Xbox already have a massive amount of games under development, and recent reports suggest one more game that sounds as ambitious as anything being made under the Xbox umbrella.
Jez Corden of Windows Central and Jeff Grubb of GamesBeat have separately reported on a cloud-based MMO being developed by Mainframe industries. Both report that the game is currently under the working name “Pax Dei”.
Grubb details the game, saying “Cloud-native here means that players can access the same game through any device. The studio is also exploring potential gameplay mechanics that can only work in a game that exists primarily on a remote server.”
Grubb goes on to say that “While anyone can do anything in Pax Dei on any device, certain tasks will make more sense depending on where you are playing. So if you’re on your phone at work, you can open up the game and quickly do some crafting or resource farming. Then, when you get home to your PC or console, you can take on some of the more complex missions like raids.”
The value of cloud is clearly ease of access and the ability to play on any device. What Grubb describes here is a game that can be accessed at multiple angles on any device where cloud access is possible. Maybe you don’t want to have a long gaming session on your phone, but you want to complete easier tasks on the go and wait until you’re home to tackle the more challenging objectives.
This sounds exciting and potentially revolutionary in theory. The execution of the game and how it scales is of course something we will need to wait to see.
Jez Corden also adds details in his own report, saying “Microsoft and Mainframe hope to establish a “best practices” framework for device-agnostic gaming using Pax Dei, which will adapt its user experience to cater to the device being used to access the game.”
He goes on saying “Pax Dei would be among the first MMOs designed from day 1 to take advantage of a device-first gaming future, where games and services target players where they are. Xbox Game Pass and its cloud gaming platform are fundamentally an extension of this vision too, with device-aware APIs that detect whether a touch screen is present to surface touch controls, or whether a gamepad is present, and so on.”
Xbox has preached their desire to reach the “two billion” gamers currently in the gaming market and have slowly made steps to achieve that goal. Their initiatives with Game Pass, Cloud Gaming, and reaching players on their own devices has helped push that goal. Pax Dei seems to be the first game that will truly push the limits of Xbox’s ambitions as a true cloud focused game.
While we won’t know how this ambition turns out until the game is eventually revealed, the sparse details we have now are exciting and show that Xbox is looking to push the industry forward.
