SCAM?

[Mallenroh]

I was wondering if anyone who defends the game actually made the effort to take a deeper look into it ?
The more i look into it the more i think its a big SCAM where minimum work and ressources were used to throw something together and sell it to naive players who trust the glorious promises of what to come from the "developers".

Just go to the UE5 engine assets store and just browse it for fun and pretty soon you will realize that pretty much 80% of the games animations , world, gatherables, building pieces, armors, weapons, animals, foliage, environment are PREMADE store bought assets.

The if you add them together you maybe come to 4000 to 5000 € in cost for almost all ingame stuff so far.....

So theres maybe 1 person in the art department, slightly reshading some premade stuff other people did and "sell" it as their own.....

So i ask if there isnt a person in the team who can come up with their own ideas or there is no money to actually pay a team to develop these ideas, how can you trust this "team" to develop a concept for an MMO?

I think i will make an excel sheet just to compare all the "premade" stuff to the few ones they actally did themselves.

IF anyone is interested i can make an excel sheet to proof that NO time went into the concept of the crafting system.
I bet 90% of the players could come up with a more logical and thought through crafting system in 1 week than they calimed they needed 5 years for.

Around 200 eqipment parts of which 70% use the same premade UE5 storebought model and maybe 20 are actually worth crafting and equipping, because the rest is only there to inflate player time to craft them and make it seems there is actually diversity when there is not ?

Store bought fighting animations

All the animals are premade store bought models, with a little reshading to the infested ones.

Didnt you notice that the gatherables in the world look like they didnt belong and some stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the environment?

Thats because they were made by different artists and studios and bought in the UE5 asset store.

Maybe we all should try the same......

- Mayke a claim what my game ISNT supposed to be and then drop some vague
information what i envision it to be without going into details.
- Then buy 80% of the games models from a store.
- Come up with a generic illogical crafting system, and buy some more models for the
icons.
- implement a generic building system with premade store bought models

Feels like the only original work that went to that game so far was marketing:
-devs or their friens or relatives opening up 200 Subscriber youtube channels that only post glorified Pax Dei videos.
- Making big claims what the game will be, without any proof of concept how they inted to deliver it.
- Paying big youtubers to do a good review video and then never play it again...

So far the game it a mix of mostly premade store bought stuff other studios had done and some generic elements all other 90 survival base building games that came out this year have.

Sure i can make big claims, that i envision a city with flying cars and no cost for living, food or electricity bills, but if i am unable to show even the slightest concept or plan how i am actually going to do it, its nothing more than childish fantasy talk.....

Why cant they do a dev video where they show what they are working on like many other dev team in other games do?
Maybe because there is nothing to show?
If i have people working on a sepcific project and get paid for it, i would like to see what they are working on if i was their boss and not just listen to excuses why they cant show anything or show the progress they have made.

Imagine you pay a company to build you a house and after 5 years there is just the bare foundation.
And every time you ask for proof what they now do or or have done in the meantime all you get is emails , "we are working on the plumbing, the windows, the electricity etc." "in 2 months we are goint to do the tiling".

And if they cant show a single photo or video of the actual work done or progression you probably have been a victim of a con artist...........

Feels a bit like Elisabeth Holmes and Theranos fraud, where all she had to show the investors and public was the frame of her praised device without EVER releasing information on how it is suppoed to work......

[Odium]

the argument of store bought assets etc is stupid to me. Some people are bad at visual art and animations. Startup studios cant always afford a team of artists to make assets and animations. So they have a resource to help them.

The real scam is drawing a crowed in with the $40 price tag for EA then charging them monthly at release.

[Kerpal]

Originally posted by Odium:

the argument of store bought assets etc is stupid to me. Some people are bad at visual art and animations. Startup studios cant always afford a team of artists to make assets and animations. So they have a resource to help them.

The real scam is drawing a crowed in with the $40 price tag for EA then charging them monthly at release.

Is monthly loading after launching an EA title really a scam through a subscription model? Let’s look at another example: World of Warcraft. Millions of players buy a new paid content update every few months and pay a monthly fee. Is this a scam? Then there’s an expensive cash shop. So players pay a certain amount for new content, but don’t always have access to all content. Nevertheless, Blizzard’s system at WoW seems to work well for both sides! Importantly, publishers have monthly costs: servers, employees, marketing and much more. Unlike big companies like Blizzard or Arena-Net, there are also small publishers that don’t have endless resources. A good example of this is the small publisher of Pax Dei. Here, players have to decide for themselves whether they want to continue with Pax Dei after the upcoming patches and content updates.
If you already like the game, you could accept a subscription model, as long as the publisher continuously offers good new content. A subscription model is not always negative – look at Final Fantasy 14! It works great there. To deliver high-quality content, you need financial resources and planning certainty. Personally, I hope Pax Dei will be successful, because I see a lot of potential in the basis of the game. Ultimately, how I said before, it’s up to you whether or not you continue with Pax Dei. It’s your personal choice!

[Mallenroh]

Originally posted by Odium:

the argument of store bought assets etc is stupid to me. Some people are bad at visual art and animations. Startup studios cant always afford a team of artists to make assets and animations. So they have a resource to help them.

The real scam is drawing a crowed in with the $40 price tag for EA then charging them monthly at release.

I think store bought assests are a problem, when the only real standout of the game is the look and visuals as people point out......

If after 5 years there is literally nothing apart from great visuals and all the visuals are bought from a store everyone has access too, and just mixed together....
What have they actually done by themselves in the 5 years ?

Come up with a vision ?

Obviously the savings didnt go into the other core aspects either, but rather into marketing as it seems

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by Mallenroh:

Originally posted by Odium:

the argument of store bought assets etc is stupid to me. Some people are bad at visual art and animations. Startup studios cant always afford a team of artists to make assets and animations. So they have a resource to help them.

The real scam is drawing a crowed in with the $40 price tag for EA then charging them monthly at release.

I think store bought assests are a problem, when the only real standout of the game is the look and visuals as people point out......

If after 5 years there is literally nothing apart from great visuals and all the visuals are bought from a store everyone has access too, and just mixed together....
What have they actually done by themselves in the 5 years ?

Come up with a vision ?

Obviously the savings didnt go into the other core aspects either, but rather into marketing as it seems

I don't like to talk about things I don't know.
So I went to internet and search how to make an mmorpg.
I found this
https://mainleaf.com/how-to-make-an-mmorpg-game-key-things-to-consider/

which says "Create (or buy) your game assets"
I was surprised to see the option to buy the assets as being mentioned.
Then they said that

"Creating those assets, however, is a beast in its own right: it’s a lengthy and sometimes repetitive task that demands lots of work and discipline. This is why game art is the second most expensive part of developing a game, being overshadowed only by marketing and promotion costs."

So you are right, if they purchased assets from the store to save money then definitely the marketing was the most expensive so far.
You definitely know what you are talking about.

On their site https://themainframe.com/en/
I see "First public Alpha test for Pax Dei." on November 2023
I would like to hear the opinion of somebody who seen that version, to hear what changed in 9 months.

Another search was to find out how much costs to make an MMORPG.
I see references to WoW being $63 mil, Rift $50-70 mil

And I also found a youtube video for solo and very small indie teams setting the minimum to $1 mil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y692Z0C1dOM
This guy also said 40% to 50% of the budget goes to marketing.
And one important part was that the game needs a player community and hype at release.

Would be a silly mistake if the Pax Dei team would spend all their budget to pay streamers now, while the game is empty.
The real hype must happen at 1.0
That is the biggest risk I see in Early Access mmorpgs.
They spent a fraction from their budget to make a fraction of their game but there will be no hype because players "see" features added gradually little by little. There will be no novelty, no excitement to discover the world at 1.0
Players will not suddenly get excited just because the devs replace placeholder assets with better ones.

Unless the updates will be better and better.

So why Pax Dei released so early? They had already a community waiting on discord.
The only explanation I can find is that they take example from Ashes of Creation, which also charges a lot of money just to be able to help testing and balancing a future Alpha 2 version of the game.
Intrepid Studios announced in December that they start Alpha 2 in Q3 2024 and Mainframe Industries did their best to start in Q2, before AoC.
Whoever spends time testing one of these two games will not invest much time in the other.
If AoC would choose Q2 2025, Pax Dei would wait a bit more to have more features too, like markets and trading.

[blubberandy]

is there a TLDR? because i have no patience for wannabe Fortune Teller.
Text that starts with "i think its" and "there will be" is worthless reading from the beginning.
If you think you can see the Future maybe do less Drugs.

[Balmung]

Originally posted by Mallenroh:

Just go to the UE5 engine assets store and just browse it for fun and pretty soon you will realize that pretty much 80% of the games animations , world, gatherables, building pieces, armors, weapons, animals, foliage, environment are PREMADE store bought assets.

Well, I would call that smart. In such an early development state it makes not much sense to build your own assets yet, because a lot can change in the developing process and so you made a lot of assets for nothing or you need to make them new from scretch. At such an early state it makes a lot of sense to use asset store assets as a placeholder. More important at this state is the stuff you don't see on screen as a player.

Thats because they were made by different artists and studios and bought in the UE5 asset store.

How many betas did you play in your life? I played a lot and very often the final animations came at the end of a beta (I talk about real betas, not advertising betas). Graphical stuff is stuff that you mostly don't do in early game development, you do them in late, when you know which stuff you need, when it comes to game polishing so you rarely spend resources (money) on things that you then need to remake or didn't use at the final game. For gameplay development such things are unimportant, you can use a placeholder.

No clue what exactly is from the asset store and what not, but in general I like the way the world looks and feel so far, there is pretty less what ruins my immersion, the most things are not even assets. For example the nights where much darker in Alpha 2, now they are so bright that I sometimes didn't notice that it is night at all. That is the most what ruins the immersion for me. I liked the feeling of the Alpha 2 so much more because of this. Never used a torch in EA, in Alpha 2 it was one of the first thing I crafted and used a lot. I guess there was a lot of "mimimi, the nights are too dark" crying Alpha players...

Well, enough about that, maybe dark nights are only to me that important...

Why cant they do a dev video where they show what they are working on like many other dev team in other games do?

Because even creating such things cost time and money. And like they said no only one time, they wanted that only players who believe in this project to buy it yet.

But I can understand why you think this way. You need a lot of trust to get involved into PxD yet. There is so much broken, bad designed etc. A lot need to be fixed, but... no matter how annoying it is to say or read it again... it is game in early Alpha that want to be an MMO when the development is "finished" (we all know a MMO is never finished) for full release.

So all we can do is having trust into PxD or have it not. Sure, the developers could do some stuff to have even more trust (my trust is also only around 50%, the first big content patch can change it... in both directions). But I wand to give them a chance, if they can do it right, it will be a very special MMO. Can they do it? I'm not sure, 50% like I said. At the end it is like on every game in development, it can be a total success or a total mess. Most games fail in the last 10% of development, mean 90% finished, PxD is maybe yet on 30% if I would need to guess.

[Caduryn]

Originally posted by Odium:

the argument of store bought assets etc is stupid to me. Some people are bad at visual art and animations. Startup studios cant always afford a team of artists to make assets and animations. So they have a resource to help them.

The real scam is drawing a crowed in with the $40 price tag for EA then charging them monthly at release.

Show me one single MMORPG with OPEN WORLD building that dont have monthly payment for Plots, because open World building is insane demanding on the Server and offers a very limited amount of Space to build.
It simply doesnt work without ongoing ukeep.

And on top of that: We still dont know if it even will be a Sub.

[Blue7even]

have 3 less coffees a month and you can play the game omg