Games

[icycalm]

https://playpaxdei.com

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1995520/Pax_Dei

Welcome to a vast, social sandbox MMO inspired by the legends of the medieval era. Here, myths are real, ghosts exist, and magic is unquestioned. Join thousands of players as you explore the land, build your home, forge your reputation, and craft your own stories. What world will you make?

First off, sign up for the alpha on the official site. Just do it, because people are signing up right this moment, and you want high priority.

Second off, everything I talk about comes from the second trailer I link at the bottom, which is misleadingly titled "Official announcement" and should have been titled "Developer introduction". They show stunning real-time footage in there whereas the other trailer is just CGI. Make sure to watch the entire dev video.

So this looks basically like a Nordic version of Life is Feudal. At first, I thought it was LiF2, but no, it's yet another game piling into the FP4X genre. Actually, we don't know if it'll be FP4X or just survival-builder, but we do know there'll be "thousands of players", so there's a good chance they'll be allowed to fight over at least some territory, in which case it'll be FP4X.

So the aesthetic is bright Nordic, as opposed to LiF's dark Slavic. However, it does have its dark ghost-story style side.

Insane graphics. Best in the genre certainly, aside from Star Citizen. In some aspects even better than Star Citizen. The art is stunning quasi-From like. Very strong character design, and even creature design it seems, from what little they have shown of the latter.

The director is very smart. I can tell from little tidbits he says. He really nails it. E.g. when he says the hardcore and the casual players need each other. That's exactly what SC has done, which all the FP4Xes have failed to do. Rust sort-of achieves this, which is why it's so successful, but the forced-monthly wipes wreck it in the end.

The entire team looks highly intelligent.

Combat looks AMAZING, which is a HUGE sticking point with these games. LiF's combat was ATROCIOUS (in an action sense; tactically it was incredible) and I've always wondered how much better the game would have been with good action combat. It looks like we'll get it here.

Moreover, there is PVE everywhere! Animals, ghosts, whatever, again something terribly lacking from the genre (even SC doesn't do this so well yet, because of server-side performance issues, though they have plans to improve on it).

Picking flowers. This tells me the Shenmue is strong within it. This tells me they are going more for the Star Citizen metaverse than the typical survival-builder/FP4X bellum omnium contra omnes.

Central city or region that is safe, and gets more dangerous the more you move away from it. This too is how Star Citizen works, again unlike typical games in the genre, and it's a massive improvement to the genre (for reasons I'll explain at length in the SC VGART essay).

Drama. There will be scripted events like wars apparently! Sounds like SC's Dynamic Events!

Lots of things we don't yet know: Will there be terraforming like LiF? (probably not, but one can hope). Will there be territory conquest? (otherwise it's not FP4X, it's just survival-building). How extensive will the building system be? Will you be able to build and hold entire castles and regions? Any naval dimension? How extensive will the PVP be? No-holds-barred, or limited to certain areas? Wizards, spells, or no magic?

But whatever the above answers end up being, what's already shown is strong enough to land the game squarely in my MOST WANTED list, and I've already signed up for the alpha and will be playing the moment they give me access. Hope to see a bunch of you there! What a year for the genre this will be! FP4X completely taking over videogames this year!













Reveal Trailer - Where we belong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAOQN9N ... XVyolQO3wj



Official announcement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF5RJcq ... XVyolQO3wj



TBA.

[icycalm]

In order for your alpha registration to go through, you have to click in their confirmation email, and go on their site and fill out your profile (including taking a 5-minute survey lol), and THEN apply AGAIN from their site for the alpha! Also, in order to ensure we all get in at the same time, you have to use a code they gave me. I will post this code in the private CULT channel on Discord. Check there in a few minutes.

[icycalm]

FINALLY PAX DEI FOOTAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Building short clip 1/2 - Daytime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPTtpuw4SsY



Building short clip 2/2 - Nighttime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sYjq-zR8As



What jumps out at me right away is that the graphics are truly next-gen (meaning current-gen). This will definitely be the best-looking game in the genre bar Star Citizen.

That said, I am worried about the building system. It's fully modular like Rust, and not predesigned like Life is Feudal. Of course that means more complex building mechanics, which is good, but it also means morons with no taste spamming the countryside with ugly designs, which will utterly KILL the aesthetic these guys are going for. In Rust it's not a big deal because the ugly buildings match the game's DIY post-apocalyptic aesthetic, but in LiF it would have killed the theme and setting, and I can't imagine it not killing it in Pax Dei. So it seems what happened here is what generally happens when programmers are in charge: they don't play games, so they aren't aware of the ugliness issue that fully modular building systems suffer from.

I will try to warn them in the Steam forum. Will probably get banned for my trouble, as I always do, but I'll try anyway.

This might be what sinks the game, and then everyone will just play Life is Feudal II instead... If LiF2 looks like real medieval towns (as LiF1 looked like), and this looks like autism central, it's game over for this game.

[icycalm]

Building FAQ
https://steamcommunity.com/games/199552 ... 7586111894

Extensive building FAQ that answers a lot of questions. It mostly sounds pretty good. Very Star Citizeny with the idea of cities that are basically safe spaces, and contested ground radiating outwards from them.

The two building videos they give are the same ones I've linked earlier, but there's a new image of an entire settlement that looks pretty dreamy.



Definitely the best water in the genre. Though no mention of naval mechanics yet.

Problem is, this settlement was built by the devs, and not in a million years will player settlements look like this unless they go with LiF's premade structures system, which they aren't. I copy-pasted my earlier misgivings about their building plans in the Steam forum, and to their credit, the devs didn't mess with it, or me.

Pax Dei versus Life is Feudal, or How Modular Building Kills Aesthetics
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1995520/ ... 7971461374

In fact, they seem to have considered my warning, and put an answer to it in their FAQ:

Can I go crazy in terms of structure, or do I need to respect some architectural rules?
The building system features a physics system that forces structural integrity on the buildings, so your buildings will have to make sense from a structural perspective. As an example, while houses can be pretty big, you cannot build a house that's infinitely high.

Is there a height cap to how tall buildings I can make?
Yes, but the structural integrity system will block you from making buildings tall enough to hit the cap. We want to enable you to make large multi-story houses, but at the same time, we don't want the game to feature skyscrapers, so the tallest buildings will be somewhere around what you'd expect to see in the Middle Ages.

This is such a weird answer. It looks like they're trying to prevent players from going full-autism by hardcoding "architectural rules". But this can only have limited effectiveness. Rust already does this to an extent, and the game is still full of autistic structures, though as aforesaid it makes sense there due to Rust's postapocalyptic DIY aesthetic.

Some new screens:

[icycalm]

I forgot this nugget:

As an aside, note we've noticed during playtests that clans often appoint a player to be the master builder, so if you're really into building, try to find a guild that wants to make you this person.

This made me think how awesome it would be to have someone like Istallri in your clan. I'll ask him when the time comes. In fact there are a few TaleSpire builders I can ask. We can probably land at least one of them.

[icycalm]

Mainframe - Who We Are
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScId93OotXM



Turns out it's an Icelandic studio, but they opened a subsidiary in Finland. The main people are in Iceland though. Never heard of a studio from there. It's such a small country. They only have 376k people. Now that I look at their names and pay more attention to them, I can see the origin. They say they also have people in Sweden and Denmark, so they call themselves a pan-Nordic studio. That's racist.

Making the World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifoXTKvoNcg



Pax Dei Exclusive Interview and Gameplay Footage | PC Gaming Show 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DneL4dkFU6M

[icycalm]

An introduction to Pax Dei's shards, servers, and zones
https://steamcommunity.com/games/199552 ... 6639119112

So there will be shards, not a single world as in the best periods of first-person 4X games like Life is Feudal and Atlas. Each shard will have about 7,000 players, though that's expected to rise later on. Compare that to LiF's 10,000 and Atlas's 40,000—though those were advertised numbers that were never really reached, or reached only briefly. Moreover, all your building will happen in central civilized areas without any danger of loss. That's like the tiny safe zones in LiF and Atlas that no one really used except a few scared PVErs that essentially played a different game from the normal population.

So the design here is way less hardcore than first-person 4Xes or even regular survival-builders. In fact I can't name one such game where everyone's buildings in the entire game were always safe. So this is survival-building Lite. It doesn't even count as first-person 4X, since you aren't fighting over territory: it seems there will be infinite land to build on for everyone who wants to.

Which makes me wonder wtf the "wars" are for that they have talked about? "There will be wars", they have said. But what wars when all the buildings are invincible? Wars with whom? Over what?

It doesn't seem like they have played a lot of the genre and thought very far ahead of an alpha. They seem to be making things up as they go along.

You can see this on full display in their ideas for character migration between shards. For some weird reason, they seem convinced that it makes sense for the players to be able to move their BUILDINGS between shards!

Moving a plot and the building(s) on it is a far more complex beast. We can't simply transfer the buildings as the space could not be available in the new World, and we can't easily move the buildings to a 'similar space' because the buildings' structure depends on the terrain they're on. Ideally, we will have a system that lets you save your building structure as a blueprint or at least put all their components in a magical bag (don't ask about the lore behind this, please).

My reply was: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1995520/ ... 6204293431

No other game in the genre allows moving buildings between shards. Utterly bizarre that you feel you have to.

And of course they can't devise an IN-universe reason for the move because it is an OUT-OF-UNIVERSE move. At that point the most you can say is "God did it" (not that that makes sense either, if you know your Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, but for the low-IQ it will suffice).

Compare to how Chris Roberts and Star Citizen deal with lore, where they have a dedicated team of half a dozen lore-writers whose only job 40 hours a week is to craft an ironclad lore-ENCYCLOPEDIA and to whom it would never occur to say "Don't ask us about the lore!", since they'd be fired lol.

Just take a look at today's Star Citizen lore update to see what I am talking about: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... -Questions

Nevertheless the game still seems compelling. If the action-adventuring is fun, and the building is fun, and the game is as beautiful as it looks, it will be worth playing. Here are some new pics from the Steam page that I just noticed:



Of course first pic on Steam has to be a black. Because blacks love building games, africa is full of castles after all and I think this studio is african: uganda I believe they said in one of the trailers. Many blacks in the team, it's like a basketball team.



And of course second pic is a woman in a ball dress putting up a wall with a hammer. blacks and women built civilization, after all, every pasty Nordic nerd knows this. They teach this in their schools.



Third screenshot is an asian woman. asians also love complex strategy-building games, that's why, along with africans, they invented this genre and make all the best games in it. They don't make mindless grindy MMOs with zero interactivity due to their catastrophically low T, that's misinformation.



The other character in their pics seems like an arab. They too excel at complex videogame design and development, everyone knows this. I think Pax Dei is even halal.

So the representation in their screenshots looks absolutely nothing like their customers. Thanks for spitting in our faces, nerds! Don't worry, you will never be made to pay for this insolence. You're safe.

And some good screenshots to wipe down the disgust with:









This last character looks suspiciously White. But I am guessing xir is trans?

[icycalm]

NVIDIA DLSS 3 - Early Access Teaser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPbgbiq ... XVyolQO3wj



Looks good, like a flashier but significantly dumbed-down Life is Feudal. The main reason I am saying it's dumbed-down is because last I heard player holdings were invulnerable. So the building won't be truly integrated with the exploring and the combat, it'll be like two-three separate genres awkwardly grafted together. It's possible that they will blend them better further along development, but I am not holding my breath. This sort of game tends to get dumbed-down not smartened-up during its lifecycle, as the initial playerbase falls off a cliff when the casuals realize what they got into and exit and the devs scramble to bring them back.

[icycalm]

Pax Dei will enter Early Access in spring this year
https://steamcommunity.com/games/199552 ... 0871279363



That's it. No more details. They're planning at least one more alpha test before that. Maybe we'll manage to get into that one.

[icycalm]

Pax Dei Alpha with shubn and The Cult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLAjy_yMMig



Pax Dei Alpha with shubn and The Cult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uP9LSKDIUQ



Rory, ysignal, shubn, Archonus and Adjudicator (let me know if I missed anyone) tried the second Pax Dei alpha about a month ago. I couldn't play because I was camping, but I followed their doings on Discord. There won't be another alpha, the game enters Early Access on the 18th, and the question is whether we want to get into it, and to what extent. I invite anyone who played to drop some comments on their experience, and whether they're interested in playing more? I am conflicted and will use these comments to decide whether to buy the game. That said, even if I don't play on launch, I might join later if others take the initiative and it looks like they're having fun. If I sense enthusiasm in the comments, on the other hand, I will probably buy the game and organize a session for day 1.

[ysignal]

We saw a variety of pretty terrain in the alpha and we scouted out several cool locations, from a mountain-top position perched over a valley to the lakeside spot we ultimately picked. We also saw some nicely designed bases, and the game makes it easy to create a fairly decent-looking house.

However, we didn't encounter any PvP, and the few enemies we found were generally just sitting around waiting in the same spots. Some wildlife might have spawned randomly but that was mostly inconsequential. There's also no theft in the PvP zones, even of boxes left out in the open. None of the crafting tables seem to need to be built indoors or be protected in any way. Overall, it didn't seem like there was much reason to build a house or protected compound except for the hell of it.

A previous version of the developer FAQ stated that they eventually want players to be able to build in PvP zones, but the current FAQ doesn't give any details on whether this feature is still planned, or if it will arrive with the Early Access release. I can see myself checking this game out again as it develops further, but probably not for a while.

[icycalm]

Thanks for the impressions. I had similar thoughts while watching everyone post pictures and comments on Discord while playing.

In the meantime, however, Mainframe has released three short videos that are very illuminating and which I encourage everyone to watch.

Early Access trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bp1gbc ... XVyolQO3wj



First we have the EA trailer, which is a beauty. You can see the strong art direction in this team. It's closer to a movie trailer in sensibility than a videogame trailer. Even those who aren't interested in the genre should watch it, as a trailer study.

Early Access Announcement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9kbu7qtYR4



Then there is a short video explaining what they're trying to accomplish with Early Access. Nice footage, and they explain that the main thing to be added is the market/economy, and social hierarchy of players. It seems that some level of this will be available immediately tomorrow, which should give early backers something more to do than ysignal described. Plus there seem to already be dungeons to tackle, from which you gain loot to sell or exchange at market. Looks like our guys didn't get to that in the short time allotted in the alpha.

Gallia's Grand Gathering | Villa Extravaganza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXklnVPfgXU



And finally a video reel of cool castles and towns people have built with current assets. This is very impressive. You can already build to a level that gets pretty close to the full Life is Feudal experience, and in some ways surpasses it. To be sure, in many ways it is inferior, especially the lack of terraforming that was such a huge part of LiF. But I could see us spending a LOT of time planning our town and castle, and even more time building them out and then upgrading and adjusting them as new assets are released.

In short, I see Pax Dei in its current state as sitting somewhere between a pointless builder like Satisfactory—that has lots of cool stuff to build but no reason to—and the cutthroat shit we normally play like Rust, Atlas, and of course LiF. And since we can't build anything in Star Citizen yet, maybe now would be a good time to spend the next few months building in Pax Dei before SC gets base-building and monopolizes our attention?

Check the videos above and think about it. Make a thread in the Online forum if anyone is planning to play day 1 or thereabouts. If there is some interest, I will jump in.

In the long run, if LiF2 ever comes out, it will totally eclipse this, there is no doubt. These devs just aren't hardcore enough to compete. LiF is a proper strategy game. Remember its territory control map and mechanics? Utterly unmatched by any game ever. And the terraforming itself revolutionary. Having to plan around hills and mountains? Being able to form the terrain exactly how you want it, to flow perfectly with your architecture? Even digging around a shack was fun.

But LiF2 has been delayed so much, that it may never come out. So for the foreseeable future, Pax Dei seems the game to play for fans of survival-builders and FP4Xes after the death of Atlas, and Rust's technology becoming entirely played out and outdated.

[icycalm]

One Dei at a Time: Conquering Pax Dei Solo
https://steamcommunity.com/games/199552 ... 0261862582

New dev update. Briefly skimmed it, but what caught my attention was this pic:



I particularly like the bottom-left one, but all are interesting.

With each update I get closer and closer to getting us started on some Saturday. I think it's like Satisfactory in that the building system and art and graphics look great, but unlike that game, here there IS some combat and challenge. So I can definitely see us enjoying it. Hell, we've enjoyed a few runs of Satisfactory even without challenge, and though Satisfactory is almost done and STILL has no challenge, this is just starting and they're adding more and more. I definitely see us playing it at some point. The question is when. And the answer is whenever one of us starts the Online thread.