Development Information

* (Editor’s note: UE 5.1 feature highlights) - Unreal Engine 5.1 Feature Highlights

### How long has Pax Dei been in development?

* Per the Mainframe website, since at least March 2019 - https://themainframe.com/en/

### 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
* Additional funding information can be found at Mainframe’s site  https://themainframe.com/en/

### 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.