Pax Dei: Art and QA for a sprawling medieval sandbox RPG 

Pax Dei is an early-access MMORPG from Mainframe Industries, a Nordic startup made up of veterans from Blizzard, CCP, Next Games, and other big-name companies from around the industry. In Pax Dei, players explore a social sandbox MMO where they can craft items, build homes, and ultimately, decide their own fate in a fantasy medieval world.  

Our Art team (Room 8 Studio) and QA team have had the pleasure of working on the game since 2021.  

The challenge 

Pax Dei is an ambitious project. Such a game demands a lot from its developers, who must add new content regularly, be extra vigilant of bugs given the game’s size, and maintain all elements of a large open world.  

Mainframe’s ambitious goals and lean core team made Room 8 Group the perfect partner to broaden their capacity. As an external developer, we’re a release valve for developers who want to outsource parts of their production pipeline.  

Here’s a breakdown of our contribution to Pax Dei so far. 

What we did 

Work was done by two of our teams: Art and QA.  

Art 

The art we’ve contributed to this project was mostly 3D—environments, characters, and weapons—with some VFX, too.  

The overarching challenge: make art assets, from props to animals and everything in between, in a realistic medieval Europe setting with fantasy elements, in Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Lumen.  

Since textures in the game were generative, we needed to be precise at the high-poly stage of 3D modeling to achieve the desired realistic effect and to make the medieval fantasy world convincing.  

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of our 3D work, where we: 

• made hundreds of crafting items, and loot props, items, modular building pieces, rocks, and set-dressing props. 

• helped develop and launch clothing customization, specifically the ability for players to alter the trim of their clothes. 
• created around 10 in-game tools that players use in the game. 
• created various animals—a wolf, bear, deer, badger, rabbit, fox, frog, and, importantly, their demon versions—as well as some NPCs, such as knights. 
• made medieval weapons and armor, like swords, cuirasses, helmets, and gauntlets. 
• created UV mapping for all assets. 
• created in-game visual assets (including 2D) of various sizes and complexities to set-dress the world, and to give players more building and crafting items, from tiny pins to forts and citadels. 

• ensured the game was optimized by keeping memory under control; we did this by reusing assets as much as possible. 
• created inventory icons for various items using pre-made rendering and color-correction setups. 
• made several master materials, tiling texture sets, and decals for shared use. 

Regarding VFX, we created most VFX placeholders for the game’s combat system. This was crucial for ensuring a good gameplay experience, given that combat is such a big part of Pax Dei.  

Our VFX artists were fully integrated into the Mainframe team. They were in constant communication with the partner’s code, design, and animation departments to work quickly and efficiently. 

QA 

Our QA team—which for this project is one lead and a team of testers conducting manual QA—has been, and continues to be, a crucial part of the Mainframe team, embedded as an extension of their core team.  

Our testers have been responsible for testing all parts of the game—every mechanic, every item, every progression curve. The world of Pax Dei is made using a procedural generation system, adding another layer of complexity to testing. Each time the world was regenerated, our teams had to complete full world passes to check if the system had created all terrain, placed each point of interest, and allocated all zone borders correctly. Given the live-service nature of Pax Dei, our QA testers have to be ready for new, urgent tasks at any moment. Because it’s in early access, it’s natural for players to find the occasional bug. This meant our testers have to be flexible and ready to respond to new reports at a moment’s notice. 

And because Mainframe isn’t the biggest team—and because of the size and nature of the game—it was important we had autonomy and were comfortable making some decisions independently, especially when creating test plans, prioritizing tasks, and creating test scenarios. Often, QA work follows a rigid, to-the-minute flow, but this project was different. Testing was often exploratory, and trust was crucial.  

With such a big, dynamic game, we had to be proactive rather than reactive, making the best of what time we had to focus on specific game areas or elements.  
 
Over time, trust was built, and our testers were embedded into Mainframe’s internal feature teams. Our testers are now working directly with feature owners and developers to test these features and communicate issues from early development. 

Some specific QA services our testers provided: 

• Functional Testing: 
• Smoke Testing 
• Environment Testing 
• Visual Passes 
• Feature Curve Testing (Combat, Crafting, etc.) 
• Discord Game Implementation Testing 
• Community and Live Report Processing 
• PvP and Social Systems Testing 
• Ad Hoc and Exploratory Testing 
• Regression Testing 
• Bug Reporting  
• Implementation of Jira Workflows 
• Test Case and Test Suite Creation 
• Compatibility Testing 

The outcome 

Big in scope, grand in ambition: Pax Dei is an early-access title with boatloads of potential, and we’re proud to be working on it with a fantastic partner in Mainframe Industries.  

Our artists learned a lot about how to be optimally efficient when making and managing consistent, visually appropriate modular kits of small assets in Unreal Engine 5. They gained experience with various production pipelines and completed a wide range of technical tasks, developing their T-shape skills. This project was an opportunity for most of the team to use Unreal on a much larger scale than they had before. 

Regarding QA: When working on fast-moving projects it’s important to communicate straightforwardly with partners, and this is something we pride ourselves on. Thankfully, Mainframe’s philosophy was the same as ours, so communication has been smooth and effective.  

The partner also praised our ability to adjust quickly and to be adaptable amidst an unpredictable work environment given the constantly evolving nature of Pax Dei. With our deep technical know-how and broad testing experience, we were consistently able to flag issues ahead of time and match the pace of Mainframe’s development. 

We’ll continue working on Pax Dei while it is in early access to make it the best MMORPG experience it can be. For now: Pax vobis… 

Play Pax Dei on Steam