PAX 2014 Day Three - Sunday 31/8/2014
Another gray day hopefully less rainy than yesterday. First up on the agenda was the Gearbox Software panel down in the main hall. The streets were wet but it wasn’t actively raining and it even cleared up as the day went on.
I joined the queue which was outside and around 2 sides of the block that Benaroya sits on which I think is the biggest queue I’ve been in so far. Once we got in seats were at a premieum I was all the way up on the third floor in the front row. It was a decent view a little far back but pretty good.
The panel kicked off with Mikey Neumann and a few others welcoming out some superb borderlands cosplay. That was followed up by studio head Randy Pitchford coming on taking off his jacked then putting another one back on. After that they got down to business and started by talking about Borderlands the Pre Sequel that Mikey apparently named by accident it was a joke that became the title. It’s set between borderlands one and two and follows the rise of hansom jack. They showed the new playable heroes although they were all borderlands 2 characters I think. Claptrap will be playable and his special will be somewhat random. Sometimes it will do what it’s supposed to other times rubber ducks. They also mentioned that the game will feature a framing device for its new game + mode where the game is told in flashback and if you play again Tiny tina of Borderland 2 fame will ask to hear the story again but harder and then have various commentary.
Then they brought out the head of Tell Tale who are doing the tales of borderlands which will be set after borderlands 2 and tell some of the stories as well as new stories from the universe and it will unlock stuff in the presequel.
After that they talked about an email they had received and had Rami Ismail from Vlambeer to do a dramatic reading.
After that they spoke about homeworld remaster and they were redoing all the graphics the textures the models the engine the soundtrack so it might take a while. They showed the cinematic remade with the hidef visuals and hidef audio it looked pretty good.
Next up they talked about Battleborn which is a new game a fps where you go through the leveling proccess very quickly, they said sort of 30 min chunks. It sounded like it was pretty early on so they had some sort of taster trailer but not much else. They suggested there would be many many different characters to play all different. The story is that it’s near the end of the universe all the stars but one have burnt out and every remaining race in the galaxy are clustered around that star arguing about what to do.
Next up Randy did a magic trick it was a card trick that was pretty good fun he basically told a story while drawing the cards so they matched the story. They had some trouble with the card table that wasn’t flat so Mikey held it up.
Then Randy did the ice bucket challenge and got soaked in ice water for the ALS charity thing.
To end things off they gave out the season pass for borderlands presequel free to everyone which was pretty cool.
After that I essentially did a loop and joined the benaroya queue again to wait for the PA make a strip panel. It was pretty fun Mike drew the strip live and both him and Jerry answered questions. In previous years they had a mike and people asked stuff live. This year they had preselected questions in envelopes white envelopes for normal red for hard. There were some fun questions then talked about some of the times they nearly called the whole thing off. How hard making the ill fated games was on them. Why Jerry always wears the same type of clothes. Mike’s desire to teach art to kids.
It was good fun and I enjoyed it as usual.
After that I took a break and grabbed some lunch to fortify myself for the afternoon. I tried to watch a tetris panel while eating but the streaming wasn’t cooperating.
Later I watched the Patrick Rothfuss panel he answered some questions read his book “The Princess and Mr Whiffle” which looks like but isn’t a children’s book and once read through is a very different story. He also gave his review of Esio Trot by Roald Dahl which he wasn’t a fan of it was a bit of an awful tale about an old man tricking a woman by replacing tortoises. The he read a bit of a novella he is releasing and then finished with everyone singing you are my sunshine.
I thought about going to one of the parties but I fell asleep and also I wanted to go to the ClubPA photo thing so that would have made it difficult to get some dinner.
After that I saw a Gauntlet semi final match with Graham Stark, Paul, Storm, and Jose Sanchez playing in the pax celebrity gauntlet tournament which was entertaining. Paul won with a great use of Thor the fighter. Next up were Angry Joe Vargas, Kris Straub, Scott Kurtz, and Katie Rice from strip search. Joe went through to the final.
I got some dinner Subway do creamy Sriracha sauce it’s firey deliciousness that hurts so good. I had it on a steak sandwich.
After that I read a bit then headed over to the paramount theater for the ClubPA picture. ClubPA is a subscription thing where you pay a small amount and you get access to some exclusive stuff things like staff podcasts and a special pin and also no adds on the site so I’d signed up as I love the podcasts and having some more seemed an excellent idea. Anyway there were quite a few of us and we all stood around some steps for the photo inside the paramount. All the PA staff were there and so while the camera was being sorted out we got a chance to ask questions of any of them and there were quite a few mostly on pax’s and other possible events. Patrick Rothfuss showed up as well and got asked when the next book comes out to which he made a rude gesture.
Kiko did some people adjusting so everyone could be seen (hopefully) I got moved along the rows so was on the very end one back hopefully I show up in the photo. It was fun to have that extra little meeting for that smallish (relative to pax crowds I mean there were a good hundred people there I should think) group.
Tomorrow is the last day there is a PA Q&A then I think I’ll probably hit the show floor as much as possible try and see some more stuff I feel like always that I’ve barely scratched the surface. Because of the way today’s panels worked out and my need to consume food to keep going I didn’t manage to get down there at all today. I still saw a lot of stuff but it feels like I should have somehow fitted a trip in even though I don’t think I could of. Anyway one more day to go.
PAX 2014 Day Two - Saturday 30/8/2014
It was a pretty wet start to the day it rained off and on most of the day I got a little wet going between things but not too bad I was inside most of the time.
Started the day off with a panel by James Spafford community manager at media molecule (the little big planet people) about how they made their excellent vita game Tearaway. He went through the history talking about how the vita because of it’s weird and wonderful input systems front and back touch sense camera gyro gps inspired the original idea for the game. If you’ve not played it the game involves a paper craft world where you interact with the world by touching with the top screen and when you press the back touch screen your fingers can go through into the world. So a lot of it involves moving things about with a combination of back and front touch making things with paper by drawing with the front touch onto different sheets of paper and having the game cut them out. Everything looks like paper and folds and bends and the sounds are all paper. The story involves a the main character either a boy or a girl who is a messenger delivering a message to you the player by reaching you (you show up in the sun tellytubbys style down to a wonderful use of the front camera) in the game world. They set out to make what became tearaway partly down to the unique hardware of the vita and to make something different from the little big planet games they’d been making for quite a few years.
The game went through three different prototypes before becoming the game it is today. Originally it was a sort of dungeon crawler that you would access through cracks in the real world then your finger was the player character. This turned out to be difficult to play so they rethought it an came up with the second game prototype a procedurally generated papercraft world that linked the gps to generate locally themed areas to explore. The world explore worked well but the gps procedural stuff didn’t so they canned that and the third game prototype was born which was basically tearaway a defined world you explored with your paper pal the messenger.
They then had a load of stuff on the look and feel of the world how they got it to look like paper. Early prototypes were shaded simple shapes but they realised while we thing of papercraft as essentially low poly it’s actually not it has wrinkles and folds and things so they dumped most of the textures and tried to make all their models in paper to see if they worked as they designed they added things like paper layering deforming as you moved over it legs and things had to fold concertina like rather than stretch since paper doesn’t stretch. The whole thing became like something made out of paper that had been cut and layered and glued together folded up to make shapes. It gave the game the distinctive art style it has today. The sound also came from paper all sorts of sounds were added in odd places like the pig noise was a board game box having the lid put on so it makes that odd noise as the air is forced out. The wendigo’s roar was a nail running down the edge of congregated card.
It was all fascinating stuff and the ended by showing the new re imagined version that’s coming to PS4 it doesn’t have all the same stuff that was in tearaway as it’s just not possible without that hardware but it looks like some of the same flavor will be in it.
After that I wandered the floor for a bit it was even more crowded than yesterday. I saw a bit of Dragon age inquisition and the new sonic game. Tried this tablet game called Ember which I didn’t get the hang of it seemed diablo esq but I couldn’t work out the attack mechanic all the hot bar did was things like maps or inventory. I queued up for a go at Double Fine’s massive challis but had to go to get to another panel. It looked interesting I only saw a bit of combat will need to circle back there later.
Then went to the Orcs Must Die! - An Afternoon of Fun with Robot Entertainment panel. We got some swag upfront a nice bag with tshirt buttons a poster. Then had the panel which was really interesting it went into the history of Robot Entertainment and the fact they have a Biergarten. The studio came out of Ensemble when they were shut down and most of the guys worked on the Age of Empires games and then Halo Wars. They also were involved in Project Titan which was a Halo based MMO that was canceled. The studio then tried something different and developed a tool to make games that lead to a serious fantasy game called Saber. Gradually that mutated into Orcs Must Die which is a great little tower defense third person action hybrid, one of the first of that kind I think. They went on to do a sequel that was also very good and then took a break to try some other things but eventually came back to OMD and made a new version that’s currently in Beta called Orcs Must Die Unchained that now included PvP. The showed a lot of the concept art for all the OMD games and the changes for the new one and at the end everyone got beta codes for the new game which was nice.
After that I grabbed some lunch and had a brief break before heading down to the Benaroya hall for Grim Fandango: Bringing the Dead Back to Life. Grim Fandango is one of my favorite games I still try and play it now and again assuming I can find the discs and coax it into running on modern hardware, so hearing they were remastering the game for PC PS4 and vita was great. The original was a classic lucas arts game though an early 3d rather than point and click. It was a fabulous story set in a world inspired by the mexican Day of the dead but mixed with aztec and other influences as well as film noir and old detective film references. It had a distinctive visual style and sound with a really great story and fun characters wonderful puzzels and I just love it. It suffered a bit due to the limitations of the time but this new version will remove those compromises. It was great to hear the people who worked on the orginal Tim Schafer of Double fine who was the game designer Peter Chan who did the concept art Peter McConnell who did the music. They had some great stories to tell about it and it was a fun panel. They also talked about how they were remastering it taking the original files and trying to keep as much of the original stuff as possible but removing some of the things like compression and 16bit colour that were down to technical limitations of the time and adding things like full orchestra for some of the music.
Also they are adding rts elements … I hope Tim was joking about that.
I headed back to the hotel after that to have a rest I wanted to catch acquisitions inc the live d&d unfortunately it filled up an hour before the thing started. I’ll catch it on twitch instead that’ll give me a chance to grab some food beforehand rather than spend a hungry hour plus queuing.
I grabbed a sandwich and then watched the live D&D on twitch they had Jerry, Mike, Scott Kurtz, and Morgan Webb initially then Patrick Rothfuss made a surprise appearance. They were attacking some dragons and they had some lovely props a diorama of the dragon castle and a model of their steampunk airship crewed by beer keg robots (that Rothfuss’ character turned up on repelled down onto the dragon and attacked unfortunately abandoning the airship with anti dragon weapons). It was a funny session with some awesome role playing like using the body of cultists as cover for a fireball coming from one of their own party. Much fighting was done then they flew off in their airship and battled dragons in the sky. They ended on a cliff hanger with Omen/Jerry’s sister getting nearly killed by Binwin/Scott as they arrived at Baldurs Gate with a mere 58 seconds to spare. It was pretty epic :)
PAX 2014 Day One - Friday 29/8/2014
First day at pax got up early as I had to first get my badge. So even though I wanted to see the keynote in benaroya hall (a block down from my hotel) had to go up to the convention center find the ticket office (behind the center in a tunnel) queue for a bit to get my badge then head down the hill again to the opera house. Saw the keynote with Mikey Neumann Chief creative champion at gearbox and the voice of scooter from Borderlands. He told a powerful story from his childhood and made some good points about some of the really stupid things going round in the industry with people trying to prevent others enjoying themselves. Then went to a panel on the importance of community in video game development in summary it's important. It was interesting to listen to the people as the various panelists ran the gamut from little 3 person studios to places that had dedicate QA & user testing departments and everything in between including Double Fine. After that I hit the show floor for a bit saw a few things nothing major I'd not heard of yet Evolve, Dead Island 2, Sunset Overdrive, Borderlands prequel, telltales tales from borderlands, Smash Bros, A saints row game or dlc called Gat out of hell, Alien Isolation, Battle Mage Litchdom, some big intel booths. After that I headed out to grab something to eat. I was going to go to the intel future of pc gaming but decided to try streaming it. Grabbed a sandwich and then watched that. Pretty interesting talk by Lisa Graff vp of intels desktop division her figures said there are 711 million pc gamers in the world intel obviously waking up to some money to be made. PC games out sold console games for the past few years. They made some predictions heavy on the VR stuff also Kickstarter got a look in. They announced an 8 core gaming high end chip. They had Chris Roberts of wing commander fame talking about his new game Star Citizen which was a kickstarter and he was interested in the faster better multiprocessor machines as well as vr. Then they had a Dev whose name I forget who was from the people making Lucky's tale an occulus exclusive vr platform game. It was interesting stuff now I'll relax a bit then head over to see the making of thornwatch panel with gabe and finish up with the concerts.
Managed to doze off but luckilly they were streaming the Thornwatch panel. Pretty interesting story it came out of the comics and Mike trying to fix D&D 4e. He felt there was a lot of busy work keeping track of things for the DM and wanted the thing to be more like a card game. He bounced this off veteran game designer Mike Selinker and with a proper team in place and things like version control and proper design docs and card libraries (initially Mike was writing it in photoshop) it took shape. They ran through a demo game and it looked pretty interesting the way you did attacks and powered specials where cards double up as either an attack or fuel for other possibly more powerful attacks. Various cards fix the not paying attention on other peoples turns by having synergy cards that can act only on other people. The wound mechanic looks interesting where you take damage immediately but rather than it having an immediate effect you shuffle x number of wound cards into you deck and when one gets drawn it effectively becomes a dead space in your hand you can’t remove and if you get too many you die. It’s a nice way to make wounds progressive and have a real consequence over your possible actions. Healers and so on can then do things to remove those. It looked pretty interesting and if I get a chance I’ll try and play a game they’re running them in the evenings so we’ll see if nothing overlaps.
Caught part of a live stream of Patrick Rothfuss and two women I didn’t recognize playing the new Gauntlet. They are doing a celebrity league thing with the various semi famous attendees Mike Jerry McFront Paul and Storm couple of others. Which might be interesting I saw the booth that twitch has setup on the show floor for that sort of stuff. Twitch seem to be much more integrated this year last year and the year before there were a couple of streams but it seems like there are more than just main theater this time and it seems to be working better than previous years bar the times the hotel’s internet cuts out.
The new Gauntlet looks interesting I was always fascinated with the old one a friend had an atari st version back in the day and we played that sometimes but I don’t think I’ve ever had a good go at it. I tried running it on my raspberry pi mini mame box but it didn’t work.
Decided not to go to the friday concerts as I was feeling a bit off and Paul and Storm were the only act I cared about. I’ll probably grab a meal and try and get an early night.
I caught a bit of the concert on twitch Paul and Storm were pretty funny they even had a bit to promote their sound bard app by having Patrick Rothfuss read a D&D encounter once on its own then again with sound and atmospheric enhancement.
