04 | March | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Earlier this week a studio named Mainframe, staffed by some former CCP, Blizzard, and UbiSoft developers, revealed their first game. Called Pax Dei it, as the headline says, it will attempt to bring the player interactions of EVE Online into a medieval setting.

Pax Dei with farms and fields

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… because that has been the premise of a few titles up to now, including Crowfall and Albion Online.

Okay, that is unfair, but it was the first place my thoughts went when I first saw this announcement… that and do we need another PvP gank box, which is what trying to turn New Eden into a fantasy setting tends to yield? (I am working on a theory about how being able to escape more easily in EVE Online makes it feel less oppressive that avatar PvP where you tend to be stuck… but I’ll get to that on another day.)

However, their announcement is surprisingly unhyped about the whole PvP aspect of the game. PvP is planned to be opt-in, as opposed to the usual game killing full loot PvP that such titles often pursue. Instead it will focus on things that make it some more like an open world survival title, perhaps more along the lines of what New World started out looking to be or what Valheim does, but on a larger scale.

Not having the place kick off as a murder simulator from the moment you log in actually makes it sound somewhat interesting. This grabs me in a way that some of the other “let’s make fantasy EVE” projects have completely failed at.

But I also have a reasonably reliable track record for liking these sorts of sims.

Of course, I still have questions. The terms “sandbox” and “player driven economy” get tossed around a lot and there are many open questions in my mind. The whole player drive economy makes me go “hrmmm…” due to how the lack of destruction often impedes MMO economies leading to massive wealth accumulation and the price inflation that goes along with it.

But the game has just been announced, so there is time to get to all of that. There is even a trailer which, honestly, doesn’t say much either.

It does look pretty however.

Anyway, I have put this on my list to watch and pipped the announcement channel from their Discord server into the MMO News channel of the TAGN Discord. I think three people show up there.