Happy Tuesday everyone. I'm Jim, and I attended PAX East 2011 in Boston this past weekend.
Allow me this opportunity to exhale a moment, and then I will begin my attempt to convey the following:
HOLY MOSES PAX EAST WAS AWESOME.
With that out of the way, let me rewind and give you the full details. Pour yourself a beverage. This series of posts will be long, because there is simply too much to talk about.
Last year's PAX East was a delightful experiment that I had nothing to do with. I was unable to make it out to the show and from what everyone said, it was an incredible success. It was so successful, that they moved it to a much larger convention center, the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The building itself is quite impressive. The main hall is 516,000 square feet, which equates to about 9.75 football fields in space. The upper floors, where they house meeting rooms and other amenities, add up to an additional 160,000 square feet, and then you have various nooks and crannies around the place that adds up to about 5.06 billion miles of space.
Something like that, anyway. It was so big that despite setting a record for crowd size, the PAX folks still didn't utilize all the space available. Just you wait until next year.
Since there was so much to do, see, and experience, I won't even pretend that I will cover it all here. I will split this into two small (ha!) articles. The first will cover the better stuff I saw on the show floor and I'll follow up with some of the panels I saw and people I got to meet.
The Show Floor
There was simply too much to see on the PAX East show floor. Three were many game demos, tech demos, and wait lines to possibly see everything I wanted to see, but after three days of roaming, I got to see a lot of cool stuff. Heres a few selections:
Battlefield 3
This was the first thing I had to see. Battlefield is one of my favorite game series of all time, dating back to the early 2000's with Battlefield 1942. I've played every game since (with special love for Battlefield 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company) and my knees got weak just seeing the gigantic Battlefield 3 diorama they set up on the show floor. The game's creators, DICE, set up a demonstration within a enclosed partition they built, and every half hour or so, one of their employees would play a 15 minute demo of the game for a small audience. In order to get in, however, you had to be an EA Gun Club member, which is simply a social network that ties together all your stats and experience from the various EA action/shooter games found on their website. Those that waited in line with me didn't know this, and used phones, tablets and laptops to sign up on the fly in order to get in. Nice move by DICE. I'm sure EA got thousands of subscribers because of the entrance requirement.
Once inside, we got to witness the Frostbite 2 Engine DICE developed for Battlefield 3, which expands on the realistic immersion that the older version pioneered. Everything... EVERYTHING... is destructible. The environments are dynamic, the AI is responsive and often way to real to be artificial, and the sound engine is (as always) amazing. The demo, coupled with the great sound system DICE set up, made it sound like you were actually in Iraq, trying to survive a battle. At the end of the demo, they showed how the city the level took place in was 100% dynamically destructible. An earthquake rumbles and shattered the highway you are on, and brings down a skyscraper onto the men below it. It was breathtaking.
Oh and they played the famous Battlefield theme song at the end. Look for Battlefield 3 to devastate cities on PC, Xbox 360, and Playstion 3 this fall.
Microsoft/Kinect/Gears of War 3
I didn't see as much of this part of the show floor as I would have liked, mostly because it wasn't laid out too well. It was perhaps the largest area that any one company or developer had, but they were pushing Kinect pretty hard, which requires a lot of space. They showcased a lot of existing games for Kinect, like Dance Central and Kinect Sports, but they also had a lot of other soon-to-be released games being demoed, as well as a lot of various Xbox Live Arcade games available to try out. The entire booth was playable, though, including a dozen or so Xboxes running the Gears of War 3 beta that will be available in April. Gears 3 looks to be just as great as the previous two, and from what I got to experience, Epic Games has vastly improved the multiplayer mode of the game. Look for Gears to chainsaw the face off of September 20th, 2011.
Portal 2
The Portal 2 demo was unique in that we didn't really see too much we haven't seen before. Instead, they took the time to showcase some of the voice talent that will be featured in the game, and it is poised to be fantastic. The highlight was actor J.K. Simmons, best known for playing J. Jonah Jamison in Spiderman and his work in the Farmer's Insurance commercials. He will be voicing the character Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperture Science. The game play we saw looked amazing, but it was Simmon's quotes that had me and the rest of the audience laughing the entire demo. It looks like its going to be a great game, and the humor the series is known for should not disappoint fans. I'll leave you with a great quote from the demo, made by Cave Johnson:
"Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA: I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is we're postponing the test indefinitely. The good news is we've got a much better test for you: fighting an army of Mantis Men."
This game will have you thinking with Portals on April 18th, 2011.
Duke Nukem Forever
Hail to the King Baby!
I can't believe that this game is actually happening. It has been the running joke of the gaming world for more than a decade, as the game has been in development, cancelled, restarted, cancelled, restarted (and so on...).
The game play looks pretty standard for Duke and pals, and the third grade humor is definitely there. The best part of their booth was a throne that was set up and flanked by two babes who would take a picture with you if you waited in line to sit. The King is back, that's for sure, and the large crown above the show floor could be seen from just about everywhere. It was pretty awesome to see such a great series back, but the game play was not anything we haven't seen in other shooters. Hopefully the character of Duke Nukem is enough to entice young players to the series that weren't old enough (or perhaps not even born) when the last game came out in 1996.
Duke Nukem kicks ass and chews bubblegum on May 3rd, 2011.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
I can't say much about this one. The booth was huge, and the wait in line was always 4+ hours long. They had a lot of screens set up with great looking gameplay and trailers, but we've seen most of these before. They allowed people to play the game for 45 minutes, as it was explained to me by fellow Channel Hide contributor Brenton Galbraith (seen gazing lustfully in the image above), which we both agreed was too long, and hence caused unreasonable wait times. Coupled with the lack of information they were willing to provide, (like a release date, the potential for free-to-play, and possible multiplatform support) the whole booth left a sour taste in my mouth. I'm not a big fan of pay-to-play MMO games, so I've been looking forward to this because they have commented that a free-to-play strategy is something they were interested in trying for this title. No news and the obvious astronomical budget would suggest that this is clearly not set up for free-to-play. If that's the case, I will not be attending the wars in the stars.
The force was strong with this booth because of the long wait time and great visuals, but without a release date or pricing, I have to say I was left disappointed by one of my favorite franchises ever. Sadness all around.
Surprise of the show: Firefall
Firefall caught me completely by surprise. I have never heard of it before, and from the people I talked to throughout the weekend, neither have a lot of people. It had a huge sign that, for a moment, looked to me like the Starcraft logo (it uses a near identical font) so of course I took notice.
Little did I know that this game is poised to be completely awesome. Its a futuristic action/shooter MMO that is free-to-play! FREE TO PLAY.
Take notice, Old Republic Developers.
The game's visuals are solid and the controls are super-smooth. They had a bunch of PCs set up to allow people to play (I returned four times, i enjoyed it so much). The developer, Red 5, has been developing it behind closed doors for some time now, and plan on monetizing the game with micro-transactions which they promised "will not unbalance the game in favor of those who decide to pay for new equipment." This is key for FTP games, as older ones had issues for players that never caved and bought new stuff for the games would always be at a disadvantage to those who ponied up. This new philosophy in FTP economies seems to be catching on with other games too, so that makes this writer happy.
Firefall will cost you $0 sometime near the end of 2011.
Ok, that's all I'm going to cover for now. Thinking about it further, I may do a second post on the show floor wrap-up, because this article hardly covers everything I could talk about. I'll think about it while I deal with carpel tunnel.
~ Jimmy "I walked a hundred miles around this place and still didn't see it all" the G.
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This post has a Shenanaganary rating of:
"People that have paid or are currently paying to play an MMO game are jackasses. Sure, you have to pay for Xbox Live and PSN+, but at least you get to play everything on the platform. But for just one game? What a waste."
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