Pax Dei - A New Social Sandbox MMO

Announced yesterday, Pax Dei is a Social Sandbox MMO, based in a dark medieval fantasy environment, and is being developed in Unreal Engine 5. While Pax Dei will provide players with challenging PvE and PvP content, the main attraction of the game will be the player-driven economy and player-built towns and structures.

Players will begin their adventures in the ‘Heartlands’, a safe area, guarded by the ‘Divine’. In the Heartlands, players will be able to build their own homes, form Clans, and work on their Trade Skills. Players will be able to fashion clothing, armor, & weapons; craft tools, materials, & reagents; and make food & shelter for their fellow villagers.

Outside of the safety of the Heartlands exists the ‘Wilderness’. In the Wilderness, players will be able to progress the storyline of Pax Dei. The Wilderness provides challenging PvE content, where players will fight back against the evil, magical, and supernatural forces that plague the world. The Wilderness will also act as the primary PvP zone within the game, where Clans will fight each other for power, resources, and territory. The further players stray from the safety of their homes in the Heartlands, the more dangerous these challenges will become. But with great challenge also comes great rewards.  Though not many details have been given, it seems that players will have the ability to turn PvP on or off, depending on their preferences.

Unlike many modern MMOs, Pax Dei will feature a classless system. This means that players will be able to switch equipment and play style whenever they want, all on the same character. Similarly, there does not appear to be a limit on the amount of trade skills that a player can utilize. These systems appear to be similar to the recent Amazon Games MMO, New World, where players are able to master any Trade Skill and use any weapon. The developers of Pax Dei have also confirmed that Humans will be the only playable race within this newly announced MMO.

Another unique aspect of Pax Dei is that, other than enemy monsters, there will be no other NPCs in the game. That’s right. All of the weapons, armor, materials, and town structures will come from the players themselves. With no NPCs, that means no quest-givers, so how will players receive quests in Pax Dei? Well, Polygon recently published an article that covers this exact topic. During a private developer showcase, the player-controlled characters stumbled upon an ancient ruin. As they explored this newly discovered structure, they came across a pair of demons, which they handled easily. As they continued to explore the area, they found a book, which detailed the whereabouts of a boss demon nearby. This way of sprinkling hints and clues throughout the game in order to discover PvE objectives is fascinating. It really adds to the tone and immersion of this player-driven world.

The developers of Pax Dei want to bring gamers a true sense of MMO scale, claiming that servers will support thousands of players to engage with concurrently.

But who are these developers anyways?

Mainframe Industries is a Nordic indie studio, with developers who previously worked on games such as EVE Online, World of Warcraft, and the 2019 action-adventure game, Control. Forming in March of 2019, Mainframe quickly raised $2,000,000 from several gaming-related venture capitals. Later, in 2020, Mainframe raised another $8 million in funding from widely-known Venture Capital Firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Riot Games, makers of League of Legends and Valorant. And finally, in 2021, Mainframe Industries was able to secure an additional $20,000,000 from Andreessen Horowitz, Twitch, and King (makers of Candy Crush), putting Pax Dei’s total funding at over $30 million. With around 75 current employees, Mainframe Industries is still looking to expand and grow their development team.

While the game is initially being developed for PC, Mainframe Industries is also working on a cloud-based version of the game that will make Pax Dei playable on both console, and mobile devices as well.

You can register for a chance to participate in the upcoming Alpha Test on Pax Dei’s Official website here.