Pax Dei’s reveal at the top of March was a surprise of the welcome sort for fans of immersive fantasy sandbox MMOs, as studio Mainframe Industries – headed up by former CCP Games bosses – welcomed lookyloos to its fold. The studio has continued teases over the last few weeks, albeit largely in Discord. Most of it has, admittedly, been lore-centric, but the recent infodump has been all about building.
Notably, you can’t build just anywhere; plots are placeable only in the heartlands, only aboveground, and not on roads or dungeon entrances or other obvious places. You can build near others to form a sort of city, there a plot permission system, you can pull resources from abandoned buildings, you’ll build your buildings with proper respect to physics, and no, people can’t steal your stuff. It also looks like land ownership will be tied to paid accounts, as every paid account gets one plot (though you can apparently buy more).
The devs aren’t talking about PvP at all yet, do note, but there’s a big tease about the possible extrinsic reasons for housing: “We don’t want to go into specifics on this right now, but let’s just say trading will be a large part of Pax Dei. There might also be additional reasons you want to visit other people, like politics.”
Mainframe also dropped a brief video of alpha gameplay in which a character strolls through a lakeside stone-and-plaster villa and surveils the construction and reconstruction of buildings as bits of debris tumble down from above. But I’m sure we don’t have any housing fans around here who’d be interested in video of that, no sir.
