Ok so PAX 2008 has been over for a few weeks now, but unfortunately I got caught up with a bunch of work and couldn't post about it until now. So here is my quick summary for PAX 2008...
The Good- We demoed Lore Aftermath at the InstantAction / GarageGames booth in the expo hall on Saturday from 4pm to 6pm (closing). Adrian and I figured that we would get a good reception from people at the show, but what we got was an incredible reception. It turns out there are a lot of mech fans out there wanting a true mech game, so when they saw Lore being played on the big screens in the IA booth, they stopped by, tried it out for themselves and really enjoyed what they saw! They didn't care that it wasn't Battletech or Armored Core, they liked what they saw and wanted more of it!
- You know you have made a good game when other developers from the big AAA houses like Blizzard come up, play your game and then tell you afterwards how they liked it.
- We got 2 free meals off of GarageGames... score! ;)
- Our first official PodCast for Lore Aftermath was done after the show with Ian Torrey from IA. You can listen to it here to find out more about the game.
- Gamers got to see what they wanted at the show. Games they could play.
- There were some very cool costumes people came up with.
- Talking to other devs at the show was incredibly easy, there was no snobbish response, or "who the fuck are you and why should I talk to you" responses like you get at GDC when people are running from session to session. Just good honest feedback and talking about games.
- I got to meet a lot of the new faces at GG/IA I had not met yet, and also met some old friends too.
- You could buy items on the show floor if you wanted. As such you could buy games, books, tshirts, gaming devices, etc.
- The show was relatively under control and wasn't anywhere near the headache inducing levels of E3s. Everyone seemed to respect one anothers booths and weren't assholes about drowning out the competition because they had more money to invest.
- I got a chance to check out a few really cool games coming to Instant Action and the PC that I had not seen before. I have to wonder soon if companies will begin to use PAX not to demo finished products but to grab more in-development feedback with regards to their games.
- The coolest thing I got from PAX wasn't the Legions t-shirt, but actually the Fallout 3 "So You Want to Leave the Dome" booklet that they were handing out. Its a really cool and well done booklet that gives you a taste of the Fallout world (and as someone who never played Fallout, I went through this booklet cover to cover and enjoyed it).
The Bad- Why the hell is the registration booth on the 4th floor of the convention center? As someone who bought his 3-day pass at the show, I have to say finding this thing was a huge inconvenience.
- Please someone give me a freaking map & schedule of events in my hand-outs I get when I register. I missed a number of good talks and wandered around the first couple of hours aimlessly looking for the few posters of the PAX layout. This was not cool guys.
- Some kid thought it would be cool to have a shot of someone else in a Master Cheif (from Halo) costume beating him up... unfortunately it ended up looking like the Master Cheif was gonna tea-bag him instead. I didn't take a picture of this but I am sure if you look hard enough on the internet you will find it, I was simply too disturbed to want to look at it anymore.
- Some game demos had really really long lines to check out. Maybe it was the fact that there were 50,000 people at PAX, but it seemed like some companies were ill prepared for delivering the good. Left 4 dead, DragonAge, Fallout, WoW: Wrath of the Lich King were really bad.
- Free what? Unfortunately because you could buy things on the show floor there wasn't a lot of free schwag to give out.