Ambitious new MMO Pax Dei promises the base-building of Rust, politics of Eve Online
polygon.comMainframe Industries, a European video game studio founded in 2019, finally revealed its first project on Wednesday — a new MMO role-playing game called Pax Dei. Mainframe bills it as an “immense, player-driven, social sandbox” filled with political machinations and player groups numbering in the thousands, a heady combination of Eve Online andRust. What Polygon was able to see during a brief, hands-off demo in late February was a tremendously beautiful game, but questions still remain on whether or not the seasoned team of industry veterans can pull off its ambitious goals — which includes a PC version as well as a cloud-based client playable on “any screen,” including consoles and mobile phones.
Pax Dei is high-fantasy MMO filled with gameplay elements borrowed from the survival genre, games like Ark: Survival Evolved. In motion it looks like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, but built with Unreal Engine 5. It boasts impressive lighting and materials interaction, with cloth that ripples realistically, hair that bounces, and shafts of light catching motes of dust as they stream through the windows of rural cottages. Moreover, the game borrows its economic model from Eve, meaning that both geography and scarcity will play a role in a dynamic marketplace.
“Being an MMORPG, harvesting and crafting are core pillars of the experience in the game,” said Mainframe CEO Thor Gunnarsson. “But in our world, the weapons, the armor, the construction pieces needed for your village, these are all items that are crafted and manufactured by the players themselves. So essentially, all of the things that you can gain access to in the world have been produced by someone else in the game.”
A big element of gameplay in Pax Dei is exploration,
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