PAX Day Three – Sunday 30th
Started off with the Nvidia panel which was part tech demo, part advert, part giveaway, and all chaos. The threw graphics cards tshirts and all sorts of tech at people no casualties that I could see.
They showed us their new streaming tech and unlike previously now you can have a second player stream into an existing game they demoed Trine 3 where a local player streamed in another player over the internet. They also showed some simplified streaming for let's plays etc.
The showed Rainbow 6 Siege which looked ok.
Then they showed some new graphics cards talking about DX12 and the effects there for 4k gaming. They showed some Dota stuff with a special latency enhancing tech on the 950. They showed the shield console and then finally they had a quick trailer of law breakers which is Cliff Blesinski's new game he was on stage talking about it.
The they had some odd game at the end.
After that I had a brief walk around the block to get some air and then headed in to see the Q&A #2 which was fun there were a lot of questions on clones and also an odd metallic sheet from the pax Europe conspiracy.
I took a tour of the show floor saw a few booths the minecraft storymode emplacement which telltale had. I also saw this epic Dark Souls three action model with fountain brown blood.
I had some pizza for lunch it was fresh off the grip and volcanicly hot so was somewhat hard to eat. Thus refueled I headed to the Thornwatch panel.
They'd been teasing some big announcement there for pretty much all the q&a's and they had two things. The first was that Mike Selinker and his team would be working on the game. The second was that the Thornwatch was going to be redone and would become Eyrewood Adventures and the thornwatch will just be one of the playable factions and it would now include the lookouts and the daughters of the Eyrewood. They were taking most of the existing game mechanics and reworking them for these new mechanics. Their take on the three factions was that the thornwatch are established they are the magical ateam they don't get more powerful. The lookouts start weak and slowly gain abilities in badges. The daughters are more about territory and managing their section of the forest. All interesting stuff.
Next up I saw a panel by CD Projeckt Red the polish developer of the witcher games on the difficulties of adapting books into games. Witcher 3 is relatively new and a superb game the witcher is based on a very popular series of Polish books they are not that popular in the west but slowly becoming so based on the success of the game. They talked about the difficulties of taking that text and making a game from it the peculiarities of translation. In the book and games Yenifer has a thing for stuffed animals and has a stuffed unicorn and they put that in the game in the french version of the books that was translated as Rhinoceros. Not quite the same thing. They also had the new expansions that are coming out towards the end of the year.
Went to see Chris Perkins Ask a Dungeon master panel it was interesting he talked about his career as a DM and how he evolved to form the idea that games are like episodic tv programs. He talked about how you should give your characters their own arcs or moments in the sun how not being too reliant on your prepared stuff improvising and use the rules when you need but don't be afraid to break them if it's more fun. I've never DM'd I'd like to try one day but not sure if I'd be good at it.
I headed over to the Westin at 9 for the ClubPA meetup and photo. It started a little late but we all posed for the photo then Robert did a Q&A that was very interesting and since it was semi secret I can't talk about. It's a nice little bonus to have that little peak into the inner workings it seems like a thing they are fairly committed to. It was interesting talk and a nice little bonus to being a ClubPA member.
Tomorrow is the last day of PAX and it's been a blast.
It's different from say PAX East where we had to travel further so having a break in the middle of the day wasn't possible but then again since it was all in house in the one place it was less tiring. With Prime since it's distributed around downtown Seattle and Seattle being the hilly place it is there is a lot of walking involved up and down to and from different hotels and the main theater in the Benaroya. Having good twitch stream has helped I can take a break get some lunch and still enjoy some of the panels. I've got the rest of this week to recover and see a bit of the city I've picked a few possible things to look at.
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