Pax Dei Early Access Q&A – Mainframe Talks Improvements from the Wilderness Alpha, Monetization and Much More

04.06.2024 - 14:31 / wccftech.com / Alessio Palumbo / Pax Dei

Pax Dei, the sandbox MMORPG in development at Iceland-based studio Mainframe Industries, has found a publishing partner in New Tales, the French team that helped publish the free-to-play collectible card game Waven.

Together, Mainframe and New Tales announced that Pax Dei will debut in early access in exactly two weeks, on Tuesday, June 18. Pre-purchase is available starting today on the official website, with various Founder's Packs options, and the game will be playable via Steam or the dedicated Pax Dei launcher.

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Mainframe doesn't shy away from the fact that the game is still very much in Alpha and, as such, in 'heavy' development. It will stay in early access for at least a year, during which major changes will be introduced. At times, full wipes of character progress may even take place. The first big post-launch update will introduce markets and a gold economy to Pax Dei.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Sulka Haro, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Mainframe, to discuss the game's current state and its future throughout early access.

When I talked to Thor four years ago, he told me the original goal was to make a cloud-native game Cloud native. It was meant to run directly on cloud servers, but that seems to be gone now. Can you speak to this fundamental change?

We still very much want to publish the game across all platforms, including mobile devices, and see streaming as a critical part of that rollout. 5 years ago, it looked like the game streaming platforms were on a steep rise, and we were assuming there would be a widely available ecosystem for distributing games using streaming available by the time we ship the game. This ended up not happening due to a variety of things and we still have a game we’d like to grant access to, so we’re launching on PC first. But as said before, there are plans to expand the available platforms later.

Will Pax Dei be available to play on GeForce NOW and/or other cloud services? If so, when?

We fully intend to bring the game out to a much wider selection of distribution platforms. As a matter of fact, we’ve announced back in January that we’re working on making Pax Dei available on GeForce Now. Not in June, though! Let’s get this PC launch out of the way first.

Will there be support for Steam Deck?

There’s no official support at this time.

During the Wilderness Alpha, I noticed the lack of proper controller support. Is it coming at the early access launch or later?

We’re actively working on improving the controller access. We don’t have a locked-down ETA for it at this point, but we do want to have this available before too long.

The combat felt quite