Yesterday, Mainframe Industries was featured on Summer Game Fest 2023’s PC Gaming Show in nearly twenty minutes of deep dive for their upcoming social sandbox MMO Pax Dei.
Sulka Haro, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer on Pax Dei, outlined the premise for Pax Dei:
Imagine you’re in this amazing, huge beautiful world. You find yourself in a forest and your mission is to find a plot for where you start building a home and from that home, you will go on to adventures to explore the world. This is the core of what you’re doing as a player, but not only are you building that home yourself, you will actually find other players to build a whole village and do the adventures together and improve the quality of life of your clan. You will be able to do all of this in this social fashion and really cooperate with other players rather than doing it alone. You’ll see other people building similar villages and cities and you’ll be able to go to them and trade and do all the social interaction you ever imagined you would be able to do in a game.
The area of the game that you will be able to play when the game launches is called Gallia and it’s very similar to the areas of the real world in southern France with influences from the Nordics where our development team is from.
Haro also said that the gear available in Pax Dei had been designed to be grounded in medieval reality, so there won’t be any weird spikes on your armors, although it will be leaning on the beautiful and intricate designs to inspire beauty.
Later in the interview, the Chief Product Officer from Mainframe Industries said that new players wouldn’t have to wait before contributing in a meaningful way to their clan’s efforts.
We’re putting the least amount of barriers to entry on how you can actually interact with other players. Whereas most MMOs actually put a lot of blocks in how you can cooperate with the other players, we are fundamentally different. From the first minute when you start playing Pax Dei, you will be able to do everything you imagine with the other players. You can trade with other people, you can actually help and literally go into a dungeon raid from the very beginning of your journey in the game should you find people who actually help you to do that.
Another interesting aspect of Pax Dei is that things like magic won’t be just handed over to every player. Instead, there’s a degree of exploration and even deduction involved, and some players may find completely unique spells.
You might find a magic spell that nobody has seen before and you might hear rumors about the magical spell that somebody found. Instead of an NPC force feeding stories down your throat that you don’t have time to listen to because you just do not get the XP and the gold, here you actually read books about the locations in the world because they will reveal hints about hidden trap doors, hidden secrets, hidden spawns. Something might happen on a special day or when the stars align in a certain way. These might be simple things, but they can also be very complex things with the whole community coming together to try to solve these massive mysteries.
Pax Dei doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can sign up for the Alpha test on the official website. You can also wish list the game on Steam, and possibly take a gander at our exclusive interview from when the studio was founded.
