I started the game two weeks ago and spent over sixty hours in it (hey, I'm retired, I can do that), but the problem was that they were pretty well the same hour, sixty times in a row. You break up rocks to get metal. You chop down trees to process the metal. You turn the metal into weapons and armour. You need these so you can kill the boars and goats that attack you. You dismember their bodies to make meat and leather armour. You collect flowers so you can cook the meat, brew alcohol and create potions. You make cloth armour from either plants or wool. That's pretty well it. The whole game is a grind.
Levelling the different skills is out of synch. You need so much wood that you can be level 20 at chopping down trees and chopping up rocks, but only level 10 at turning the results into gear. You can be level 10 at butchering carcasses to make meat but level 5 at cooking it, so you have to do low-level, negligible-XP butchering in order to produce the scraggy meat you can cook. You learn "poorly parted" butchering of boars before "parted" butchering of boars, but "parted" butchering of chamois before "poorly parted" butchering of chamois. Some objects crafted using a skill at a low level need materials crafted using a skill at a high level — jewellery in particular. It's all over the place. Coming right after playing Dune: Awakening, this was very noticeable.
For crafting skills, levelling makes a difference in the form of new recipes. For gathering skills, levelling makes very little difference. You do a teeny-tiny extra amount of damage to trees when you go up a level in tree-felling, but it's beyond the decimal point; except when you manage to creep across a threshold, it's still going to take you just as long to fell a tree. I was very relieved the time I managed to increment my woodcutting ability such that it took eight swings to bring down a tree instead of nine (and eight more subsequently to get the wood from it, rather than nine more). You don't get more wood when your skill rises, though; you don't get more wood if you use a better axe, either. OK, so there's only a finite amount of wood in any tree, but given that if I chop a huge tree down I only fill a slot-and-a-bit in my backpack with wood, realisticness is not a defence here. You also get occasional pieces of resin and beehive materials, which unless you want to make hundreds of bows or ring your plot of land in behives you immediately discard so as to free up inventory space.
Nodes of metal that are broken up produce not just metal but sand and gems. You get much, much more sand than you ever need (it's used, with charcoal that comes from burning — you guessed it — wood to make glass that you can turn into potion bottles). Most of the gems have no apparent use. Some can be made into jewellery, but the jewellery doesn't do anything except maybe help spread the damage your characters takes when it dies. Some of the gems that jewel-crafting requires at level 2 don't drop until you're level 14. There were some level-1 jewellery recipes that I'm sure must exist, but I somehow didn't unlock them.
Levelling up crafting skills involves seeing which item you can reasonably make uses the fewest resources, then churning out as many of them as you can until the crafting experience bar crawls up to the next level. You can't salvage any of what you manufacture: you have to throw it all away. You can't even throw metal stuff into a furnace to recover the metal. Oh, and melting rocks down into metal (tin, copper, iron) takes 30 minutes per batch per furnace. You see a lot of furnaces around as you wander the countryside. The world does look gorgeous, by the way; it reminded me of that of New World, although neither game has a character-creation system of the same standard in terms of good looks.
Crafting progress is very slow after the initial burst. When I finished, my levels were:
Alchemy 7
Armoursmithing 8
Blacksmithing 15
Butchering 11
Carpentry 14
Cooking 7
Fletching
Jewelry Making 10
Leatherworking 10
Mining 21
Skinning 13
Tailoring 8
Weaponsmithing 10
Winemaking 6
Woodcutting 20
I was 0 in baking, mainly because it wouldn't initially let me build the necessary cooking workbench for some unfathomable reason.
All this was with the +50% XP you get from buying the game for a month, by the way. Gawd knows how slow it would have been without it.
There is some combat. I saw boars, deer, chamois (goats), wolves, rabbits and badgers. I saw no birds. I saw no fish. I know there are bears , retextured wolves and perhaps some other critters in the higher-level zones, but I don't expect there'll be birds or fish there either. Fighting-wise, none of the animals really pose a problem unless they double-team you (killing two boars of your level is easy; killing two boars who are then joined by a wolf a level higher than you is not easy). There are groups of NPC enemies: these are generally harder to kill than animals, because if you're unlucky when you pull one then they do double-team you. Most of the time when my character died in combat, it was to the NPCs. Most of the time my character died overall was from fall damage sustained when, following death-by-NPC, I was resurrected at a shrine at the top of a rock face and tried to make it back to base. For each death to NPCs, I averaged maybe a death and a half from falling down mountainsides.
It's not just crafting skills that have levels: so do armour-wearing skills. I made the mistake of wearing the first gloves I could manufacture, which were of cloth, and then finding that when I wanted to use iron gauntlets I couldn't because my heavy-armour hand skill was 0. My light-armour hand skill was 10, but to raise my heavy-armour hand skill to that level I would have to go out and kill hundreds of boars or NPCs — which would have raised all my other armour-wearing skills, too, so the iron gloves would have permanently lagged behind them.
For weapons, you can't use the next tier unless you've mastered the tier below. You can make the weapons, you just can't necessaarily use them. Why is using an iron sword more difficult than using a bronze sword? In the world we live in, iron swords are easier to use the bronze ones because they don't bend as much and keep their edge better. In Pax Dei, you're stuck with a bronze sword until suddenly you can use an iron one.
Now, all this was done playing solo. I was very pleased when I started and saw people chatting in the chat window: I saw more communication in the first ten minutes than in my whole time in Dune: Awakening. This rapidly tailed off, though, and a week later I was only seeing the occasional plaintive message in French or German, or unanswered comments I made myself. Either people joined guilds and forgot about group chat, or they realised after playing for a few days that they were facing a life of grind so quit. It's probably the case that if you are in a guild, you specialise in just one or two crafts and get everything else from other members who specialise in different crafts, in which case the grind may be more tolerable. Given the castle-dimensioned size of some of the buildings I saw, I expect this does happen. As usual, though, games that focus on group play rather than solo play eventually lose the solo players. They may aim to promote social play, and indeed succeed very well at it, but many prospective players prefer to go it alone, and those that are social will see a chat box that's empty for hours at a time and figure that the game isn't social, even though it is. If guilds only communicate using guild chat, they become insular and the game seems empty to newbies; then, the guild members wonder why there are no newbies joining them. You do keep your players for longer when you have this social glue, especially if they've invested so much effort in grinding their skills, but you have far fewer of them.
It may be that Pax Dei's gameplay improves (or at least appears) later on, but I don't want to repeat the whole gathering-and-making routine for hundreds of hours just in case it might.
To me, Pax Dei feels as if it's still in early-access. The world is there and is beautiful, but its content is unfinished. There's nothing to do but grind, grind, grind. Yes, you can explore, but to what end? The game has great potential, but that potential has yet to be realised. I hope it pulls through, but given that all the updates so far are aimed at satisfying the needs of high-end players, I do worry.
I'm sure the developers know all this anyway, and have a roadmap to address the issues. With hope, somewhere along the line the game's artistic spine will finally become apparent, too. Give it two years and it'll be great.
For the moment, though, my home plot is going to go the way of every other plot abandoned by players.
