We got up earlyish and after a quick in room coffee we got going to join the queue for the keynote. We grabbed a quick on the go breakfast of bagels and coffee. I had generic wheat Byrnie had some spinach and tomato monstrosity. We got to the queue when it was fairly full and ate our bagels while we waited. We managed to find some fairly good seats close to the front on the ground floor.
The keynote this year was Peter Molyneux of Populous fame. He was talking about his career and the games he’d worked on as well as talking about his new game the kickstarted Godus. The talk was pretty interesting talking about the various flaws and goals he had and how he came to the design for Godus. He talked about minecraft and how it took the established rules and basically ripped them up. Then he detailed all the places he was going to steal ideas from Civilization and Minecraft featured heavily. He then showed the new god game Godus which was looking interesting. The bit that struck me was the cloud aspect where each player has a chunk of land on a map the size of Jupiter (Apparently Notches world was the size of Neptune) and all players are part of the same world with chunks butting up against each other and eventually perhaps coming into conflict. He showed some gameplay and it looked pretty interesting it’s coming to steam early access.
After that we stayed for the Q&A which was good as always with Jerry and Mike on good form. After that we wandered the floor a bit. The show floor at PAX is a bit like being smashed in the face by game trailers, it’s overwhelming. We just wandered looking at what was new and interesting. We saw but couldn't get near the Occulus Rift booth, a giant pair of headphones 10ft tall, and watched a presentation on homes in Wildstar an upcoming MMO where it seemed players could have a plot of land floating in the sky with their houses and other random stuff on them. It was very cartoony and bright colors but with some interesting looking action style gameplay.
We took a quick look at Nvidia shield which they had running a few simple games it worked ok but I’ve never really been taken by the machine it was quite a heavy device I’m not sure what it would be like for any length of time. The demo games were pretty unimpressive too simple 2d games. Then we had a look at Elder Scrolls online, it was a bit difficult to get near there was a massive queue and the booth seemed configured to hide the displays. We took some time wandering around the indie booths which had a lot of the PAX 10 games which were pretty interesting the wonderful Gunpoint, Escape Goat, and Rogue Legacy to name a couple. After that we headed for a break and grabbed some drinks and food.
We watched BBC America which for some reason was showing continuous episodes of Star Trek Next Generation and Torchwood adverts. We had a spot of dinner and afterward we had intended to go to the Loaded Ready Run panel but due to a slight miscalculation we thought it started at the finish time. Later in the evening we enjoyed an evening with Scott Kurtz he told some really funny stories at least 50% of which involved bodily fluids. We headed back to the hotel room at about 11pm and by this point the jet lag was really catching up to Byrn who was dead on his feet so we turned in early. Tomorrow we don’t have PAX passes so we’re likely to be watching the Twitch TV stream of things and probably relaxing a bit.
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