Is there not a thread on Pax Dei? Alright, guess i’ll start one up.
Pax Dei is an new MMO/survival game (they’re calling it ‘social sandbox’) by Mainframe. A cursory look at their history shows that it was founded about a year ago in Finland, and have raised about €30M in financing to date. Based on what they wrote up on their website, they’re aiming at a ‘medieval eve-online’. Yesterday marked their first NDA-free alpha test and I hopped on board to check it out.
First impressions: character selection was pretty good. There’s about 20 prefab characters that you can choose from, and then you can tweak them(at least facially) to pretty significant degree. Body offers you a little less customization, and though there’s nothing too new here that i saw, you should be able to create a character that you like.
Server choices seems pretty straightforward - regional split. And after that…a server name. I’m not sure what I chose after that - there seems to be different maps, or are they subsections of a larger map? I’m not sure if that’s a one-time choice, or there’s any movement between those maps. I chose “Ancien” for no real reason, and then after that, there’s starting area.
First glance, it’s very pretty. The world is very vertical, with towering mountain ranges and gorgeous valleys and rivers. I’ll have some screenshots when the servers come back online.
Gameplay wise, it seems heavily tilted towards crafting (player interaction in the alpha seems limited to emotes and integration into clans) , and there are very definite new world and valheim influences. The game so far feels a bit ‘slushy’ when it comes to movement, and coming out of a sprint or out of a action animation has a bit of a ‘sliding’ feel to it. Combat, at least to the extent I’ve done it (killing deer and boars for the most part) is also a bit loose, with no ability to lock on to an enemy and the same sort of ‘sliding’ as you try to hit something.
I’ll be back in a bit with some images and more impressions.
I’ve watched the previous Alpha and participated a bit in this one (maybe 4 hours worth). Technically the game runs fine. The animations are ok, nothing great but not janky either. They’ve got time to improve those aspects of the game so I’m not going to ding them for that. Gathering and building seems reasonable.
However, given the pace of advancement, it feels like a game that is very much designed towards group play. For example, one of the bullet points in the alpha announcement email was this:
- It is dangerous to go alone. Denizens of the world will now present a real challenge. Don’t wander away from home without a party and the proper equipment.
In addition, the breadth and amount of materials you need to advance your skills is daunting. I suppose one person could theoretically do everything by themselves, but it seems to me they’d only do so at a glacial pace. And everything you build (after the initial few crafting stations) needs a variety of materials, all of which you need to go out and find. Plus, there’s no crafting from chests and that sucks!
I watched some videos of the prior alpha from Asmongold. He had a bunch of folks helping him out (maybe 50 or 60), harvesting and building structures. They built a gigantic castle in the middle of a lake. It was quite impressive. But only accomplished by having a great many people gathering materials and dumping them into chests for the builders to use. It was quite impressive what they built. But definitely not something that a single person could do in a reasonable timeframe.
Why do scandavian developers hate life? Maybe it’s all developers? I dunno, but fuck is it frustrating.
What’s troubling you, pyrhic?
Ok, well, since you asked. You’re starting the game, and since it’s about crafting, that means by default, it’s also about inventory and item management. So obviously, you should bury your first storage device about(chest) about 3 layers deep. Now to make this chest (which holds only 12 items), you need 8 rough planks and 20 wooden pegs. To make these, you need a wood block. The pegs stack in units of 20, and you make 5 at a time for 1 wood. The planks stack in 10s, and you make 3 at a time for 1 wood (iirc). Now, of course, early on, your woodworking skills suck, so you can fail as you make the items, meaning you dont make the item AND you lose some % of the items you crafted with. Sometimes this now just goes back into inventory, but sometimes this just gets thrown on the ground (hopefully, this is a bug). Each one of these ‘presses’ takes between 2-5s to complete, so that’s probably 10s to produce the pegs, and about 15s to produce the boards. Now you have to go to the woodworking table and make your chest. And this can also fail. And you can lose some mats in the process. And they might be on the ground. And(though i’m not sure about this), they might be lootable by other players. Anyways. So now you make your chest, and while its in your inventory, you can only place it by going to your crafting hammer, then going to your crafting menu, selecting props, and then chest, and you place it. Ugh.
Now, making this even more fun, every item has its own stacking limit. This isnt new to games, but…some of the ones theyve chosen make little sense. Pegs: 20, Planks: 10, Beams: 5 - that sound reasonable. Reeds: 50, Flax: 20, Cotton: 10…um. Charcoal: 50, Iron ore 20, iron : 10 - shouldnt you be able to stack more of the refined material? It’s like they just threw it all into a random number generator.
So then we get to the funnest part. So wanting more than 12 item storage, i decide i want to make a decorated chest. I dunno if this holds more than the standard chest, but it is further down the tree and its icon image looks better. Unfortunately, the material costs are considerably higher. 30 nails, 2 hinges, and i think 10 higher quality boards. Well, here’s the process to make this:
there we go…let it all out…
I could get by the QOL issues and awkward UI – wouldn’t be the first time. But is this forced PvP? Forced full-loot PvP? The Eve-Online reference rang that alarm for me. That kind of gameplay is just not my cuppa.
Looking into the valley where i built my base…
Draw distance is really good, this is dusk, and all the player bases shine with firelight
In the day, it’s more impressive…
Much like valheim, you can see it utilizes a 3 food buff system, with each food providing some measure of health/stamina/regen. I imagine the first slot (above the central health/stamina bars) is for a potion buff (i haven’t played around with alchemy yet). As near as i can tell, all the terrain is accessible - behind me in this shot, a steep mountain rises, and i was able to summit that to come nearly eye level with the majority of the large peaks here, including that one to the right (which i also summited today).
It looks super grindy with systems designed to keep you playing rather than to have fun. Ill pass on this game unless I hear otherwise. I am sure it will never amount to anything. It will just be another MMO in a sea of MMOs.
So… if it’s going for that Eve feel, shouldn’t it all be in one “server”?
The rest, needing other people to do some stuff, can’t do all yourself, non consensual fighting, yeah, that tracks, hope they have the equivalent to high sec, low sec and 0.0…
Reminds me of Wurm a bit on a quick glance. At least that didn’t have stacking limits by number, I don’t believe, but everything was by weight.
Still, looks like something I could enjoy. Heck, I even liked the glacial pace of Wurm Unlimited when you could make your own servers.
That’s a lot of words for “the game respects my time fuck all”. Being grindy is one thing. Being able to waste hours of gathering on a failed crafting attempt is…something else.
If I was to make a wild prediction, this sets up any servers for being dominated by a bunch of no-lifers with a guild that can (and will) roflstomp any new characters simply due to the fact that they have put in the man hours to craft the “horrifying bastard sword of n00b slaying” while you were stuck desparately trying to convert a small forest into crafting mats to get the “slightly pointier poking stick”. Maybe they’ll be nice and keep you as a woodcutting tool/buttmonkey, EVE style.
Thanks, but no thanks. If I am to suffer, I expect to be paid at least.
Ya, I can’t disagree.
Just now i found a recipe in my collection for a small barrel that said something like ‘holds a significant amount’, so i figured i’d attempt to make it. Thing is, i needed 2 large iron sheets to try it. To make iron large iron sheets, i need 4x iron sheets (2 iron ore each) - and I burned through all 20 iron ore i had just trying to make large iron sheets. I now have no iron sheets, no large iron sheets, and certainly no barrel. And near as i can figure it, because I wasn’t sucessful, i didn’t earn any xp towards levelling up my blacksmithing…so it’s a fail until you succeed system that I don’t see any way of subverting.
Here’s the crafting menu on my station. Stars beside the item indicate that it’s trivial (guaranteed success and no xp for crafting, afaik), and all the cloverleaves indicate my chance to succeed at it. Funy thing, even the ones that are 4/4 cloverleaf still have about 25% chance of failure. Large sheets, which i’m highlighting here, i believe have a 4/8 chance of success (at least that’s what i think 4/8 signifies) - note that the cloverleaf is only an approximation of that chance, the iron pommel below was 4/9. The other thing to note is the little scroll icon beside some items (in this case, the large iron axe blade that’s two down) - that indicates a new recipe will be learned if you can successfully build this.
Anyways, I guess what you’re supposed to do is take a chance at creating the item and gaining xp for it, or else build a bunch of lower risk items, that you either dump or store, to bring up your expertise so that you might have a greater chance of creating the thing you want. Either way, it’s a lot of time and resources spent.
And with that bit of frustration, that’s probably it for me and this alpha. Hopefully they improve on some of those design decisions in future builds. I’ll leave you with a shot of home:
Note that unlike valheim, the attending stations do not modify the ‘main’ station, but are complete and separate stations on their own. For instance, at the corner of the house, you have (going counterclockwise) a pair of boxes i use for wood and iron, then the base blacksmithing station, then the stone anvil, then the basic weaponsmithing station, and to complete that section there is the foundry(i think its called) on the other side of the well. Each one of these produces different things (except the stone anvil looks like it can be replaced by the foundry, but i dont know for sure yet). Continuing along the side of the house, i have another storage box(for tailoring items), steps, the basic tailoring station, the spinning wheel and the loom, followed by the tanning station, the leatherworking station and the fletchery station. I also haven’t yet unlocked the pottery station (which i assume is for the potions), the distillery or the apothecary stations. And there’s 4 food stations so far too (inside the house), including a charcuterie station because…i dunno, pain is good.
