Game Information

What is Pax Dei, who is the target audience? What monetization will it follow and what platforms are supported?

What is Pax Dei?

Summary

Pax Dei aims to be a vast, social sandbox MMO inspired by the legends of the medieval era. In Pax Dei, myths are real, ghosts exist, and magic is unquestioned. In this immense, open-world playground, the player chooses the role they want to play. Fully immersing themselves in the world with thousands of other players, exploring the land, building homes, forging reputation and crafting their own stories.

The developers FAQ can be found here: Pax Dei Official FAQ

What does "Pax Dei" mean?

“Divine Peace”
More information can be found in the Lore category.

What are the major existing games Pax Dei draws inspiration from?

Current state

Alpha

The game is currently in Alpha state according to the developer. Sign-up for joining alpha-testing is available through the official Pax Dei website and may involve an NDA.

The first wave of Alpha testers will be invited "before too long™" and will start in a region of Gallia.
Here are the two most current quotes from the developer which gives a more detailed answer to the current state of the game/testing:

We’re still a few months away from a large-scale Alpha test. Rest assured that when we’re ready to announce it, we’ll publish official communication with all details.

We are running regular, small playtests under NDA with our friends and family to test parts of the game we intend to have available for larger-scale testing. One should start pretty soon, actually. We’re sorry we can't add you to these playtests, but they will primarily be used to test specific features and setups in preparation for the Alpha which we can invite you to.

Target audience

The "no-hero" MMO

Pax Dei won't treat you like a hero, but still wants to appeal to a wide range of player types who do seek social interaction. Be it trading, crafting, venturing out into the world exploring, gathering, joining demanding PvE/PvP, building a home, a village or even a city. Pax Dei aims to provide a sandbox where everyone matters, no matter how they want to play the game.

Development Team & Tools

Team size

According to a developer, there are about 70 people working on Pax Dei at the moment. 60 of them are developers (including QA, backend, infrastructure, design etc.). The other folks take care of publishing, customer support, analytics, team- and studio management. And there's the CEO!

More information can be found in the FAQ about Mainframe Industry.

Development tools

Apart from Unreal Engine 5.1, some other tooling is used, including Blender, Maya and Modo.

FAQ about the team at Mainframe Industries

At Mainframe, we are good people. This is our motto that we try to apply in our everyday work as a team and that we try to transpose to our game, as we would like our community to adhere to this mantra as well.

In this FAQ, we'll go into more detail about our background, who we are and how we work. 

When was Mainframe founded, and by whom?

Mainframe is an independent, venture-backed game developer founded in the spring of 2019 by 13 game industry veterans, mainly from CCP and Remedy. The studio's goal is to create the first open-world, massively multiplayer online game (MMO) built from the ground up for cloud gaming networks.

Our mission is to create a virtual world that millions will live in for decades. 

Do you all work in Finland or Iceland, then? 

e do have offices in Finland, Iceland, and France. Still, some team members are spread worldwide and working from Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, and even Australia! We have 17 nationalities represented at Mainframe.
For us, the most important thing is that people work from where they are most productive, which can mean working remotely. 

When does the team meet then if you work remotely?

Mainframers in Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Paris meet regularly in their respective offices and try to share a weekly lunch. There are weekly online team meetings where everyone joins and shares company information and updates.
The game teams occasionally meet to workshop and plan together in one of our offices.

We also gather the whole Mainframe team once per year in a big summit, mixing workshops and fun activities to keep the team spirit and get to know each other better.
We also gather to celebrate our milestones - whether online or offline - as we recently did for the announcement of Pax Dei.

What’s the background of Mainframers?

We started with 13 founders from Finland and Iceland who represented all game development disciplines. Now (May 2023), we represent 17 different nationalities and a (super) wide variety of skills needed to develop an MMORPG.
Our current team consists primarily of Engineers, Designers and Artists, but we also have a Publishing team, Producers and people taking care of running the company.
We are a small team considering the challenging vision we want to deliver to gamers, but we think we can do it. For the purpose of keeping the team small, we try to find ways to do things in a smart way, and we have also hired mostly people with seniority and extensive expertise and experience. We hope that in the future, we will be able to mentor more developers at the start of their journey with the game industry. 

How is life in the Mainframe office?

We are an online community at Mainframe. We are spread in several locations and split into teams (each team is developing a specific aspect of the game - the world, combat, the crafting...). Members of any feature team may come from any location. Our teams have come up with their own way of working together in the past 3 years.

Because we work online primarily, we're still figuring out the best way to use our offices. Our offices in Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Paris are centrally located and support everyone who wishes to work there with plenty of coffee and excellent company.

Diversity is a hot topic right now. What do you do as a company regarding diversity?

We take on team members based on their skills and merits - everyone on the team should feel they were hired because they were the best candidate for the position. Our team trusts each other, and we are very open in our plans and discussions. It is a balance of inviting everyone into the conversations and ensuring we all spend our work time on the most important tasks for each of us. It is not always easy, but we try to constantly evolve in how we work by being honest with each other and dedicating effort to improving.

When we have a chance, we hire for diversity - meaning that we tweak the role a bit to get a wider pool of applicants. 

Can you give more details about who invested in your company?

You can find all the details in the press releases that were issued for our two rounds of funding: https://themainframe.com/en/media/

Looking at the pictures on your site (https://themainframe.com/en/), you look like a bunch of old geeks… are you all old geeks?

Funnily enough, the average experience in the gaming industry for the company is 15+ years… are we old? It all depends on how you define “old” ;-) 

We prefer to say that we are experienced. And we want to put that experience into creating the game of a lifetime. Are we a bunch of geeks? Definitely! We all have our favorite universes and references, but we are definitely geeks, and proud of it!

Fair enough, you are old, but you seem cool. Can I join your team?

We’d be happy to have some members of the Pax Dei community join our team. We have some positions on our website; if your profile matches our needs, feel free to apply: https://themainframe.com/en/work-with-us/#jobs

If none of the open positions fit your experience, you can also send your CV via the “General Application” form.

Note that our work language is English, and only applications in English will be considered.

We are a small team, and we take care of hiring on top of our other duties, so please be patient with us. We diligently review the applications for specified positions and send replies to everyone. We are currently also getting a lot of general applications, and unfortunately, replying to all of them will take time.

We don’t currently have open positions for internships or apprenticeships. Still, we hope to be able to offer such possibilities later, as it is the best way to keep us old developers on our toes and gain valuable new insights.

More about the team can be found in this video:

Monetization

Model

The monetization model has not yet been revealed by the developer. They made it clear though that it won't sport any pay-to-win mechanics and they don't intend to sell "time-skips".

There are however thoughts about a PLEX* like token, which also somewhat imply a possible subscription based model.

A "PLEX-like" token, which is an item that is bought on the game website, costs the same, or similar amount as monthly sub, can be traded between players and can ONLY be used in the relation to the game by destroying it to add one month sub to the account.

Here's the follow up quote of the developer in regards to the likelihood of such a token to be part of the monetization:

I honestly have no clue if we are going to introduce Plex or not.  All I know is, that it is a simple and extremely easily understandable system that is good for the player market, first and foremost the people who spend a lot of time in the game.

*PLEX is a token available in the store for EVE Online and can be used to add gametime that elevates your EVE-online account to a subscription level, or spent on cosmetics and services. The token is tradable and sellable via  the in-game market, and therefore can be "converted" into in-game currency that can be used to buy pretty much anything in the game.

Supported platforms and languages

Initial release

At first, Pax Dei is planned to be released on Steam for PC (Windows)

Other platforms

Eventually, Pax Dei will find its way to mobile platforms. 

Languages

Initially, the game will support English, German and French.

Client & Server information

Client

Currently the client is based on Unreal Engine 5.1.

Server

Sharding

According to the developer, the servers will feature sharding with up to 20'000 players per shard.
A few more details can be found in a developer comment:

I won't go into all the details, but obviously a single shard is not run on a single physical server as no machine is fast enough, so we've had to develop tech to have a bunch of servers work in concert so you can walk around the world and be seamlessly transported between servers as you move about.