After Grey Wolf and Iceberg Interactive announced that Pax Nova would be delayed until 2020, we were very curious to know what the direction of further development would look like for this very promising game.

We reached out to Iceberg and Mike Domingues, the lead developer at Grey Wolf, and we’re now excited to share these answers with you:

1) Congratulations on a rather successful Early Access period so far. You’ve done a great job of responding to feedback. With that said, what other feedback do you plan to address before release?

Thank you! Acting on player feedback is the reason we’re in Early Access, and we really appreciate everything we receive. Right now; there’s still a decent list of bugs and imbalances that we’re working on, so polish is the number one priority. Beyond that there’s also support for different languages and more content planned, but we haven’t finalized the plans for how much will end up in version 1.0 just yet.

2) Is there any consistent feedback that you see that is simply outside the scope of your project?

Multiplayer is an obvious one – and it’s something we have explored. Our conclusion is that first we need to have a successful launch and establish enough of a player-base for it to be worth our time investment. Another request that just isn’t in our vision for Pax Nova are battles with ‘hundreds of units’. Even though the conflicts in PN can get very tense with explosive turns, this game isn’t designed for that kind of quantity.

3) Personally, for the sake of replayability, I’d still like to see more asymmetry for each faction, or even just each race, that helps them feel a bit more distinct from one another. Are there plans for that?

During Early Access we’ve been redesigning the inner systems of Pax Nova that are working together to create intriguing scenarios for players. Recently, we’ve significantly retouched the combat mechanics. This made it more obvious to us that the changes we had in mind for unique technologies, traits, seals as well as units should be higher priority.

4) What has been the most difficult challenge so far in development?

Keeping up with both the solid stream of quality feedback from our Early Access players as well as the enormous scale of the game! For an indie developer it’s really challenging and ambitious to maintain a project of this scope.

5) With unlimited time and resources, what would you want to add to Pax Nova?

Well multiplayer is still something we think would be a great feature for this game. Also content like missions, different biomes and units are part of that dream world, that stuff is very time consuming.

6) Will more sound effects be added? Pax Nova feels a bit quiet sometimes…

Some small sound effects might get added but music-wise we’re looking at DLC rather than the base game.  

7) Pax Nova has become a very solid game. How do you think you’ll encourage those that came in early and left wanting to retry it? 

We’ll be reaching out on Steam forums as well as our Discord and ask what our players miss, if we can point at a changelog then there’s a start! We’re also planning to continue Pax Nova’s development after its release early 2020 and continuously listen to players.

8) Will there be any more “major” updates to the Early Access version? Is there a beta branch available to help development?

We haven’t finalised our plans, but I can say we’ll have more news soon!

9) Lastly, and with the understanding that you’re not promising anything, do you plan to support Pax Nova with expansions after release? If so, what ideas do you have? 

That’s certainly our ambition, but as always it depends on how well the game performs on launch. If there’s enough demand for DLC, we’ve certainly got ideas!

Thanks again, Mike! Pax Nova is genuinely shaping up to be a good game and we’ve really been enjoying our time with it. We hope to see it reach even higher quality and look forward to continuing the road to 1.0 with you!