Server size is very often the sort of question that comes to mind when most genre fans hear about a new game, especially those who swing our genre’s acronym about like a weapon in internet arguments. Those folks can be rest assured that Mainframe Industries’ developing sandbox MMORPG Pax Dei is worthy of the classification, as it talked all about server size and server tech in its latest dev blog.
Mainframe states that each regional shard of the game (US, EU, and Asia) is estimated to seat a maximum of about 7,000 players. Those shards are further broken down into zone servers to handle the computational load of managing a whole world, while moving from one zone server to another should be a seamless process from the player’s perspective except for instances like moving from a province into a dungeon or seeing other players across a zone server’s boundary. Breaking down populations further, zone instances are currently capable of housing 150 players at a time, but each zone will be chopped up into separate instances (aka layers).
The latter portion of the post offers up a server-focused FAQ, which confirms that Pax Dei will start without language-specific servers initially but may suggest certain shards based on language preferences, affirms that there will not be region locking between shards (though players should expect some latency if they connect to a shard outside of their physical region), outlines rough plans to allow for server transfers in some instances, and confirms that the MMORPG is “open to third-party programs and add-ons” that don’t allow cheating, though it currently isn’t set up to offer add-on support right now.
