The new MMORPG Pax Dei has entered early access on Steam and after three days has “balanced reviews”: 56 percent are positive. One of the reviews for the 40-euro game is now causing a lot of discussion.
This is the situation at Pax Dei:
At Pax Dei, base building is considered a unique selling point:
Pax Dei: Trailer for the Early Access launch shows a beautiful medieval world
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Steam user writes review after 12 minutes in the game – It goes viral
This is the review: A review by user “gisk” appeared on June 18th (via Steam) after the user had only spent about twelve minutes in the game. The user’s review is written as if he were writing an email from the boss to the developers.
The review reads nasty, the developers should just use free standard development tools and quickly cobble something together, without a story, dialogues, a class system or NPCs. After all, they are making a completely player-driven sandbox.
Actually, everything should be standard, but you have to pay a few streamers to get them to say that Pax Dei is the “best survival sandbox MMO” ever made. Except Lirik, who left the game after 20 minutes – you shouldn’t pay him. On the other hand, maybe you should pay him in order to force him to say good things about the game.
The team should then bring the game into Early Access and three months later introduce a subscription model for $100 a month. Anyone who doesn’t pay will lose characters, items and the base. This way they make double the profit, and if that doesn’t work out, they can simply develop another Early Access game.
Developers initially react rudely, then want to use reviews for advertising
How do the developers react? The first reaction was pretty rude (via archive.org). They said the player hadn’t checked the Discord, where they’ve been publishing information about the game for a year and a half. They take game development very seriously and love getting feedback on how the game can be improved.
But when the review went viral, the developers changed the text: Now they congratulate the reviewer on his good writing and say that they hope that everyone who finds the text funny will also take a look at Pax Dei. Now they describe the advantages of the MMO.
This is how it is discussed: Streamer Lirik had a lot of fun, as did many other people on Steam.
The developers’ statements and especially the fact that they quickly changed this to advertise the game are perceived as “cringe”.
The player wrote a negative review after only twelve minutes, but there are also people who only comment negatively on their game after much longer: Player spends 7,900 hours in Free2Play MMORPG, writes devastating Steam review