When Pax Dei launched in early access last year, I was pretty excited. Developer Mainframe Industries painted a vivid picture of clashing kingdoms, a player-run economy, and even the ability to become, essentially, the Pope. What we got initially was a pretty generic survival crafting game where simply making a pair of trousers took almost as long as it would in real life.
Since then, the team's introduced player-to-player trading, a magic system, an expanded PvP area and a variety of tweaks and changes—including the world itself being transformed, to better facilitate more players and building projects. And now it's gearing up to leave early access, with the 1.0 launch set for October 16.
Unfortunately, the players never really took to it, outside of the diehards. Active players quickly tapered off following the early access launch, with only small spikes thanks to notable updates. But even that seems to have stopped.
This month, a big PvP update went live, and it didn't move the needle at all. Since early July, it's been stuck under 1,000 concurrents, and this month it's been averaging around 300. There are older MMOs that have been able to survive despite small communities, like DC Universe Online, which I still dip into. But Pax Dei is a different breed of MMO, one that requires constant teamwork and offers less to solo players.
September's update may have struggled to bring players back because it was the first major update following the announcement of the 1.0 business model. Mainframe Industries had made it clear that it would introduce subscriptions after early access, but that might have been easier to swallow before players started to take issue with the pace and scale of improvements.
The big thing you get with a subscription is one month of access to your plots of land, which is where you build your homestead, gloomy den or castle. Mainframe Industries frames the subscription as optional, arguing that you can still experience the core game for free (once you've purchased the game itself), including building on plots belonging to other players, with permission.
Free players, then, can join a clan and start building and crafting. But if you just want to start by building your own home before venturing out and meeting new people, you'll need to start paying your landlord after the first month.
I do get it, to an extent. One of the things that made me less inclined to return to Pax Dei was the vast number of ugly or unfinished buildings that ruined my view of the striking wilderness. This also made it hard for new players to find a plot. That said, Pax Dei already has a system that stops inactive plots from sticking around forever—it just wasn't that evident during the earliest phase, when the population was at its peak.
On Steam, it's clear that a lot of players don't think it's ready for prime time. "Going into 1.0 is crazy," writes one player. "With 1851 hours of playtime under my belt... I think that, in its current state, releasing this game now is a serious mistake," says another. Criticisms include the "tedious, time-consuming" grind of the crafting system and a lack of diversions once you get tired of said crafting.
As someone who was seduced by the promise of player-run kingdoms, I confess that I too was disappointed to discover that this headline attraction is still some ways away. Mainframe Industries is working on the introduction of larger communities that go beyond clans, but the first part of that, the ability for clans to forge alliances during war and peace, won't be arriving until next year.
Typically, when games leave early access, there's a big update accompanying the milestone, but Mainframe Industries hasn't announced any notable additions. You can expect a wipe, of course, refreshing the world and its denizens, but otherwise it looks like it won't be that different from the early access version. The number is just changing.
I'm not optimistic, but I do hope Pax Dei ends up fulfilling the promise of the original pitch. It has pretty good bones and lots of good ideas, and as an MMO freak I always want these games to succeed. But it's definitely got an uphill struggle ahead of it, and I've got no real interest in paying for a subscription until it becomes feature-complete.
