pax-prime-2013
Latest
Naughty Dog's alternate ending to The Last of Us
The above video, which details an alternate ending to The Last of Us, was previously only seen by those who attended Naughty Dog's panel at PAX Prime. Through the wonders of the internet, we're all now able to see it – though we stress no one should watch unless they've finished the game. Spoilers abound! Surprisingly, this alternate ending was completely improvised. Aside from one line of direction from creative director Neil Druckmann, the actors came up with everything in the moment. It's an odd sequence, but somehow it totally works!
Eric Doty's Troubadour and the melancholy of growing up
Lucy doesn't belong here, wherever this is. With each step, her body artifacts and glitches slightly as if she's being derezzed from a virtual environment. Her internal thoughts pop up in old Windows 95 prompts as she moves about a convincing urban sprawl. This is Troubadour, the first game from indie developer Eric Doty and Zak Alexander. Doty, who spends his days working at Microsoft, wants to tell a meaningful story in an easily digestible experience – a brief game, about 30 minutes in total, that will tell the story of protagonist Lu's ascension from responsibility-free teen into the personal accountability of adult life.
PAX Prime 2013 and FFXIV relaunch event in pictures
This year's PAX Prime has come and gone, but during my trip I snapped a bundle of pictures we're pretty sure you're going to love. Enjoy some booths, crowds, games, and quite a bit of the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn launch event. Even Jesus showed up for my photo shoot!
The Summoner's Guidebook: You're wrong about the LoL community
I'm finally home from PAX, and I'm exhausted. And if there's one thing everyone I talked to mentioned, it's that Riot Games was the elephant in the con. Everyone was comparing something to a similar thing Riot did, whether that was mistakes made or successes had or risks taken. League of Legends is enormous, and even as a columnist for the game, I didn't really grasp just how big it was until now. Let me paint you a story. I'm familiar with fandoms. They're not a new thing. However, when you go to a huge convention and you see that probably a quarter of the people play League of Legends, it changes your perspective. When every non-Riot developer talks about LoL, it opens your eyes to just how pervasive the game is. There was another unified thing about everyone I talked to who played LoL: All of them hated jerks. None of them were intentional trolls, and everyone loved the game and wanted to make it better. All the Riot staffers I talked to preached the same mantra: "It's all about the fans." It's clear that their attitude has paid some pretty big dividends. There's a lot of you guys, and you're all pretty awesome.
PAX Prime 2013: Breaking tables in DC Universe Online
During this year's PAX Prime, I was able to grab some hands-on time with the PlayStation 4 version of DC Universe Online. The demo was made up of content from the brand-new DLC, Sons of Trigon. The DLC features three new duos and an alert, whereas I feature slightly rusty DCUO skills. In fact, nearly all of my DCUO experience has been with a keyboard and mouse, so I reached for the controller with hesitation. I managed to pull slightly more confidence from a long history of PlayStation gaming and Sony's staunch refusal to change the basic layout of its controller for 19 years and counting.
Ask Massively: The best and worst of PAX Prime 2013
PAX Prime is the last major western gaming con of the year, and we'd like to believe it's given us all something to think about as we head into a winter full of special snowflake games. Alas, PAX Prime this year seems to have left us all bewildered at best and underwhelmed at worst, at least when it comes to pure MMORPGs. Now it's time to explain why. We're going to tell you about what was for us the most surprising reveal, the most disappointing offering, and of course, the best MMO in show. The ground rules for our discussion? They're basically the same as for E3: It had to be a game or topic we can justify covering on Massively. Every staff member was permitted to chime in (though not all did). We stuck to three big categories rather than create so many that every game could "win" something, not that these are really awards. Roll the dice!
Guild Wars 2 interview picks Colin Johanson's brain
If you could corner a developer and ask any question that popped into your mind, what would it be? Matt Visual attempts to cover all of the burning questions that many players have about Guild Wars 2 in his piece with Colin Johanson from PAX Prime. The half-hour interview covers a wide range of topics including gear progression, dungeon hard modes, legendary items, a new wardrobe system, housing, and dueling. One interesting tidbit is that the devs have been working on cloaks but have had some issues with the animations. Check out the full video after the break and see if your burning question gets quenched.
The atypical story of Kerbal Space Program's indie flight to success
Making video games is what Felipe Falanghe always wanted to do. Unfortunately, that's not what his job was at Squad, an interactive marketing company in Mexico City, Mexico. Squad was responsible for creating multi-media installations to sell products from Samsung and Nissan to the Mexican market. So one day, in early 2011, Felipe approached his bosses and told them he wanted to make a game. "And it completely blew me away when they just said, 'Okay,'" Felipe told me during a meeting at PAX Prime. "I didn't believe them at first," he added, but his bosses were serious: If he brought them a good idea and a solid business plan, he would be free to go for it. This is when he wrote the design document for Kerbal Space Program, a sandbox space flight simulation game that has been quite successful since its launch through the Steam Early Access program in 2011. Felipe has been lead developer ever since.
PAX Prime 2013: Guild Wars 2's Jon Peters on the state of PvP
At this year's PAX Prime, we attended a party hosted by ArenaNet at which the studio demoed the second world of Super Adventure Box. There was a raffle, plenty of drinks, and a lot of ANet people. In fact, I mentioned to ArenaNet's reps that I was really into competitive play, PvP, and e-sports. Not five minutes later, I was introduced to Jon Peters, lead gameplay designer for Guild Wars 2. I was a bit intimidated; I mean, this was the guy who singlehandedly created over 70% of the skills in GW2! But he was surprisingly down-to-earth with our conversation.
Seen@PAX Prime: Secrets of Rætikon's Rune Translation 101
There are many secrets within Secrets of Raetikon, but at least the lost language of runes has been translated. The above sign at developer Broken Rules' section of the Indie Mega Booth at PAX Prime not only helps you translate in-game messages, it lets you insult friends in a made-up language!
World Zombination beta early next year, launch in the spring
During a demo session at the PAX Prime Indie Mega Booth, Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak told Joystiq that a beta for World Zombination, the studio's strategy game that pits zombies against humans, is expected early next year, with a full launch planned for sometime in the spring. World Zombination is due first on iPad and Android tablets, with phones to follow, and then PC and Mac. "I think we'll try to target the iPad 2, but we'll certainly do iPad 3, 4 and whatever's coming next," Sivak said. "It'll be playable on the phone, as well. We're building it foremost to be a tablet experience but we'll bring it across platforms. It'll be a universal app and it's a shared world across devices." As for pricing, Sivak said that Proletariat is still working that out, though two initial pricing models seem to be frontrunners. "We've been toying around with two options: One is a premium to purchase the app – because it is kind of like an MMO, some amount of paying for new content like when we release new units and things like that," Sivak said. "The other one is just going like how the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer was, where you have progression and you unlock and buy booster packs. So that would be more of the free-to-play model.We haven't really gotten to the point where we're seriously talking about that, we're just trying to build a game that's like an MMO that feels like you could play it instantaneously and still have the same sort of team guild feel that traditional MMOs have."
PAX Prime 2013: Riot Games' Whalen Rozelle on LoL Season 3
I was really excited to step into Riot's press room on Friday at PAX Prime. We had just finished the first series of matches of the day, and it was pretty exciting to talk to people about the matches yet to come. But I don't think anyone was more excited to talk about League of Legends' e-sports scene than Whalen Rozelle, or RiotMagus as he's known on the internet. As the senior e-sports manager at Riot, he's tasked with making sure that events run smoothly, and I took the opportunity to ask him about the format for Season 3 -- especially improvements over Season 2 and the lessons Riot will be taking into Season 4.
Indie developer BetaDwarf lived in a classroom for seven months
Denmark-based developer BetaDwarf raised $65,413 on Kickstarter in December 2012 to fund its action arcade game, Forced. Similar to other developers, the team relied fully on the crowdfunding campaign in order to make its game a reality: As BetaDwarf CEO Steffen Kabbelgaard Gronning put it at PAX Prime, the Kickstarter "pretty much saved our asses... If that hadn't went through, we'd have had to abandon the game, I think." Described on its Kickstarter page as a mix between Diablo and Left 4 Dead, Forced has players battle enemies in a combat arena. The game's development traces back to January 2011, when BetaDwarf was founded at Aalborg University in Denmark. During the summer, classrooms at the university went unused, so Gronning and his friends took over one abandoned room to use as their studio. "We moved in and we didn't really want to go home, so we moved in beds and microwaves and refrigerators and things like that and until there are like, eight guys living there our whole vacation," Gronning said. That "vacation" turned into an extended stay, as the group "managed to be there for five more months" since the university "didn't really want to use that classroom," he explained.
PAX Prime 2013: I played Smashmuck Champions and it was golden
There were some pretty great games at this year's PAX Prime, but if there's one new game I played that I couldn't wait to go home and install, it was Smashmuck Champions. Currently in open beta, the game features a MOBA-like control scheme combined with faster-paced arena action. The guys at the booth joked about how they hated the term MOBA, but there are few games that fit the term "multiplayer online battle arena" better than Smashmuck. Allen White, art director for the game, led me through the matches. He was a pretty big help, answering all of my questions while I stomped all over the other con-goers. Unlike the typical MOBA, Smashmuck has a low barrier of entry, a lot of game modes, and an easy learning curve, and it's just plain lots of fun. You're doing yourself a disservice by not installing the game right now.
Inafune: Mighty No. 9 looks like Mega Man due to my art style
Mighty No. 9 could present some legal issues due to its similarity, both in terms of art and gameplay, to Capcom's Mega Man series. When it comes to the former, Keiji Inafune told me at PAX Prime it's because he created both Mega Man and Mighty No. 9 – and it's only natural the two should share some resemblance. "If you really do look at something that a lot of people really don't realize, that character – Beck – may look similar to Mega-Man at a precursory glance, but it's because I created it. Artists have their own style and they get comfortable in that style, so the things they make look very similar," Inafune said. "Picasso paintings look like Picasso paintings, so that's my style – I can't help it, that can't be changed, it is what it is." Inafune elaborated that despite the style, Beck and Mega Man are two very different characters, "from the color, from the fact that one has a cannon on his arm and the other doesn't, from the eye size, from the headgear – it's very different." On the note of legality, Inafune admitted he had some concern how Mighty No. 9 may be perceived, but reiterated the game is "one hundred percent, from the ground up, built originally" and doesn't take anything from previous Mega Man games. "I can't say I have absolutely no worry but it's really impossible to say how one side is going to view something. There was no ill will and ultimately I think if it did come down to any sort of legal issue, it would be like: Did I actually have ill will towards Capcom when coming up with this concept? And to that I can one hundred percent say no that is not the case. So for me, it was merely, one hundred percent, I heard the voice of the fans and I've always been somebody who likes listening to them and that's what I'm trying to do with this project."
PAX Prime 2013: SMITE's graphical updates, 10v10 mode, and e-sports
I found myself in unfamiliar waters as I waded into the Twitch booth at this year's PAX Prime. All around me were gamers -- but not just any gamers. These guys were wearing jerseys with sponsorship logos and carrying custom gaming mice and headsets. These guys were pro gamers, and they were there to play SMITE. I had a different agenda, so I tracked down Hi-Rez chief operating officer Todd Harris to talk about upcoming changes to the game. He admitted to me that his team isn't doing a lot of big changes, but that is largely due to the game's continuing success. He did have a few things to show me, though.
Mighty No. 9 will have old-school challenge, yet still be 'fair'
One of the chief concepts relayed by Keiji Inafune in his Kickstarter pitch video for Mighty No. 9, a new side-scrolling 2D action platform game from Comcept, was his intention to combine old and new – the classic gameplay sensibilities of the past paired with modern conventions. "Finding that balance is the true innovation of this game, I think – what makes it original," Inafune told me during a PAX Prime interview. "If you are just making an old classic style game, the formula is already set pretty much in stone and you don't need designers to try and come up with anything new; you can just imitate one hundred percent the classics. However, if you make something that's too new and doesn't have enough of the old, obviously the people who want to play these classic games are going to feel left out – some of those are the key fans who have supported us on Kickstarter." For Inafune, Kickstarter is what will drive this balance between old and new, since backers can directly engage with the creators and proclaim what they want from Mighty No. 9. Of course, one can't bring up classic gaming without talking about difficulty. The original Mega Man games are some of the toughest out there. "It will be challenging, as far as the old games were, but it will be fair and have some of the newer, modern game mechanics that allow people to – even if they die – continue to restart and basically rely on their skill and not have to backtrack and do annoying things over and over and over again," Inafune added. "But again, this is something that, with game balance, you have to continually tweak and tweak and tweak. And with Kickstarter, we'll be able to be tied into our fans and they'll help us tweak it with what's the perfect balance." Mighty No. 9 reached its funding goal a mere day after its unveiling. The Kickstarter campaign has earned nearly $1.4 million so far with 28 days to go. The game is slated to launch in 2015 for PC on Steam, but if $2.5 million is raised, Comcept promises console ports on Wii U, Xbox 360 and PS3 – sorry, no next-gen.
PAX Prime 2013: World of Tanks blitzes onto the 360
While there was definitely some buzz at the PAX Prime Wargaming booth about World of Warplanes, which will get its commercial launch on September 26th, World of Tanks was the main source. Not only is Wargaming planning to integrate accounts for both Tanks and Warplanes, but it also has the XBox 360 version of World of Tanks in closed beta. I sat down with some of the Wargaming guys and attempted to play the new 360 version. I struggled a bit with the console controls, but that had more to do with a lack of familiarity than anything else. As I played, we discussed how Wargaming has rebuilt WoT from the ground up for the console market.
PAX Prime 2013: Adjusting butts in Elder Scrolls Online
After my hands-on demo at E3, I was cautiously optimistic about sitting down for another hour of Elder Scrolls Online at this year's PAX Prime. I was ushered into the press demo area and immediately dived into character creation. There were significantly more options available here than during my last demo just a few months ago. Among the additions was a feature I'm sure you've been waiting for: the "posterior dimensions" slider. Beyond butts, the variety of the options Bethesda brought to PAX Prime was pretty impressive. I spent more time in character creation than I expected, even customizing my stomach size. After I decided on the appropriate butt girth, I loaded into the snowy, nordic area of Bleakrock Isle and immediately spent a solid 10 minutes exploring my option menus.
Xbox One external storage not supported at launch, says Major Nelson
The Xbox One won't support external storage at launch, and it's unclear when it will, going by the comments of Microsoft's Larry 'Major Nelson' Hyrb. In a Q&A session during his PAX podcast, Hyrb said his understanding is the feature "will not be there at launch because the team is working on some other things, but it definitely is on the list." He added that he doesn't know when it will be added. We've reached out to Microsoft for clarification. As Microsoft Senior Director of Product Planning Albert Penello told our pals at Engadget back in May, the Xbox One is expected to support external storage devices via the system's three USB ports. According to Penello, those devices will be able to store the same things the system's integrated 500GB HDD can, including game installs and downloaded software. The Xbox One launches in 13 markets this November.
