Pax Dei

This is a so called social sandbox open world game where you play togheter with others and live your life. Well i can tell you, it's more a-social than social. For starters, worlds are empty, a few people for each server, each province, each starting zone remain and most of them are just like me, logging in not to lose your hard work and nice buildings. It's not a game that you buy and are done with. You either play it daily or you lose it all. Don't want to lose all, play daily and gather grace to renew your buildingspot every month, or pay "daily" and lose money each month to keep your plot. The game is out of early access since octobre 2025. I started octobre 31th, close to midnight and played it a lot. Around the time a new server was opened because other servers were getting full, so i basicly started from scratch. I was more or less first and alone in my starting zone back then, and after a few days/weeks, people joined and played, we were social. But like all of this games: people lose interest due to way too much grinding, a market system that's either non existant or just a serious pain: running 10 minutes to go buy a thing and then having to run to another player for 7 more minutes to buy another thing, in order to, after that, teleport back to your starting stone, and then run again to your home. If you teleported too fast, you're either stuck for an hour untill you can teleport for free again, or you just have to 'you guessed it' pay again with grace. It's a beautiful world, no comments on that. If you feel deprived of nature in your real life, you can definitely get a nice virtual walk in nature and enjoy beautiful sceneries. My biggest problem with the game is two fold: 1. the devs are pandering to a very small very vocal minority that wants to pay pvp. Every small update for the last year, every 'community' event that is focussed on on discord, is all pandering to this very small minority. PVE gets treated like cinderella or even worse. The game is far from finished but sold as a finished game. Players who want to focus on just playing in PVE mode are treated like garbage, because they can get nowhere without resources you need to grind in pvp zones where you risk your life and if you die by the hand of another player, might even lose all your stuff you gathered and gear you were wearing. A-social thievery gets promoted. 2. Want to avoid losing things, than you got to be strong, in other words, have the best gear possible. How do you get that best gear possible? You either need friends or people that trade in your server, or you have to craft it yourself. Since the whole world is getting emptier by the day, you basicly got to craft it yourself. How do you craft it yourself? You need 100's of hours of grinding materials, sometimes in pvp zones, sometimes in your own province after you ran for 20 minutes to notice someone else just gathered it all and you got to wait another hour or two before everything is back again. Then you come back home and you got to process the materials by kilns or furnaces, looms or other stations. Every level you gain from a certain profession, makes it harder and harder to gain a new level. Want to train heavy armor? You not only need to train blacksmithing for that, have upgraded working stations, but also have to train light and medium armor workstations because without the tailor or the leatherworker, you aren't going to be able to craft either your heavy armor workstation or your heavy armorpiece. To get the ingots you need to make bars, nails, sheets, studs, ... you need furnaces that can only be created if your leatherworking and tailoring is high enough. Long story short: if you can't buy anything from other because your world is too empty, and you have no friends you play with or want to play with, you're constantly gathering, training and mostly failing your training, in order to gain a small amount of xp, so you can fail the things you make a little less once you get another level. Each level takes ages, and once you reach the state that you can create armor or weapons that are better than the average person you might encounter you risk that you can't even wear them. Why you'd ask? Well, you got to train your 'wearing' skill too. a higher quality piece of armor needs a higher level of that skill. And the only way to train that is by wearing that category of armor or weapon and kill things: kill boars, kill deer, kill npc's in camps nearby or in pvp zone. Of course, same with this skill, the higher you want to get it, the harder it gets to get it there. Not only do you need to gather items for hundreds of hours, you also have to kill animals and npc soldiers for hundreds of hours. Today i just log in each day for as little time as i possibly can to gain my dialy 10 grace and to log out again. Each 30 some days i pay for another month on my graceplot with grace and keep my castle alive. I don't enjoy that, i just do it out of fear of losing all, fear of missing out. Why? because i'm still not fed up enough, not disgusted enough, and still hope that what i worked for, for over 800 hours, that some day the game devs come with a new pve oriented update/patch, and that i finally get a feeling that it is worth again to spend some time in the game. As long as the devs keep pandering to the very small very loud minority that want pvp, i'm not even slightly intrested to do a thing. The longer they take, the larger the risk that at some day i just decide to quit it all togheter. This game is not New World, it is not even a replacement for New world. It's just a complete asocial sandbox game where hardly anyone ever plays. That's just my two cents, my opinion. Others might (and i hope so) have other experiences.