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.

### Is Pax Dei designed only for MMO experiences or can solo players also partake?

* “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.”
* "You absolutely can have a meaningful and compelling experience playing solo. It really depends on the expectations. Can you explore the most dangerous parts of the dungeons alone? Probably not, but you definitely can experience adventures and do PvE alone or you can just harvest resources and focus on building and crafting alone and sell your goods and minimize the social interactions or dependencies on other players."

### 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?

(*editor's note - this is a long comment, worth a full read*) "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..."

### 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 client on steam for PC users that runs and computes the game locally while communicating with a server or do you plan to stream the video of the game from a cloud gaming provider to steam users?

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

### Can I play 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.”

### 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."

* "Unlikely. Takes a lot of effort to add the controls, need to make the PC version good first. And there's no hardware that could render the game fast enough for VR"

* I'm not saying "never" but don't hold your breath this would happen any time soon.

* "There are plenty of 3rd person VR games but I guess everyone here is talking about 1st person view. Enabling VR is easy with UE, it’s the completely different inputs, UI and movement physics that take the most time and are even more difficult in a game that’s fully designed as a 3rd person game."

* “There was some discussion about this previously. Not saying never but very unlikely to happen as it requires doing so many things completely differently. Just the fact that a lot of our game’s UX and feedback is based on the character appearances and animation makes the game really hard to do in 1st person and 3rd person VR doesn’t really offer enough to be worth spending the time on implementing it.”

### Support for ultra-wide? What aspect ratios will be supported? (21:9, 32:9 specifically asked)

* “At least currently the game is using vertical FOV and I've been using 32:9 display without issues. I tested various aspect ratios and there's no need for black bars. 🙂”

* “The game is definitely playable. I’ve used 32:9 all this time but there are obviously a lot of details and things that take extra attention like UI/HUD scaling and placement but overall we want to offer options and customization. It might just take some time to cover all the permutations and setups. The game view is the same, on wide screens it’s just wider.”

### 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 😉"

### Is there a list of developers? (credit to [Aetherius] Ryve Genesis)

* https://ryvegenesis.com/pax-dei-development-team/