Pax Dei: Fantasy style EVE?

Yougottawanna

UPDATE: Game is in early access at playpaxdei.com/en-us/early-access

Pax Dei (official website) is a recently (February 2023) announced sandbox MMO.

Here's the announcement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF5RJcqujz0

and the initial trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAOQN9NF0bY

As someone who's been waiting for years and years for someone to iterate on the EVE Online concept, this looks very promising. Many of the leads are ex-CCP (developer of EVE) veterans.

The name refers to the "divine peace" that rules over the central part of the gameworld, where it looks like there will be little to no pvp. Outside of that center, things will become more dangerous and there will probably be no-opt-out pvp. According to the announcement, they'll be using at least some procedural generation (mixed with custom-designed areas) to generate the world.

The gameplay looks to be more actiony, as opposed to hotbar/tab target. Some clips showed reticule aiming for a bow.

If the devs' statements are accurate, all or nearly all of the structures in the world will be player-made - meaning that almost everything will be player-driven, from construction to economy and (potentially) politics.

If it sounds interesting, there's an alpha you can sign up for on their website. No idea whatsoever when the alpha will be launched.

Yougottawanna

Hopelessly optimistic space reserved

V1m

Hopefully they learned some lessons from Darkfall

Skeith

Yougottawanna wrote: »

The gameplay looks to be more actiony, as opposed to hotbar/tab target. Some clips showed reticule aiming for a bow.

If the devs' statements are accurate, all or nearly all of the structures in the world will be player-made - meaning that almost everything will be player-driven, from construction to economy and (potentially) politics.

If it sounds interesting, there's an alpha you can sign up for on their website. No idea whatsoever when the alpha will be launched.

Reminds me of Landmark.

Yougottawanna

New trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp-CMQR6Uns

Doesn't really show much new though. Supposedly there's going to be some kind of early access or alpha thing this Spring?

Skeith

There's supposed to be another alpha soon, the first one was a couple months ago. It sounds like early access is how they're phrasing their beta.

Xaquin

I've been following this and it seems like there's been a bit of backlash over potential in game purchases

hopefully that gets dropped because this game looks like a ton of fun

Yougottawanna

I don't mind them implementing a PLEX-like system. I personally don't like cash shops, even if they're just for cosmetics.

Xaquin

I'm hoping for a flat fee or a monthly subscription is all

Skeith

Anyone else make it into the upcoming alpha?

Skeith

Here are my thoughts on the game, as it stands. Alphas being what they are I wasn't expecting perfection, or anything all that close to it, but I'm worried that without some major redesigns this game will be a flash in the pan. The crafting systems are interdependent like FFXIV, but the problem is there are 16 different gathering and crafting skills and all of them are a bear to level. For example, you have cooking, baking, and charcuterie, whereas in other games you'd just have cooking. It's not active the way FFXIV's system is either, it's more like WoW where you interact with a station and wait for a bar to fill-- if it fills more than half with red, it fails and you get some materials back. Material requirements are steep and stack sizes are small, and usually not aligning neatly with what a given recipe needs: for example, to make rawhide, you need eight large animal skins, but they stack to five. That's a problem when you have to go ranging far to find a given material. As far as I can tell there's no way to increase inventory size, either. Building is a little janky, but it reminds me of Valheim in a good way, where build pieces will be on a color spectrum from green to red if they aren't properly supported, with bright red pieces breaking down seconds after being placed. Gathering feels fine, but there's no indication that those skills actually doanything. Different plants and ores are found in different biomes, some of them in the home valleys and some in the wilds. Combat feels janky, lots of animation lock. I understand that this is an MMO and they need to keep players engaged long enough to make something with monetization, but I don't see how that'll work unless it's a subscription model. I'll keep adding stuff to this post as I think of it.

edit- the big thing I ran into is that the game feels hostile if you're playing solo. It can feel like you're not making progress, even after hours of trying to level crafting skills. That shit is poison if you're trying to sustain an MMO.

V1m

It sounds like they're trying to strongly incentivise co-operating (or at least interacting) with other players.

Skeith

For sure, but I think it goes a bit too far in that direction. The worry I have is that it'll turn into a pile of zerg guilds. They didn't even have zone wide chat in the alpha, just a local/say and clan communication.

V1m

"Fantasy style EVE", I guess.

Hopefully they'll avoid the Titan Trap

Jasconius

It sounds like they're trying to strongly incentivise co-operating (or at least interacting) with other players.

as we know, this only means that people will be running 8 accounts.... just like eve! and every other game in history that has ever tried to do interlinked crafting going back to SWG

New World didn't do much right, but they at least understood that you might as well let everyone do everything because thats what your best customer is going to do anyway

Yougottawanna

I like the crafting style because I hope it'll drive a player-driven economy. What I DON'T like right now is the game's performance. I don't have a beast rig or anything but it plays Elden Ring and BG3 with no problem, but I can't get more than like 8FPS on this game even on the lowest settings, and there's a full 1.5 seconds of input lag. Am I doing something wrong here? Right now I just can't play the game.

Skeith

No, you're not. It wasn't well optimized in the alpha either.

Lucascraft

I've been following this game from afar, but have not bought the early access yet, or participated in any of the alpha/betas.

I did see a clip of one of the more recent alphas where Asmongold managed to organize a huge bunch of his community to build an entire mountain fortress town. That was neat.

Reading early impressions of the early access, I'm getting the feeling that they released too early. It sounds like a huge chunk of the promised features, including a lot of the social and economic stuff is not in, and at this point, this is just a bare-bones craft/build/survive game with a slightly higher than normal player count, but missing a ton of feature parity with other craft/build/survive games.