Pax Dei Early Access Q&A – Mainframe Talks Improvements from the Wilderness Alpha, Monetization and Much More

Pax Dei, the sandbox MMORPG in development at Iceland-based studio Mainframe Industries, has found a publishing partner in New Tales, the French team that helped publish the free-to-play collectible card game Waven.

Together, Mainframe and New Tales announced that Pax Dei will debut in early access in exactly two weeks, on Tuesday, June 18. Pre-purchase is available starting today on the official website, with various Founder's Packs options, and the game will be playable via Steam or the dedicated Pax Dei launcher.

Mainframe doesn't shy away from the fact that the game is still very much in Alpha and, as such, in 'heavy' development. It will stay in early access for at least a year, during which major changes will be introduced. At times, full wipes of character progress may even take place. The first big post-launch update will introduce markets and a gold economy to Pax Dei.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Sulka Haro, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Mainframe, to discuss the game's current state and its future throughout early access.

 

When I talked to Thor four years ago, he told me the original goal was to make a cloud-native game Cloud native. It was meant to run directly on cloud servers, but that seems to be gone now. Can you speak to this fundamental change?

We still very much want to publish the game across all platforms, including mobile devices, and see streaming as a critical part of that rollout. 5 years ago, it looked like the game streaming platforms were on a steep rise, and we were assuming there would be a widely available ecosystem for distributing games using streaming available by the time we ship the game. This ended up not happening due to a variety of things and we still have a game we’d like to grant access to, so we’re launching on PC first. But as said before, there are plans to expand the available platforms later.

Will Pax Dei be available to play on GeForce NOW and/or other cloud services? If so, when?

We fully intend to bring the game out to a much wider selection of distribution platforms. As a matter of fact, we’ve announced back in January that we’re working on making Pax Dei available on GeForce Now. Not in June, though! Let’s get this PC launch out of the way first.

Will there be support for Steam Deck?

There’s no official support at this time.

During the Wilderness Alpha, I noticed the lack of proper controller support. Is it coming at the early access launch or later?

We’re actively working on improving the controller access. We don’t have a locked-down ETA for it at this point, but we do want to have this available before too long.

The combat felt quite barebones, especially due to the stiff animations. Are you looking to improve that?

Absolutely. The combat system in the Early Access build has already been improved quite a bit in terms of responsiveness, but we can see how we still have to work a lot to get the combat to the level we aspire. We just did a planning session with the whole team and did agree that combat improvements is one of the focus areas for the rest of the year.

Is there a set amount of active combat abilities that players will have at their disposal?

Each one of the weapons (and shields) has a special ability, which we’re improving all the time. Additionally, we’re adding more spells to a larger selection of gear. If you only played the game for a short period of time in the Alpha, you may never get your hands on the spell gear - as you play in PvE, you can find Relics, which unlock recipes for wearables and wieldables that grant you spells, most of which are in form of active combat abilities.

Other MMOs have class-specific special resources (rage/energy/mana, etc.). Will you add something like that to Pax Dei? What about Ultimate abilities?

Our game doesn’t have classes - we use the gear you’re using to effectively create the classes. So when you go raiding, you’ll want to choose gear that matches the role you want to play (which in turn grants you spells once you’ve found some Relics). This system eliminates the need for class-specific resources - we use stamina to gate the spells and abilities you get from the gear. Not related, we are planning to introduce a second resource by the end of the year that will, to some degree, have a similar role in the game.

Previously, you said that magic would be rather rare in the game. Is that still the case? Do you have to work hard to find magic spells?

When you start the game, you have no access to magic. As you progress in the game, you can find Relic, which unlock recipes that allow manufacturing gear that grants you spells and abilities when worn or wielded. The relics for more powerful spells are quite challenging to find, and as the Relics are consumed as part of the crafting process, magic items indeed are not common, and the powerful spells will be quite rare.

Is all gear going to be tradeable? Could you conceivably lend high-end gear to a newbie to make them competitive right away?

Yes, we don’t gate trading and/or using items with character progression. Having said that, new characters will not have progressed in the skills and will not be able to effectively use advanced gear, and of course, a new player is unlikely to have the player skills needed to maximize the use potential of the gear. What this means in practice is that a twinked new player will be immediately useful to you but will not be as powerful as an experienced player with a character that’s in the skill cap in the progression.

In terms of PvE, you talked about the dungeon. Is there a limit to player numbers in dungeons? How does instancing work for dungeons? Could you find other groups there?

Each dungeon has a maximum capacity of players that can be in the same instance at a time. The number is based on the dungeon size & performance requirements to ensure the gameplay experience in the dungeon is pleasant. The instances are not made specifically for a party, so you can find other groups in the dungeons, and new instances are created as needed if the dungeon is full. There’s a system related to the instances in Pax Dei that looks at which instance your party & clan members are and automatically picks the instance with your friends if multiple instances are active. The system also has a different “soft” and “hard” caps for the player routing to give it room to do this social matching to maximize the probability you always end up in the correct instance. This same system also applies to the open world areas of the game, where if a Heartland or Wildland reaches the soft cap, it gets instanced, after which we prioritize the instance for you based on where your friends are.

Will PvP work in dungeons, allowing fights between different groups?

Currently, no - we do not want to create significant PvE content in the game that’d be locked behind PvP flags, so players who do not want to participate in PvP don’t feel like we’re forcing them to PvP. Having said that, we are working on an expansion to the PvP system, which will allow players to flag themselves for PvP in a manner that will also work in dungeons. We’ll tell more about this later.

You spoke about potential rewards for PvP, so what are people getting from PvP activities except for loot from the defeated foes?

Currently, PvP is enabled in Lyonesse, a central area in the world accessible from the four Provinces that feature the buildable areas. Entering the area flags you for PvP. The risk/reward related to entering Lyonesse is about the resources you can find in the area - for example, Pure Iron, which is very good for advanced gear manufacturing, is relatively common in Lyonesse (and very rare outside of the area).

I believe Clan Wars were also mentioned somewhere in the presentation slides. Is that feature coming during the early access phase?

We are indeed working on an expansion to the PvP system, and yes, this will launch during the Early Access. The system is not tied directly to the Clans - the PvP organizations are independent of the Clan memberships of the players. We’re assuming some Clans might choose to go all in on PvP and have the PvP organization and the clan memberships match 1:1, but this is up to the players, and we’re sure there will be interesting mixing of clans across the different organizations.

How would those work? Will there be sieges and stuff like that?

We do want to pull off sieges eventually, but in the short term the PvP will be skirmish based. We’ll tell everyone more once we have a better idea of when the features are going to ship to players!

Will there be some bigger PvP-enabled area than Lyonesse at some point?

The entire world will eventually be PvP-enabled. Having said that, the players who do not want to PvP will not be forced to do so and the plots you’re building are sacrosanct and protected by the Divine Peace, so no destruction will come to the villages players are building currently.

You've listed Churches and Feudal System as upcoming Pax Dei features. How do those systems work? What about Altars and Miracles?

The altars will enable new gameplay through Grace, a new resource attainable from the altars used for Miracles and churches are built… around the altars. Grace will also allow anointing Knights, who are PvP flagged across the entire world, which forms the basis of the Feudal System. We’ll tell more about this when we’re a bit closer to shipping these features.

You said transitions to other provinces will require load times. Is there no way to make it seamless at some point?

Currently, when you play the game, it’s pretty rare to get to a loading screen during a typical play session as the 100 square kilometer provinces already provide a huge area for exploration. At this moment, there are practical limits to level sizes, and 100 square kilometers is already pushing it when it comes to seamless travel in the world. We’ll probably look into this at some point, but at the moment we think our time is better spent on other things like improving the combat feel and adding the new game systems discussed earlier.

Can you move between different instances, perhaps to find friends?

At the moment we don’t have a feature for the players to move between instances. We’ll probably add this eventually, but at the moment this is not critical as the way we’ve implemented the instancing areas means players very rarely experience areas that need instancing and when they do, we have the matchmaking system that places layers into the instance with their friends, so it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever experience a moment where you’d need to hop between instances.

What options will there be to reach distant players with fast travel?

At the moment, the only fast travel option is the ability to return home. We’re likely to keep the fast travel in the world very, very restricted, as we want distance to matter in the game. There will be features to make travel more pleasant (mounts will definitely appear in the game eventually).

Regarding character customization, will you add more faces and cosmetic options?

Absolutely.

In the Pax Dei Wilderness Alpha, even with DLSS 3 enabled on a PC equipped with an RTX 4090 GPU, the game stuttered every few hundred meters. Will you solve that problem in time for the early access launch?

We’ve made several improvements to the content loading, and you should see significant improvement in reducing those stutters in the Early Access build. The stutters were caused by a multitude of issues not related to the GPU, and the work on these, with the help of some of the profiling data we gathered during the Alpha, has paid off very well. We have a few remaining issues, which we’ll address as part of upgrading to a newer version of the Unreal Engine later this year.

What other improvements have you made to Pax Dei since the last Alpha test?

We’ve made a ton of changes that improve the combat responsiveness. Almost everything that can be touched regarding balancing (from combat to recipes) has been touched. We (finally) have rebinding support. There’s literally a few hundred bugs that have been fixed since the Alpha 2 And other things… we’ll soon be publishing extensive release notes that cover a lot of this in detail.

I know you're using Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and Nanite. Will you keep updating it as Epic releases new versions?

That is the plan, yes. We’re currently using UE 5.2.1 and have already started working on the upgrade all the way to UE 5.4. We’ll ship the Early Access build with the current engine version and are hoping the first bigger update to the game a few months after the launch will already be using a newer engine version.

You've hinted that the game could eventually require an active subscription to play. However, only three of the oldest MMOs (EVE Online, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy XIV) still use that business model. Aren't you worried you might alienate many people unwilling to pay a monthly fee?

The final business model for Pax Dei is not decided yet. In Pax Dei, you’re building your home in the “real” world. Whatever gets built on a given player’s plot must always be maintained - that’s costly (not to mention technically challenging). We also need a system to free up land once players leave the game (or become ‘inactive’). This system will be crucial in keeping the world alive, full of activity and opportunities to meet friends, and avoid having areas of the game become ghost towns. Coupling this with monetization seems to be a well-understood and generally accepted model - in the existing Pax Dei community, at least.

We have yet to fully determine the exact shape and form (and price!). this will take. The good old-fashioned subscription model is certainly something we’re looking at. Still, we are also considering other options, with an eye on balancing the simplicity of usage while allowing players to choose how they want to engage with the game. We also indicated we intended to offer a free tier, allowing players to discover the game before committing to it.

We’re committed to being transparent with our model and we’ll keep our players updated on our progress, with an increasing amount of details and with space to experiment and adjust based on sensitivities and data.

What are the odds you'll expand Pax Dei to consoles after the early access phase?

The funding theory behind Mainframe was to make a game playable on every screen. We’re not excluding anything. That said, let’s get things right on PC first!

Thank you for your time.

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