he is supposed to handle.  They know how it feels to have a good Tank by their side (and a little bit in front of them…)
  
  What you will find in Pax Dei is NOT a predefined set of things that we have in our infinite designer wisdom decided would make a good tank.  What you WILL find are skills, specializations, armor, weapons, accessories, enchantments, abilities and/or spells that may be useful for someone wanting to be the Tank.
  
  Ideally, the community will make their own profession websites where players define what a tank should be.  Which skills he trains, what equipment he carries, which abilities and magic he should employ.  And there will no doubt be several theories what is best, and there will be several setups for the ideal tank, for when he faces different types of enemies.
  
  The same goes for other “professions” or “classes” that players carve out of the material we offer.  WE will not be breaking any molds, YOU will be making any mold you like; The classical ones, New ones and I am quite sure that you, the players, will come up with things far more innovative and smart, than what we would have been able to cram into something we called “a Tank”.

This is how it looks to design for emergence.  This is also how it looks when you design a game where the Player and his endeavors, his deeds, his smarts and efforts are at the center of the story. And this is what it looks like when you wish to feed the community endless material to make their own things, both within game and outside.

• Ok as people are asking, the combat system is action based… but the whole answer is a bit more complicated than that! While combat is action based, it will rely a lot on the RPG progression elements. So the game feel will be very action oriented, but you’ll want to progress your character skills and gear and have the best consumables possible, similar to tab targeted games. And of note, you will be crafting all the gear and consumables, so if you want to just focus on PvE, you better have a clan that has people who love crafting!

Will we be able to have multiple weapons equipped, and be able to swap between them during combat?

• “Question about swapping weapons: also “yes”

How is magic going to be handled?

• “Can’t share any lists of spells yet but magic won’t be limited to combat. 🙂

What I mean is that we will also have magic that can be used in other parts of the gameplay than combat but we’re not ready to share any details about actual spells or the casting mechanics.”
“Player knowledge definitely is one part of the combat mastery.”

• “You cannot find anything on Pax Dei magic yet.  We have not revealed it. If you want to imagine what it COULD be, I can say that the magic in there is the kind of magic people actually believed existed back in the early middle ages.
  
  A simple prayer, an evil curse, the song of the forest, a blessing… wyvern´s saliva or dust of a fairy?  All things magical.
  
  A low fantasy setting only means that we do not feel the need to invent all sorts of incredible things, the world of the common medieval mind was fantastical enough.”

Will combat be Directional Based?

• It depends on what you are doing during combat and which role you are filling, but for when you are actually swinging some melee weapon, directional combat is the main rule, yes.

• To clarify a bit. We’re not making combat where you control/choose the direction of a swing/attack. The attacks depend on the weapon you use and the attack animation set it has. 

• Ok, I’ll clarify some more.  We’re not doing tab targeting. What I meant with previous comment was that we’re not doing combat that allows you to choose the direction of your attack like for example in For Honor. Each weapon has a set of attack animations but you do choose in which direction you perform them (like in Dark Souls or most 3rd person RPGs). So a sword typically has swings, maybe a stab, and a spear is more about poking with the pointy end.

PVP

How will PVP work? Opt-in, always on, etc.

• “PvP is opt in insofar as it will be clear when you  enter that mode or when you enter a zone that has dangers of PvP. If you do not want to engage in PvP then there is plenty of PvE content in the game and you don’t have to engage with the game that way at all. The same is true for PvE. If you prefer to just be a master crafter in your village and never venture out, then that is possible too and will be just as important in fact as other activities. There are always tradeoffs naturally. As mentioned in another dev-question, many things are gated via skills. Aspects of combat as well as crafting an others. This results in many ways of requiring to work together. You might need to go into a high level PvP zone to mine a certain ore, and bringing a bunch of PvP players along to protect you is surely desirable in this case, especially if you plan not to be part of it. However this isn’t a must, opt-in is the keyword for every activity. The choice is yours and it will be clear when you play what dangers you are exposing yourself to.”

• “We’d prefer to not share a ton of details right now, but… While PvP will be opt-in, we really want to make something that has high stakes, is in-world and has good reasons for why you want to PvP. If this pans out the people really into PvP (and we have some Very Serious PvPers in the dev team) will really like this, the people who want to test waters with PvP will be able to to and there’s a good reason for PvPers and PvErs to work together.”
  
• “Absolutely not. PvP will definitely NOT be forced, and it is up to you to engage in it. If you do engage in it, there will be benefits for everyone. We want PvP to be something that PvPers do enjoy a lot and can find meaning in as well be something that PvEers can 100% ignore and still get the best stuff in the game.”
  
  When we say that we do not want to reveal our PvP plans at this point, it is because we do not want people to jump to wrong conclusions and we do not want to build false expectations.
  
  We are looking at completely fresh approaches to how PvP enters an MMO world.  Approaches that are guided by experience from more or less all PvP games that have been made.”

• “Thank you for the suggestion, totally with you there, even though I differ on the solution. As you point out, one can do the flagging in a banal, meaningless and shallow way, but alternatively, in a smart and meaningful way.  We are totally aiming for the latter”

Will there be instanced and ranked PVP?

• “Generally on instances: Instances artificially split up the population.  We want to bring people together.
  
  Generally on ranking systems: A rank that is given to you by your fellow players is 1000 times more valuable than being a number on some list generated by the game.”

PVE

How will PvE be handled in Pax Dei? Is there a solid presence of competitive to highly competitive PvE activities, either organized or not?”

• PvE is very free form and open. There will be large open and deadly dungeons. There will be raid targets. When it comes to PvE, the game is not going to make any promises about whether you will succeed or not. Pax Dei is not going to tell you how many people you need to bring. Pax Dei is not going to tell you where you may or may not go. You can go anywhere, with any number of people and try. And try again and again….

• “Yes. Huge, deadly, open world, persistent, respawning dungeons, swarming with monsters of all shapes and sizes.”

Will there be many quests?

• There won’t be traditional NPC given quests that play the same way for every player but the world is filled with lore and mysteries that require exploration, deduction and collaboration but also having the right knowledge and tools it the right place at the right time. 🙂
  
  Can’t go too much into details but we aim to see player made content or “quests” – if you will – expand beyond simple requests for material and trading. One of the core principles is to build systems and features that enable emergent gameplay and this is very much part of that.”

• Quests can be found via notes and via researching discarded artifacts. They’ll lead you toward dungeons and buildings protected by tall, inky black monsters that growl and hiss as you slash at them.

How do you intend to ensure a good new player experience without quests?

• “Yes, this is a core pillar in our design. New players will immediately be able to make meaningful contribution no matter the gameplay area they want to engage in – and similar to your example they will able to equip gear with solid base stats that works well enough even if their character’s skills are still lacking.”
  
• “It is absolutely a goal to help new players. Although there will be no NPCs, there are other ways to guide a player into how the game works. We are exploring different ways of doing that, including letting players skip past any tutorials and bring that back at any point. We realize there are also players who genuinely like helping new players, and this is part of the social gameplay. To allow senior and junior players to easily meet and play together with meaningful experiences and rewards for both is very important to us.
  
  Naturally someone new will always potentially get confused no matter what, so providing tools to be able to ask for help and get it quickly is absolutely imperative”

Will there be NPCs?

• “Maybe worth clarifying that yes, there will be NPCs (and other AI enemies) in PvE but there won’t be any of the typical friendly quest giver and vendor NPCs. Players will inhabit towns and cities and handle trading, crafting etc.”

How will the start of the game work without NPCs?

• This is a question that is loaded with expectations from other games, many of which do not apply to how you start out in Pax Dei.

It is especially the very start that people have a hard time imagining, but how do you start out in Valheim for example?  One game that we have taken some inspiration from.

There you start with two empty hands, but surrounded with everything you need to get started.  You make simple tools, simple weapons, simple clothes and take it from there.

How will you maintain Ambiance with no NPCs?

• No NPC´s who are stealing business and competing with players or giving out quests does not mean that eventually there will not be any NPC´s in the game.

We do have plans and intended roles for friendly, humanoid entities in the world. There may also be at some point a representation for offline players, who left their characters performing specific tasks when they logged off.

And I am not saying this is included in the planned launch version; What I AM saying is that we are not doing no NPC´s because we hate them or there are no roles fit for NPC´s, there are simply certain meaningful roles we rather want to allow players to fill exclusively. 

Leveling & Classes

How does leveling work?

• Hey MeetJS, it will be a combination of progressing skills on your character and equipping different weapons and armor.

• You will not be locked in and can explore any activity with your character as you want and pivot anytime

Are there classes? If not, how will weapons/gear work?

• “As was mentioned in our reveal interviews (which you can find here btw: https://youtu.be/bF5RJcqujz0), there will be no explicit classes as found in more traditional RPGs. That doesn’t mean however there won’t be ways for you to build your own setup that corresponds do those. Items, weapons, armor and magic spells will be oriented towards such gameplay roles such as a caster, DPS, healer, tank etc. However this is very fluid and gives you players the maximum choice to customize the style that suits you.”
  
• “The gameplay will support the “holy MMO trinity” – i.e. tank, healer, dps roles, but we’re aiming to be a bit more flexible when it comes to selecting your playstyle, gear and strategies. Unlike in most MMOs, you don’t pick a class and be locked to it but define your role with gear, spells and your playstyle etc instead which also allows exploring different playstyles and evolving your character over the years.”
  
• “Gear will be the main source for abilities/spells. Your skills determine how you can utilize them.”

Gear & Weapons

What about gear progression?

• “I can’t to reveal too much at this stage, but I can say that everything has its use. We want players of all levels to enjoy meaningful experiences and be able to collaborate (or fight each other). That naturally means that things never really become obsolete and are open to be traded or recycled or kept for the right opportunity. So even a low level resource will inevitably have value for a high level player as one example I can share.”
  
  “Everything can [be recycled]. So nothing is truly wasted. There will be different ways to go about it, but we do want to emphasize a “as little waste as possible” item economy. So everything has its use in some for or another, if not for you then for someone else.”

Will gear take damage?

• “Gear definitely has wear and tear and you actually see it in the items in game. The dents, scratches and rust actually appears on armor as it’s used. As for buildings, we’re not talking about it yet.”

Will there be gearscore on items?

• “We’re not ready to share too much details but the power and gear progression won’t be based on gear score.”

Will there be black powder / guns?

• No muskets, we’re pre-blackpowder era, when magic was still real.

Weapons vs Tools – Is there a distinction?

• As a general goal of the design, if you pick something up, you should be able to it for anything for which your instinct tells you it should be used. Yes, a hand axe that you are employing to chop down a tree with, can also be used to defend against a boar that decides to stick his snout a little bit too far into your woodsman business. We try to follow this principle as much as possible, it feeds into the dogma of creating the world with verisimilitude in mind.

What can we expect from the Pax Dei Arsenal of Weapons?

• “One of the biggest development goals for us is to be able to expand the game with both new gameplay and new content for years to come.
  
  While we do aim to have wide variety of weapons, we also want them to feel meaningful and bring something new to the game other than just looking different so the weapon and combat systems are designed and made that in mind and we’ll keep expanding the selection over time. Can’t share any lists or numbers at this point though.”

How will inventory weight work? 

• “We want the logistics to matter but more on crafting, building and trading. We don’t want to be too punishing and limiting with your personal gear and stuff you need for PvE.”

What kind of Equipment can we have?

• Stills from the announcement trailer show several levels of equipment including
  • Helmet
  • Pauldrons
  • 3x Body Armour including (Breastplates, Chain Mail & Tunics)
  • Gauntlets
  • Gloves
  • Leg Guards
  • Breeches
  • Shoes and Boots
  • 3 Rings, 2 Bracelets, Necklace, Earrings
  • Cape

Crafting

What will the player crafting and building system look like? Castles, forts, etc.

• “We aim to have a building system that allows players to express themself and create what they want, how they want it and create accessories that give their buildings personal character. We also want players to tear everything down and rebuild, as their opportunities, needs and skill change. A house is never essentially “finished”. And yes, you will be able to mine, chop down trees, forage for various materials, hunt and harvest the land”
  
• “It’s free building with various blocks and buildings won’t be around forever. Players can claim a plot where they can build their houses (i.e. building outside a plot is not possible) and if the plot is removed, the buildings will decay. Multiple players can also join their plots together to have more space to build.“

• After designating a plot of land, you can start to place walls using gathered items like wood and clay. Over time, you can start to create a village with gardens and workbenches for blacksmiths and alchemy.

• “All we can say at the moment is that a plot will have a fixed size and in order to create bigger settlements you will need to cooperate with other players by placing your plots next to each other and allow them access. And you are absolutely right that one critical part of this mechanic is the moment when someone decides to move due to joining another clan or simply changing their area of interest within the game but we are not ready to share details regarding this just yet. That being said we are looking forward to get feedback from you all on this in our future playtests”

• “As we mentioned before there will not be any class in the game and there is nothing that stops a player to focus only crafting. Items that players are crafting will always be the best, so crafters will be a really important part of the community. We really want to create a game that all the players will have fun while playing it for years whatever they decide to focus on.”

Can you expand on crafting more?

• “We want to offer compelling gameplay on every part of the game and crafting is a major part of the game and economy so there will be plenty of things to discover, tinker and create. You absolutely can make it your main thing. Abandoned structures without plots are free for all.”
  
• “We aim to have a building system that allows players to express themself and create what they want, how they want it and create accessories that give their buildings personal character. We also want players to tear everything down and rebuild, as their opportunities, needs and skill change.  A house is never essentially “finished”. And yes, you will be able to mine, chop down trees, forage for various materials, hunt and harvest the land”

• “Most buildings you’ll see in the game will be player built. Starting from small huts and growing into villages and cities as more players join together. Player-built buildings in Heartlands are safe and untouchable.”

Will there be any significance to specializing in a particular craft/trade?

• “Specializing in Trade is usually much more dependent on creating the right connections, gaining trust and being consistent than anything else.  And I think it will be similar in Pax Dei.
  
  Obviously, to make the basic necessities, anyone can probably craft those in his house, but to make anything advanced or create facilities to refine things properly, you need to cooperate with other people.  Making everything you need and everything that can support your operation simply takes too much space, to be built on a single private plot. Everything should be better together… also Trading.”

How will food appear?

• Like all things in Pax Dei, food and drink will be made and traded by players themselves.  With everything that implies.

World Resources, will things grow back?

• Trees are c[h]opped down, yes.

Hole digging, not so much.  Technically not a feasible thing to do.

Respawn of resources is varied, depends on the resource. This is totally an object for balancing btw.

• Digging is a technical limitation

Can buildings be destroyed?

• You can destroy your own buildings when you wish and rebuild them as often as you like.

You can not attack or destroy the buildings or rob your fellow man of his belongings within the heartlands, there your possessions and projects are sacrosanct.  What happens elsewhere is yet to be revealed.

How will you protect best locations from being instantly taken?

• The “best location” is always going to be close to the players you play with all the time.  There will be huge advantages for a group of friends to place their plots in next to each other, both immediate gains, but not the least later on when people start working on larger projects together.

And yes, we have solutions for claims that fall out of use.

Economy

How will the economy work? What about gold/coins? Will crafted gear be valuable?

• “People will be able to use coin when trading. And there will be important exits for coin out of the economy as well, for those who have it.”

• “We definitely want the logistics and distances to matter and since the economy is 100% player driven and we want to maximize the social interaction, we’re creating systems that allow players to create content to each other.”

• “Yes! Compared to most games, we plan to invert the value of loot vs player crafted items. We want to see the players creating the best and most valuable items in the game but also for them to offer services, be it for maintaining gear or selling reagents for alchemy. There will be wear and tear on gear and you can easily identify an old armor by it’s scratches, rust and dents. While we want the players to treasure their most valuable gear, there will be great reasons for “retiring” old gear and chase that next awesome piece of gear. 🙂”
  
• As you have it right with the social sandbox, this games economy is 100% player driven. So we definitely have features that allow you to craft and sell items in a various of ways that suit your chosen play style in the game. The concept is that players really do have the choice of what they want to engage with in Pax Dei and to what degree. That means if you do want to focus entirely on crafting and trading, the game not just lets you, but also includes to tool for you to make this a rich experience.”
  

• “All items and resources and freely tradable. There is no traditional “magical MMO Bank”, you’ll need to build and maintain your own storage and/or cooperate with other players to craft a shared storage. Based on your playstyle or needs you might want to keep certain good in different locations (i.e. you might process raw materials in a different location from where you do crafting or prepare for adventure etc.)”
  
• “Unfortunately I can’t go into details yet but this is one of the very important parts for us as we want to make player crafted gear valuable and meaningful – something you even treasure. We want to enable as many people playing together in a meaningful way – whether they are newcomers or experienced players – but also want to reward mastery.”
  
• Player run businesses are very much a thing. Can’t share more information about the social systems at this point but the world will be filled with lore and mysteries that require exploration, deduction and collaboration and we also want logistics and distances/traveling matter.
  
  Knowledge is valuable and you build your houses, craft the items, track and collect rare resources and create things that have value – besides your own knowledge – so if you see a business opportunity, we very much expect you to capitalize it.

Housing

What is Pax Dei’s housing mechanic going to look like?

• “Thank you for your questions Tobel, many of those we are not ready to answer just yet but what we can say is that for now we are using basic state of the art building mechanics where you can select a building piece and place it in any way you would like, stay tuned”

• “It’s free building with various blocks and buildings won’t be around forever. Players can claim a plot where they can build their houses (i.e. building outside a plot is not possible) and if the plot is removed, the buildings will decay. Multiple players can also join their plots together to have more space to build.”

Player-owned shops?

• Hard Yes

• In a game where all trade is in the hands of the players, the ability to put up own shops is essential.

Social

How much of a “Social Sandbox” is Pax Dei really?

(Long – Snipped)

• When it comes to our “dabbling” in making sandbox economies and political play, I can point to EVE online. There, everything of note is harvested and crafted by players. There, everything that matters is built by players. 

In Pax Dei, all material goods that matter will be crafted by players. All functional buildings will be designed and built by players. All trade will be in the hands of players… I am not sure how to explain it better, but we think have a pretty solid theories about economics and sandboxing 

I can say similar things about politics…. (Snipped)

• When it comes to the world of Pax Dei itself, yes, the future is in the hands of the players, but the past has already happened and is full of wonders and events that have shaped the world you will enter. (List of really intriguing questions – see the original post)

But to be sure, history is history. It is there to create a backdrop and context for the stories of the future, stories written by the players themselves. 

• Anyone can equip anything to fulfill any roles he wants. What dictates how the player succeeds are her skills, experience and the people she has the good fortune of getting to know along the way. Pax Dei is not about the Hero´s Journey, it is not about “grinding to 60”. Like a great wise woman once said… “there is no spoon”

Will there be religion in the game?

• “As the setting indicates, the lore of the world is inspired among other things by the various ideas of Divinity in the early middle ages in Europe. The history of Creation (as well as previous Creations!), the nature of things and entities residing outside of the natural world and how all those things and beings interact with the world today will be revealed over time. It is deep, complex and… actually very exciting”

Will there be weddings/couples/families?

• “This is a sandbox where we try to give people building blocks to do whatever they want.
  
  So, what will you call a marriage? 2 characters with the same family name?  You can do that.  Would you prefer a church wedding?  Have your Clan build a church, appoint a priest and voila.  Would you like to be married by the mysterious beings out by that old stone ring in the enchanted forest?  You can try!
  
  But seriously.  If you think about it, love is the thing that is most important to everyone, whether they admit it or not and it has always puzzled me how little attention MMO´s have given it.  How often have you wished you could simply hold someone’s hand in an MMO?
  
  So, without promising anything, I can tell you that we think about this too.  A lot.
  
  And with the housing; Put down your plots next to each other, share all permissions and you can simply build one house together and use the rest of the area for whatever your heart desires”

Will there be a card game (TCG) in Pax Dei?

• Nothing on this yet, but our Lead Game Designer did design the EVE CCG back in the day and come to think of it, several members on the team have been involved in designing various card games. So, who knows what happens eventually? 

Will there be political tools for laws, interactions and other political maneuvering?

• The plan is to support political maneuvering on many different levels.

Will players be able to build reputation with various group in game?

• We intend for players to be able to have friendly interactions with a number of entities. Definitely not all though 

Clans

Are there guilds/clans/companies? What will clan sizes be like?

• “I envision some very different Clan sizes, all according to what the members of the individual Clans prefer, what they are wanting to accomplish in game, which types of structures they build and where they do it.
  
  As has been stated several times, we are designing this game with emergent gameplay in mind.  We want to give players basic tools and building blocks, to do with as they see fit. We are not going to try to dictate what is optimal or make rules that force players to create the Clans we think are somehow of the “Correct” size.
  
  When it comes to inter Clan connections, there should be a lot of ways for different Clans to connect and cooperate.  I cannot reveal much of it now, but I want to remind you again of the setting. What meta organizations did hold the strings of power there? The feudal, the ecclesial, the artisans, the scholarly and a wide range of more secret societies that extended throughout society and connected groups on all sorts of different levels”

• The clan is the basic social entity in the game and you are a member of only one clan.  It is your home base.  It is the collection of people you play with every day. The ones you trust. The ones that will not leave you during the darkest hours and the ones you want to share with the most glorious moments.  Or to quote an old and tired sitcom, it is “the place where everyone knows your name”.

But then.. you will have social structures built by players that create the larger society.  Feudal structures, ecclesial hierarchies, artisan guilds, military orders, magic schools… whatever really that people are interested in and see a reason to cooperate over across Clan lines.  Some of these meta organizations will be made easier by some sort of game mechanics, but some will arise as emergent gameplay, when players find them advantageous.

Will clans feature any sort of permissions system?

• “Yes we will feature permissions for crafters and other elements in the game and you can decide who to share them with including your guild 🙂”

Chat

Will there be positional/proximity chat as a feature?

• “Thank you for the question Jenny! While we cannot go into too much detail yet in regards to our ingame communication systems we can say that we are hard at work to make it a modern and frictionless experience, stay tuned 🙂”
  

Heartlands

How big is the Heartlands? Are there multiple “heartlands” or safe zones?

[Size, can Heartland fill multiple and sizeable player-cities, how big is the Heartland geographically roughly?]

• 1. Yes.  Huge.  Collectively, even more HUGE.
• 2. Yes
  

• Hey small note here, wonder if anyone will pick it up – the mmorpg.com article seems a bit confusing to many. The map they saw showed one “province” of the world. Each province is 100 square km in size and has multiple heartlands in it. The whole world has multiple provinces in it – we haven’t yet actually revealed the size of the whole world. 🙂”

• I also like to correct a misunderstanding on this topic. We realized that in some articles one thing is incorrect and all the other articles are written based on articles or streamers commenting by using that article as a reference giving incorrect information about the map. The area of a heartland is around 100 km2, and yes there can be more than one heartland but that is not the entire size of the world.

Heartlands are broken up and spread around?

• Yup like real valleys in a real world! You need to travel!

How will land/plot claims work? Will they be protected?

• “The plot of land a player claims will for many be their most important possession. What you build there and the facilities it contains can play strongly into your progression. Placing your plot next to your friends will give you all sorts of advantages. Players who share permissions on their plots can build wonderous things…. No one is going to be claiming 10, 20 or 100 plots”

Will plots and housing feature permissions for storage and access?

• Hey Kryshael thank you for your question! Yes we will feature permissions for crafters and other elements in the game and you can decide who to share them with including your guild

Over World

What will the world size be?

• Translated via google “When we say that Pax Dei has big plans, we can also take that literally. You let off steam in a world of about 100 square kilometers (editor’s note: 38 square miles)that you share with up to 20,000 players per server. It should not be empty either, but filled with interesting places and secrets.”

• Editor Note: World Proven to be larger by Dev Comments

• There will be multiple different provinces each around 100km2, editor’s note: 38 square miles)

• It’s open world. You can travel from any spot to any spot in the game and you never get a private instance of anything

• Pax Dei is a result of the attention from the Divine and the attention of the Divine is strongest around the center of the world.  And with the “Heartlands” being protected by the Pax Dei, I would say that there is a plausible reason to believe they are at least close to the center of the world.

Will players, clans etc be able to venture out into the wild and make their own settlements?

• “We envision locations that can be unlocked to build temporary (or not?) camps and outposts way out in the wilds and beyond.“

Will there be any sort of water exploration?

• “thanks for a great question and for starting this great thread. There are certainly rivers and large bodies of water in the world of Pax Dei. We’re however not ready to talk about what the future holds in this area yet, but stay tuned.”
  
• “Hi! The world is filled with lakes, rivers etc. but at this point we have no news to share. 🙂”
• “Ships and boats have been discussed a lot, but I think it’s safe to say the initial release is very unlikely to include this gameplay. The world does feature water though and there is associated gameplay.”

• There will be water.  There will be wading. There will be swimming.

That is all we have to say on the subject at this point 😉

Will there be terraforming or land shaping?

• “The engine does not allow for much digging, but there are ways to create functional elevations and we use that.”

Will there be private instances? Public instances?

• “Only public. The game aims to maximize human interaction. You’ll never be guaranteed you’re alone anywhere in the world.”

Regarding myths and folklore, what’s the inspiration?

• “We draw from anything that we feel inspires the setting.  You will find some of the classical, many obscure and some beings that you really need to dig deep to find, from folklore around the world.
  
  One thing they all have in common though, is that we have put a lot of effort in making them a natural part of the world.  They are real and waiting to be discovered by unsuspecting explorers…”

• “This question invites a 16 volume omnibus as a reply. But to keep it simple: Lets make a parallel world to ours, where the imaginations of the common medieval mind about good, evil and the spiritual, about myths and fairy tales are all actually true in some form. That kind of lore and setting is obviously inspired by a wide range of things; folk lore from all over Europe, religious writings by some early scholars, ideas about the evil one and all his works, legendary creatures, mythical places, alternate explanations to natural phenomena people did not understand properly and events from history.  I could go on and on, but I hope you get the gist of it.”
  
• In short: Even though we have a main theme, when it comes to the lore and setting, we do pull in influences from all over.

To paraphrase Done´s words, while taking him a bit out of context  : No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… because I am involved in mankind.

Can you talk about how agriculture and harvesting systems will work?

• Flora and Fungi… I cannot imagine any type of craft that will not be using resources from either of those or both.
  
  Also…

• – Flowers can have spiritual meaning.
• – Specific flowers are liked by various beings.
• – Flowers are pretty, the most grateful pets you can have
• – Flowers make for excellent gifts.
• – Some flowers attract certain things
• – Some flowers repel certain things
  
  There is a reason flowers have always been central to human activities…  Onions too!
  

• “Gathering for us is what we call a non system system.  You walk around and gather whatever you like, sometimes using a tool of some sort to do so.”
• “You can water yourself in the game if you build a well!”

Will there be libraries, books, etc.?

This is a long response, so excerpt here, but worth reading the rest!

• “So, books in Pax Dei 🙂 As you can perhaps deduce from the inspirations, we have thought a lot about this and there are grand plans in place for books in the game, almost none of which will be in the Alpha 😉
  
  But like with a lot of other things that will eventually be important to progression and the feeding of various content into the game, I just cannot talk a lot about details. A couple of bits though that may jog your imagination. Things that may happen one day..
  
  Ideally:

– Books should not be a wall of text you need to read through, you should most likely get some quote from the contents, info on who wrote it if it is known, some indication of the  quality of the book and perhaps an indication of if there is anything within that you can glean from it.

• – Books should contain knowledge, recipes, hint at ingredients, locations, history, mysteries…
• – Specific books could be made from scraps, bits and pieces you collect.
• – Books should be researched in order to glean anything from them.
• – Books could even be be copied, skillfully, or not so skillfully
• – Special facilities should make working with books more effective
  
  Yes…  we love books.  The concept of books.  The role of books.  The magic of books. The mystery of books. Books!”
  

Please tell me if there is going to be an awesome fishing feature? … And that it will work hand in hand with cooking? 

• “No MMO survives for long without a brilliant fishing minigame of sorts.  We are fully aware 😉 And yes, if something is harvested in any way, it is totally going to be used in cooking or other crafts. To be sure, I confirmed that we realized the importance of it.  I did not say if we had made it yet!

Will there be an opportunity to play lutes and other musical instruments in the game? 

• “This is a feature we have tried in a lot of games.  It is a feature we love. We have looked at this a bit. For this game, a feature like this needs to allow for player creativity and skill, be fun and meaningful.  When we find a good way of implementing it, it will definitely be high on the list of things we want to do.“

Do distances matter?

• Distances do matter but it’s actually quite complicated topic. We want to encourage exploration and adventuring and make distances also matter in logistics and economy but still we want to make sure a group of friends can enjoy the game together without spending hours on organizing and traveling so I can say we’ve spent a lot of time thinking how to make the world feel huge but not to trivialize traveling or logistics. 🙂

Dungeons

Will there be instanced dungeons and raids?

• “Dungeons are mysterious and dangerous. Mastering that environment should take exploration, experimentation, daring, and practice. Tis is why a dungeon experience is not random.  There, in an enclosed space, the game is doing its best to fend off players who want to enter and rob the place of its riches. Learn its layout, solve its mysteries, get to know the behavior of the inhabitants and you can become an expert in that dungeon, the maven who other players call on to show them the way.”
• Dungeons are not instanced zones, they are part of the greater overworld

The big dungeons are… big
(No kidding – Editors note)

 (Follow back replies)

Big one as in you want to come back many times to really learn it

• I just got lost in a big one and just gave up after 25 minutes of furious running around trying to find my way out

• (snipped) That means large, dangerous dungeons with developing themes. A place where you sneak in with your group and carve out a space that you can handle, trying to beat respawns while hunting for special mobs, interesting drops and uncovering mysteries about the place.

What it also means is that you are not alone.  The place may be full of other players, carving out their little camps throughout the dungeon.  Cooperating with you, or not. Rescuing you if things go bad, or not. Exchanging information, or not. Becoming your friends, or not.

Human interaction.  Maximized.

• One of the design dogmas we have been using is “Maximize human interaction”.  This means that every single feature or mechanic in the game gets the question: How can we make this more interesting, if people are doing it together.
  
  Private instancing of dungeons is completely opposite that goal.
  I cannot talk about PvP when it comes to dungeons at the moment.
  Oh… and the dungeons are of various sizes.  Some can be absolutely humongous.”
• I just got lost in a big one and just gave up after 25 minutes of furious running around trying to find my way out 🙈

Will dungeon loot be protected from ninja-looters?

• “You will have ninja loot protections.”

Will dungeons drop unique Items?

• Dungeons and quests will reward unique items, but just like the player-created ones, you can trade them. 

Exploration

Can one venture out into the wilderness, seeking treasures, rare materials, discovering animals or creatures – seeking knowledge?

• “Wanderer, Adventurer, Scout, Ranger, Explorer…. gather the skills you find aid you in surviving the wilds and boldly go where no one has ventured before, harvesting resources, discovering lucrative locations, hidden lore and wisdom and finding interesting places to die! A beautiful dream.  Make it come true”

Will there be hunger, thirst, and/or survival gameplay elements?

• “I would not describe it as being hunger or thirst, as much as being a situation where you would really benefit in various ways from having good food and drink.”

Will light (Torches, campfires) be important?

• Torches and campfires will have various beneficial effects.

Will there be Consumables?

• The consumables are an important part of role specialization in combat. You will want to carry stuff that fits your play style.

Traversing the world? Modes of Movement, fall damage, climbing?

• When you ask about rope-swinging, are you referring to bungee jumping or more of a Tarzan style activity? On the whole though, I have always been iffy about dangling from a rope 😆

But yes, most of the character traversing you talk about there is something you can expect to do.

We are not going to talk about horses at the moment, even though we are just as excited about that option as anyone else.

Nature

Will players be able to tame animals or have pets?

• “Animals are an integral part of the gameplay. We do want to create a world that feels alive, even when players stumble into a new corner of it. Part of this is having interactions that go well beyond the kill on sight of animals. What those will be specifically is still under wraps”
  
• “I cannot promise anything here at this moment, but obviously a medieval setting requires a lot of interaction with animals, both friendly and otherwise. Ummm   and yes, people imagined and talked about all sorts of monsters back in the day.  I am sure they are not just fabrications out of thin air 😉

Will nature be all around or in hot spots?

• “We want the world to feel real and believable, according to the setting.

Walk outside, look around you.  In your mind remove all houses, roads, replace flattened hills and filled up crevices, add 1000 times more birds and animals, like things were before we killed everything off and mutilated our natural environment with concrete, chemicals, drainage and monocultures.  Oh, and remove any panthers!

It should give you some idea.”

Player Characters

What races will be available?

• Humans; “That is correct. All players are human in Pax Dei”

What level of character customization will there be?

• Quite a lot! Showing those features would make a nice content drop

The Hero’s Journey / Player as a ‘Hero’ & NPC Dynamics

• “Pax Dei does not make anyone a “Hero”.  Who cares what an NPC feels about you or your character? No matter how many quests or how much tribute you give him, the NPC is and will always be a soulless collection of pixels on a screen.

Games who are geared towards what has been called “The Hero´s Journey” do exactly this.  Create an illusion that it matters somehow to you how an NPC feels about you.  But the fact is, the NPC AI has a certain attitude towards your avatar entity, but he does not give a hoot about YOU, the player.  Therefore it turns into a perpetual empty pursuit of happiness.

This is an essential part of why the promise of MMO´s has been broken again and again and again. The Hero that matters is the one who is so in the minds of other players.  The one who uses his time, effort and skills for the good of his fellow players.  And looking at MMO´s separately from other games and what should make them special; This is indeed the only thing that should matter.” 

• Anyone can equip anything to fulfill any roles he wants.  What dictates how the player succeeds are her skills, experience and the people she has the good fortune of getting to know along the way.
  
  Pax Dei is not about the Hero´s Journey, it is not about “grinding to 60”.  Like a great wise woman once said… “there is no spoon”

What will we start with in the game?

• Your character will start with nothing in a zone protected by one of the gods, and as you explore the “procedurally aided” open world and collect resources, you can build a home. 

What are the consequences of death?

• I cannot share at the moment exactly what the effects of dying are, other than I totally agree with the assumption that the “mechanics in Pax Dei [should] motivate players not to die without killing the desire to continue playing in it”

Server Capacity

What will server capacity be?

• “Additionally, Gunnarsson tells me Mainframe’s aim is to allow for up to 20,000 players per shard, so the large world of Pax Dei should be well populated with each player able to build and stake their own claim.” 
  
• “Truly large open world. The game will be sharded, but the shards are… large. With a lot of players in them.”
  
• “Hi birdynomnom, we’re not ready to talk about exact numbers yet but the game will be sharded (meaning there’ll be multiple servers, each with their own community) and those shards will be large.”

Are players able to choose a shard (e.g., to play with friends? Is there travel between shards?

• No response yet

Folks who watch a streamer will [likely] flock to their Heartland / Province. Are plans already in place to keep that from making the shards imbalanced or will y’all take a more “fix it when it’s broken” stance?

• “The plan is still partially being formed as this is super complex. We’re well aware and have been figuring out solutions for a long time already.”

Will there be server types (RP, PVP, etc.)?

• An interesting question.

If you look at what makes for a RP server rule set in lets say.. WoW, or EQ or LoTRO for example, those servers functional difference is very often to take away artificial restrictions the game imposes on players to tailor for the impersonal and/or solo-play nature of the Hero’s Journey.

Another thing that games that are geared towards the Hero’s Journey do, is to have players go through endless premade NPC quest arcs, completely irrelevant to their fellow players.  There is no player communication, no interdependencies, no promises or reason for trust between players, i.e. no basis for roleplaying.

Pax Dei is not about the Hero´s Journey. It has as little artificial restrictions as possible. All meaningful positions within the world are created and filled by players themselves. Your success is dependent not only on your own efforts, but the efforts of the community you are a part of.

So, to answer your question; I am not sure what we would do differently in order to make a special RP rule set for a server.

I am sure there will be servers where people are totally professional badass minmaxers, all business and no afternoon tea parties.  Other servers will be full of people who never see a reason to leave the shade of the party tree.  But those are questions of server culture that develops, nothing about the game or the rules of the game should hinder either.

• “Can’t share any information about servers but I think another way of thinking this is that the whole game is just one huge social sandbox with players building the cities, running the markets and creating content for each other so I see endless amounts of roleplaying opportunities and similar people getting together and enjoying the game the way they like.”

Server regions? South America / Brazil or SEA?

• Regarding Brazil:
  “Of course we intend to release in your region, just as anywhere else.  We are aware of the problem and it is already being looked into.”
  
• “Hey there. To answer your question/concerns about us locking Brazilians out of our community: This is definitely not something we intended to do… To be quite honest, we do not understand why you cannot see Pax Dei in Steam and have been requesting assistance from Steam support as soon as we received the first report. Understanding and fixing this issue is one of our top priority.”

Misc

Are there plans to implement RP mechanics to the game?

• Yes.  Most these things are pretty fundamental to an RPG and definitely planned.

Will there be a first-person perspective?

• “The game currently only supports third person camera, although you are able to zoom the camera very close to your character”

Will we be able to adjust field of view?

• “Hi, there will be an option to toggle the the depth of field on or off, along with some other effects.”

Will players be able to create addons/mods?

• No response yet

Will there be any public API available?

• “We have discussed that we want to have API to support player created tools. The ‘when’ and ‘what’ is not public yet. But this is something we want to have.”

Will Pax Dai be playable on consoles?

• “Eventually we want people to be able to access the game from any device and we have prototypes of various different clients.  For the launch however, we are concentrating on a PC version on Steam.
  
  We also love the “skilling in EVE”, and even though a lot of skills will progress differently, some things will behave similarly to how skills do in EVE.”

Can you share any cloud details?

• “Hi! The only thing we can say right now is the game will come to PC via Steam and that we do intend to bring it to wider audiences on other platforms eventually. If you look at the videos we posted, there’s footage of the game being played on a tablet over streaming. If you look at the streaming market overall, there’s great stuff there that works super well. Nvidia’s Geforce Now allows you to essentially skip purchasing an expensive gaming PC and play your Steam games on their hardware and Microsoft’s Game Pass is a great deal with super well working streaming features.”

What compromises have you made to make the game work ‘Cloud Native’?

• The only part I’ve noticed there’s a difference is with ultra fast paced PvP. Haven’t found a game where PvE doesn’t work well.

Will alpha data be saved/carried over?

• “Unfortunately we cannot promise to save data during the playtests for later releases at this point. Testing might require us to wipe data regularly. So any progression you have earned in that time will be reset upon launch.”
  
• “Alpha implies that the world may have to be wiped and restarted sometime during it, even though we really would only do that as a last resort.  However, before we launch the game for real and people start paying for it, I would absolutely expect a wipe, yes.”

Will alpha be streamable? 

• “We will let you guys know closer to the Alpha what can and cannot be done if you are selected for the Alpha. And don’t try to trick me into providing more information by asking the follow up question “when that would be?!”

Will there be an NDA for Alpha?

• “It is too early for us to say whether or not the next Alpha will be under NDA. Therefore we, unfortunately, cannot answer yet to those specific questions. But we will make sure to make this point crystal clear for those selected!”

Will this be on web3 or metaverse? NFTs?

• “The public information related to this that we’ve said is, the game will initially be available in Steam – you might want to check their crypto policy.”

What languages will the game be translated into?

• “At first, Pax Dei will be released in English, French and German. We will look into providing support in more languages if the community is responsive – we are still looking into this to ensure we can support the community in an appropriate way.”

Will there be VOIP in Pax Dei?

• Anything that “opens the door to massive toxic behavior” is obviously less likely to be implemented than other things

Using voice is something people need to feel safe about and the only way really to do that is through a system where people are invited to voice channels by people who are already there. And indeed, a lot of players are never going to be comfortable using voice.