Pax Dei, a new medieval MMO, will blend elements of Rust with Eve Online

Mainframe 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 machinationsAnd player groups numbering in the thousands, a heady combination of Eve Online and Rust. 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 DeiThis MMO is fantasy-filled and features gameplay elements taken from survival games such as Ark: Survival Evolved. This is what it looks like in motion Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls 5Unreal Engine 5 is used to build this model. The game boasts amazing lighting effects and material interaction. There is cloth that ripples and hair that bounces. Light shafts catch dust motes as they flow through rural cottage windows. It also draws its economic model. EveA dynamic marketplace will have both scarcity and geography.

A distant village near a mountain lake. There’s a church-like structure, backlit by the sun and distant mountain ranges.

Light streams through a window in a rural home to illuminate an alchemists bench, with scales and equipment for heating elements.

“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.”

The key element to gameplay is the ability to use your imagination. Pax Dei The first is exploration. Small groups of people will be working together in early games to establish connections to settlements. These opening moments are crucial. Pax Dei’s nuance is immediately clear, and it begins with how its geography impacts gameplay.

The Heartlands are green, ethereal areas where players will start their quest. They can build small villages together with their clan and plant crops. Gunnarsson quickly points out that any place the player can see is somewhere they can go. What’s even more interesting is what will motivate them to try and get there.

“When it comes to venturing from the Heartlands,” Gunnarsson said, “really the next area is the Wilderness. Here is where danger lurks. Mysteries are interspersed throughout the world, and you begin to unveil the ancient lore of the world — its wondrous past — really through what we call sort of internally ‘indirect mysteries.’”

A group of adventurers with a horse hold torches on the edge of a misty glade at night.

A warmly-lit interior of a ruin with barrel-vaulted ceilings, including Roman-inspired frescoes.

A vaguely Irish castle, its towers shorn off at 45 degree angles. A mist shrouds the structure, revealing a tiny bridge to its entrance.

It was interesting to see developers play through an in-game quest. This is a very different experience than other MMOs. Lead game designer Pétur Örn Þórarinsson, formerly a game design director working on EveThe controls were held by. First he donned his armor — a pauldron and a breastplate — showcasing how the light reflected off its surfaces. It’s the kind of Unreal Engine demo that we’ve seen for years, with incredibly high resolutions and a tremendous amount of realistic detail — not something you’ll find in legacy MMOs. Then he headed off down a forest path, leaving his clan’s tiny patch of the Heartlands behind.

The party was accompanied by two companions controlled by players. They stumbled upon a Roman ruin with limestone walls that resembled the arches in an aqueduct that dates back to 2,000 years. There, in a corner of a basement closet, were a pair of demons — humanoid forms made of flies. Bright spells and mad sword blows were visible to lower its hit points. BorderlandsThe demon died quickly. Þórarinsson’s further exploration revealed a book resting on a bench upstairs. After reading the book, Thorarinsson discovered that there was another larger demon in the area. After scouting the area, it was discovered that the boss demon was a tall and four-winged pile full of filth, who killed off the party within a matter of minutes.

These kinds of diegetic quests — little clues scribbled in a book, on the inside of a ring, or carved into the surface of a piece of pottery — will be what moves the narrative forward and reveals the mysteries of this world to its players. The Heartlands, which are intrinsically secure and high, will lead to deeper, more dangerous places. Pax DeiThese are the places where you will find all of your real adventure.

“We don’t intend to just like expand outwards,” Þórarinsson said. “More often than not, we want to expand inward, actually making the dungeons deeper. [Say that] you’ve been playing for four years, and then something happened to the world. You now have an excuse to return. […]Because there was a door at the bottom the dungeon [that is now suddenly open] — or an underground lake that is cleared […]A bridge has fallen. Something has changed, and now you have another reason to go there and actually go deeper than you did before.”

Players observe a donkey and a cow near a forested cottage.

Players line up against a bear-like monstrosity that has holed up in a fieldstone ruin.

A player with a spear fights a bear in a forest.

But while Mainframe boasts a deep bench of talent — including additional veterans of CCP Games (Eve Online), Blizzard Entertainment, Ubisoft, Rovio, and Remedy (Alan Wake) — many unanswered questions remain about its design. How will the game’s opt-in player-versus-player combat work, and what will the stakes be for clan-versus-clan engagements? How will governance — both between players and between Mainframe and its community — even work when thousands of players are competing to rule? Pressed for details, developers couldn’t say.

“This is a social sandbox game,” said Gunnarsson, early in the presentation. “It is designed with human interaction and social play at its heart, and we are aiming to offer some new and innovative ways for our players to come together with friends — and then hopefully some some enemies — along the way.”

While the PC version of the game is first available, it will also be accessible on mobile devices. Pax DeiThe game is described as being cloud-based. The goal, developers say, is to be able to play the game on consoles and mobile devices utilizing “cloud gaming platforms,” according to the news release. However, we were unable to see any of the functionality during our brief demo.

Next phase Pax Dei, Gunnarsson said, is an extensive testing period where the experienced team’s theories and technology will be put to the test. An alpha version of the game will be coming to PC soon, and players are encouraged to sign up at the website and join in the discussion on Mainframe’s Discord.

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