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MMO

Pax Dei, the medieval EVE Online-esque MMO, gets its 1.0 release next month

by admin October 1, 2025

What if EVE Online was a bit less sci-fi, and a lot more medieval? You would, in theory, get Pax Dei, a game that first entered early access in June last year. Responses to it so far appear to be, well, mixed, but as seems to be quite common with These Kinds Of Games, everyone that’s played it appears to be going through some kind of Stockholm syndrome kind of situation, as the game is still going. It’s going so far as to launch into 1.0 in fact, and developer Mainframe Industries have even put a date to it.

That release date is October 16th, about half a month away at the time of writing (assuming I still know how to read calendars). Mainframe outlined what you can expect in the leadup to the launch, as well as what will happen at launch itself in a recent Steam news post too.

From October 6th until the 14th, servers for the game will be completely offline. On the 14th, at 3am PDT, anyone that owns a founder’s pack will have access to the game’s 1.0 servers, and then on the 16th at 8am PDT, the MMO will be available to everyone. Something to note is that with the launch of 1.0, everyone that has been playing so far will have everything wiped – shards, characters, plots, inventories, skills, and more. This is the final wipe though, Mainframe explained, so you won’t have to worry if you’re new to the game.

One big difference is that Pax Dei will also have a subscription model. You can just play the game by buying it, but memberships give you a whole bunch of extras that do seem a little bit unfair. In particular, depending on which membership plan you go for, you’ll get a number of plot tokens, which let you literally own certain pieces of land – that you have to continuously pay for with said tokens. Yes, this is essentially digital rent. Whether this works out or not, well, we’ll find out in the next few months.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

A skeletal warrior stands holding a two-handed sword, wearing bulky black plate armour.

Gaming Gear

No MMO will ever have graphics as good as the text MUDs I played for years

by admin September 20, 2025

My friends, you’ve been had. You’ve been suckered. A cabal of sirens has made you stupefied and susceptible, bearing impressive names like Unreal Engine 5, Unity, Anvil, Snowdrop. These are distractions: dark paths to divert you from the true way. You don’t need nanite-rendered leaves or dappled evening sunlight rendered with lumen. Look away. Look away!

Terminally Online

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMORPG column, and I am not Harvey Randall, your usual author. I’m Joshua Wolens, filling in for Harvey this week with a lot of wistful, misty-eyed old-man musings about the glory of the MUDs of yore.

Look away and look back to the last time anything was good: the ’90s, when the internet moved too slow to cook your brain and the absolute peak of graphical fidelity was translucent water and the PlayStation 1, whose vertices swam and staggered beneath their own raw aesthetic power. Back then, if you wanted a world—a real world—there was only one place to go: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).

And frankly, my contention is that for all our modern graphical horsepower, that’s still the case.

Sacred texts

MUDs, if you’re not familiar, are large, shared, entirely text-based worlds where everything is conducted by the input and output of text. Massively multiplayer command lines, of a sort. Want to go somewhere? Prepare to type GO NORTH, GO NORTHWEST, GO NORTH, GO NORTHEAST ad nauseum until you reach your destination.

PvE might, in a generous game, consist of you typing KILL until the deed is done, pausing intermittently to input whatever the appropriate verb is for healing. A less generous game will have you type out the correct verb for every specific type of attack you want to do. As for PvP? Likely a terrifying arms race of custom-made combat scripts based on an ever-shifting sea of variables.

(Image credit: Mudlet Makers / Iron Realms Entertainment)

They’re complex, in other words. But despite that, it was a MUD—Achaea—that got its hooks into me at the tender age of 13. Not WoW, not EverQuest, not anything else. Achaea was my main game for years, but I moved on to others: Lusternia (no, it’s not a XXX game), Aardwolf, a brief flirtation with Discworld, and so on.

The ‘why’ of it is easy: more than any graphical MMO, these games captured the spirit of tabletop roleplaying—where the gaps in presentation left by dry stat sheets and dice rolls have to be filled by your imagination. MUDs were (and are) nothing but imagination, and their rudimentary presentation left enormous room for players to fill the gaps themselves.

In my heyday, the meat of what I got up to in the MUDs I played didn’t consist of relentlessly grinding dev-authored quests (though there was plenty of that), it took place in all the interstices the designers had left and that players had moved to fill. The beauty of text is that there’s very little you can’t do with it and doing it takes very little time.

Being able to describe yourself any way you liked, to perform any action you could fit into a sentence meant that players I knew made their living as travelling performers, as essayists on in-game lore (this was often tedious), as politicians and diplomats. Also they would quite regularly retreat to somewhere secluded with one another and—sweaty fingers trembling—co-author the most specific smut you can imagine. The internet!

(Image credit: Iron Realms)

It is, in these circumstances, relatively easy to catch a dev’s attention and have them help you roleplay out some kind of in-game event. Perhaps you want to be an archaeologist making a momentous discovery: all you need is someone to type you up a new item, and maybe briefly inhabit a nearby NPC to act out the scene.

And it really did look great, too. Not to turn into a kindergarten teacher, but your imagination is quite powerful, and good writing is timeless in a way no texture or lighting model ever will be.

Left on read

Alas, MUDs are on the downswing. In fairness, they’ve been that way since at least the late ’90s. They were dying even when I was first getting into them, slowly supplanted by MMOs which more closely resembled videogames and less resembled emacs. Where my favourites of yore once had playercounts in the hundreds, now they number in the tens. Some in the single-digits. Though some are doing quite well, I understand.

(Image credit: Iron Realms / Mudlet)

We’ll miss them if they ever go entirely, I think. As tech advances to fill more and more of those gaps which we used to have to fill ourselves, our scope for participation and mental investment in the worlds we spend thousands of hours in diminishes. Or mine does, anyway.

I’ve tried to get into the WoWs and SWTORs of the world (not FF14, which I believe I need some kind of catboy licence to enter legally), but none of the many characters I’ve made linger in my mind like the cadaverous freak I used to play in Achaea, and it’s Lusternia—not any MMO normal human beings play—that I habitually return to every holiday period. If I’m going to take part in a massive online world, I want to feel like I have the capacity to shape it, if nowhere else than in my own mind.

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September 20, 2025 0 comments

Esports

The Elder Scrolls Online heads on the aftermath of Microsoft’s cuts and the future of the long-running MMO

by admin September 15, 2025

There have been some tumultuous times recently at ZeniMax Online Studios, makers of The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO).

As part of Microsoft’s sweeping cuts in early July, a long-in-development MMO codenamed Blackbird was cancelled. Shortly afterwards, ZeniMax president Matt Firor announced his departure after 18 years as head of the studio.

Rich Lambert, studio game director, ZeniMax Online Studios

Replacing him – or at least part of his role – is Rich Lambert, who was formerly game director on ESO. Lambert’s new title is studio game director, while Jo Burba has taken on the title of studio head. “He’s focused on the operational side of things,” explains Lambert, “and I’m focused on a lot of studio-level things and future planning.”

It perhaps says something about Firor’s importance to the studio that it has taken two people to fill his vacant seat. “He wore a lot of different hats,” acknowledges Lambert.

Stepping up into Lambert’s old role is Nick Giacomini, who started off as a senior product manager at ZeniMax in 2019. “Am I nervous? Absolutely,” says Giacomini. “But I’m very excited.”

“This wasn’t something that I was seeking out,” he adds. But he says he is “incredibly honoured” to take on the role, and judging by his all-encompassing enthusiasm for MMOs, he’s the perfect person to steer the future of ESO.

Nick Giacomini, game director, ZeniMax Online Studios

“I’ve been playing [MMOs] for about 20 years, almost every single day,” he gushes. “I can count on my own two hands the number of days I haven’t logged into an MMO, so that’s thousands of hours in multiple games.”

Securing a job at ZeniMax in 2019 was like a dream for him. “I remember jumping up and down with my wife, [going] ‘I can’t believe this is happening!'”

But Lambert has warned his successor that being the public face of a popular MMO also has a negative side. It means dealing with a lot of criticism from players, some of it personal. “You have to have really thick skin for that stuff,” he says.

“Nick and I were actually talking about this the other day, where he asked me, ‘How do you deal with all of the hate? […] How do you not let that get to you?’

“Because it’s a personal attack, right? They’re personally attacking you, and it’s really hard to deal with that and work through that. And I just told him, people generally don’t complain unless they’re passionate. And so try to find that nugget.

“And if there’s no nugget and it’s just pure vitriol, then just kind of push it away and try to focus on the positives.”

Saying goodbye

But the more immediate concern has been dealing with the aftermath of Microsoft’s cuts, which reportedly saw ZeniMax employees being locked out of Slack and left in limbo.

“It was super emotional, it was awful,” recalls Lambert, who says that he had personally worked with some of the people affected for 10 or 15 years.

“But then after, you pick yourself up off the floor and […] you realize that we have this responsibility to our community, to the game, to everybody else that is still there to move forward. That’s really hard, but that’s the goal, to continue to move forward and keep ESO going.”

Giacomini emphasises the point: “We have a commitment to our players to try to deliver the best product and experiences that we can for them. And so yes, it’s been challenging, but we’re facing forward.”

Image credit: ZeniMax Online Studios

There was also the sudden departure of studio founder Matt Firor to process. “I’ve been working with Matt for almost 20 years, and it was a shock to all of us,” says Lambert. “But he’s his own man. He’s his own person. He gets to do that, and you respect him, right? He’s been in the industry a long, long, long time.”

Still, the show must go on. “I think the thing that you kind of rally around as a team, especially on something like ESO, is we’re more than one person. The game is more than one person. Yes, Matt is the founder of the studio, and I was the number two person on there, but I don’t build everything. Nick doesn’t build [everything], Matt doesn’t build everything.

“We have this village of super-talented, super-passionate people, and we get to represent them, but we don’t do it all.”

Fast forward

In terms of where ESO is going, Lambert says it’s in “a bit of a transition year.”

Historically, the game has issued updates as ‘chapters’ – big swathes of content that take around 18 months to build. The trouble with that, says Lambert, is that “most of the team’s efforts are focused on building the chapter,” which means that any issues raised by players in the meantime get pushed back in the schedule until the team has time to address them.

Now, ESO is switching over to a ‘season’ model, where the goal is to have “smaller, more bite-sized things out quicker,” explains Lambert. And rather than players waiting perhaps 18 or 24 months for requested features to be implemented, the hope is to get that down to six or nine months, he says.

The ultimate goal with the season model is to put out more frequent, meaningful updates to players, Lambert says, adding that the chapter model had started to feel a little too formulaic. “We’re kind of too predictable, and we want to shake that up and be a little bit more reactive.”

Image credit: ZeniMax Online Studios

It also, perhaps, ties in to the industry-wide ambition to make things a bit more quickly: a response to the lead times for ever-more-detailed modern games becoming ever longer. But Lambert emphasises that games, by their nature, are just “really hard” to make.

“It takes a long time to build art, because you’ve got to model it out and you’ve got to rig it and skin it, all these things. It takes time to code things out. It takes time when we’re building stories: you’re writing words on a paper and then you put that in-engine, and then you have to send it out to be voiceovered and localized.” In short, he says, it’s “really, really complicated.”

What about AI, that purported saviour? What kinds of uses is ZeniMax finding for that?

“I mean, obviously we’ve looked into it. Microsoft has got their big push for AI. But we don’t really use a lot of it right now. I use a lot of it for meeting summaries and whatnot, because it just makes my life easier. It helps organise my inbox and stuff like that. But we don’t have a ton of it right now.”

Ambitions

In terms of the future of ZeniMax Online Studios, Lambert has lofty goals.

“I want us to be the most successful studio in our entire organization,” he says. “That’s a big thing to say because we’ve got Bethesda Game Studios, we’ve got MachineGames, and id – the list goes on. But I want us to be that group that everybody looks at, like we do with [Bethesda Game Studios].

“You look at Todd Howard’s group and […] it’s, like, five Game of the Years in a row, and this massive legacy and all that. That’s what I want us to do.”

Presumably, does that mean Lambert has ambitions for the studio beyond just ESO, then? “I want to make more games,” he replies. “I’m not done yet, and the team continues to want to make more games as well.

“I have lots of ideas. Hopefully we’ll be able to share those at some point.”

So it certainly seems like ZeniMax Online Studios won’t always be a single-game studio – and Lambert definitely doesn’t want to pin everything on a single game.

“I don’t think you can ride one thing into forever. I mean, obviously we want ESO to be successful, we want it to be that 30-year MMO, and commit to it,” he says. “But if you put all your eggs in one basket, there’s issues.”

Image credit: ZeniMax Online Studios

Still, there’s that perennial problem for studios with long-running live-service games – the worry that any new release will only end up competing with and potentially taking players from your existing title. But Lambert points out that this is something ZeniMax Media deals with all the time.

“When you look at our entire portfolio, we have that across the board, right?” he says. “There’s Fallout 76 and ESO, and they coexist, right? We’re also under the entire Microsoft portfolio, so World of Warcraft is [being made by] a sister studio now.”

Amid all the drama of the long-running Microsoft/Activision Blizzard acquisition saga, when much of the attention was on what would happen to Call of Duty, it’s easy to forget that it also resulted in two rival fantasy MMORPGs being united under the same parent.

Giacomini says ZeniMax now works together with Blizzard – “We communicate with each other, we learn from each other” – and he adds that internal competition is something they need to be aware of for any new game, giving the example of Bethesda releasing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered earlier this year.

“We looked at it, and we’re like, ‘Ooh, what’s that going to do for us? Does that have the potential to hurt us?’ But in fact, it resulted in a lot of new players trying ESO for the first time, and a lot of players who have lapsed coming back to the game.”

Innovation versus inertia

ESO came out in 2014 and recently celebrated its first decade. But being the steward of such a long-running game poses all sorts of problems.

For a start, there are the technical aspects. “We used to be cutting edge in 2014,” says Giacomini. “Maybe less so now. And so that’s something that we’re constantly evaluating.”

He points out that the studio recently reworked the game’s starter zones, home to some of ESO’s oldest content, as well as adding new onboarding for lapsed players, “because as we’ve continued to add to the game, it’s introduced a tremendous amount of complexity as well.”

Lambert adds that ESO’s water tech has gone through four iterations since the game’s debut, and there have been a whole host of other technical improvements over the past decade, too. “When we started building the game in 2007, cross play wasn’t a thing,” he points out.

Image credit: ZeniMax Online Studios

But if ZeniMax has ambitions to keep ESO going for 30 years or more, there’s also the inescapable issue of the human aging process. As ESO’s loyal, long-term audience gets older, and perhaps has less time to play games, how does ZeniMax plan to persuade a younger audience to come in?

“There’s no solution, exactly,” says Giacomini. “A lot of it comes down to the players in the community, of course, and doing right by them, trying to give them what they want and need from us.”

He notes that player expectations change, just as technology changes, “and so staying on top of that while staying true to the roots is also a big part of it. Games need to be willing to change and evolve.”

But of course, any changes to suit new players or emerging trends could also risk alienating veteran players who want to keep things as they are.

“One hundred percent,” agrees Lambert. “And we’ve gone through this over the years. At the launch, we tried to walk this line between MMO and Elder Scrolls, and we were in this weird spot where we didn’t do either one particularly well.

“And so when we decided that we were going to do Elder Scrolls first and then do MMO kind of second, that upset some folks. But it just made everything better overall.” He adds that the game has changed considerably from launch, notably dropping the subscription model early on.

“I think the other really important part in all of this is respecting players,” he continues.

“That’s the most valuable thing that players can give us, is their time”

Rich Lambert, ZeniMax Online Studios

It’s a tall order: a balance between making sure there’s enough content and mechanics to ensure dedicated, daily players can be satisfied engaging in marathon game bouts, yet also ensuring that players who can only engage for a handful of hours here and there still come away satisfied at having made meaningful progress, without being bamboozled by complexity.

“That’s the most valuable thing that players can give us, is their time. And as you say, as you start to get older, you start to have less of that.”

In other words, time comes for us all, in the end. “I used to be able to stay up for 30 hours straight and play games,” remembers Lambert. “Now? Five hours, I’m exhausted, I’m ready to go to bed.”

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September 15, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Opening Night Live buried the lede with WoW’s Midnight expansion – the MMO has a load of new additions coming that are genuinely interesting

by admin August 20, 2025

Gamescom Opening Night Live was packed full of new game reveals as is tradition, one of the fancier looking ones surely being the new cinematic for World of Warcraft’s Midnight expansion. Blizzard cinematics are always fantastic, the team responsible for them having seemingly made a pact with eldritch forces to maintain a level of quality one would think insurmountable.

But aside from the glitz and glamour of this cinematic, and the community-wide sigh of relief from the World of Warcraft community that Lor’themar didn’t get murdered live in front of Geoff Keighley, loads of other dope World of Warcraft related information was dropped that you may have missed. Here’s the good stuff.

Watch the cinematic for World of Warcraft: Midnight here!Watch on YouTube

World of Warcraft has housing and it looks pretty cool

My house! | Image credit: Activison Blizzard

A few months back Blizzard announced its intention to eat Final Fantasy 14’s lunch and add player housing into the game, without virtual landlords and camps of destitute players camped outside of plots they’ve heard may be going up for sale soon.

There’s a housing virtual tour website you can use right now to get an idea of what these homes will look like, and a gameplay demonstration at Gamescom gave us a look at what customising a house would actually be like via the lens of various content creators. Seeing internet celebrities place down a dozen carpets has never been so exciting.

Housing will either be a new venture for collectors and social players that’ll add another layer of immersion and lovely personalisation, or it’ll be a barren building speed levelers will run into briefly once when the expansion comes out before racing to max level and wiping in Mythic zero dungeons. Either way, cool. Those who pre-order the expansion can gain access to play housing early, obviously.

New Demon Hunter specialisation and a new allied race

Perhaps the most Avenged Sevenfold spec of all time. | Image credit: Activison Blizzard

A new Demon Hunter specialisation – called the Devourer – has been revealed. This void-focused spin on the edgiest class in WoW allows players to gorge themselves on the power of darkness, using the void to deal loads of damage. Using spells like “Collapsing Star” and “Hungering Slash”, you can pretend you’re not 35 years old and balding.

The Haranir will also be playable as an allied race in Midnight. These subterranean elvish / trollish people were introduced in The War Within and are a pretty rad spiritual subrace of intriguing weirdos. You’ll be able to play them as a Druid, Mage, Monk, Shaman, Priest, Warlock, Rogue, Warrior, and Hunter. Those who level ’em up get a hairy bat mount.

We’re going back to Blood Elf territory

I mean check this out… Brilliant. | Image credit: Activison Blizzard

One of the best zones Blizzard ever made purely from a perspective of vibrancy and high-fantasy vibes was Quel’Thalas. It’s a gorgeous forest filled with beautiful people with one big scar running down the middle. Well it turns out we’re going back, and not only will that big horrible scar be fixed up, but Silvermoon City will also be totally repaired. As a Blood Elf player, it’s a big victory all on its own.

You’re there to make sure the Sunwell doesn’t fall to the forces of evil, a tough endeavor considering the Sunwell has fallen twice already throughout its history. Still, it’s an excuse to head back to Zul’Aman and murder a third generation of Troll, as well as explore two new zones called Harandar and the Voidstorm. Nice.

A Prey system that might just fix the open world difficulty

Now every quest could be a lot more than you bargained for. | Image credit: Activison Blizzard

For years players have been doing quests and roaming around the open world in World of Warcraft with War Mode on, which would open you up to world PvP. This was meant to make questing a little more challenging, but frankly has mainly been used for an XP boost and for some niche collections.

The new Prey system is similar, though doesn’t require any PvP. Instead, by marking yourself as prey, you can go out and hunt (or be hunted) by tough bosses. There are three difficulties too, so it should all be genuinely tricky for those looking for some extra excitement.

Mounts and house customisation pieces can be gained by signing up, so all in all it’ll likely offer a decent diversion for those looking to extend their time in the Midnight zones, rather than through themselves at raids with terrible friends.

So there’s actually a lot to be excited for with World of Warcraft: Midnight. I, someone who swore off the game a year or so ago, has once again reinstalled the MMO and have found myself roaming around the world. Such is the cycle of WoW. I may even pre-order the expansion, for a mount I will ride around only once and transmog I shall never use.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments