I know for sure I want to attend the Criticism/Game reviews panel. It conflicts with the transgender issues one unfortunately!  As for Gamers with Jobs, I'll only manage to slink in if my appointment at 11:30 with SquareSoft is really short. On the other hand, hey, I have an appointment with SquareSoft.  I actually scheduled a lot of such appointments because, well, I COULD, and when else will I be able to?? With my development schedule, quite possibly never!

Right now I'm chilling out in the Hilton about to head over to get my badge. Doors open at 10 AM. The lineup starts at 8 AM, but being a vet of PAX West, I know standing in line is for suckers.

I opted not to drag my laptop on to the show floor yesterday, because the internet isn't so hot anyway and my back was already hurting. So today I'm just using hotel wireless (paid ten whole dollars) to make sure I stay connected for more than a few seconds at a time.  

I went to a few other panels. There was one yesterday about games and storytelling with a bunch of famous people on it which I actually missed. The line was intimidatingly long, which is a theme with PAX sometimes. I instead opted to go to the Community Managers panel, as it's directly related to my current job. It turned out to be fun, though I'm still trying to figure out if I had a concrete takeaway, or if it was just kind of fun. On Friday evening I also went to Ben Kuchera's talk on long-form game journalism, which was interesting too. He thinks writing reviews is "too easy" and sort of pointless, because everyone writes reviews. I don't know how I feel about that. I do know I think reviews aren't my strongest writing and I hate giving games scores so maybe I'd like to agree with him out of laziness.

The two panels had the following career advice in common, which I found interesting: "Don't go to college. ...Unless you are my son and/or daughter, in which case, don't listen to me, YOU have to go to college." I think it's so weird how they aren't at all bought in to the college hype anymore and yet they are still totally bought in to the college hype. But I digress; it's probably a whole thread to itself.

I got a preview of Neverwinter, the new D&D MMO which is largely a 4th-edition MMO. Perfect World also wanted to show off Raiderz at that same press meeting, but it had technical issues (not dealing with the game, more dealing with the dodgy PAX network I believe). I may yet see it, but honestly if I didn't it wouldn't break my heart because it is a Korean MMO with Korean sensibilities for Koreans, and I am a soft American who doesn't want to spend 40 hours grinding a single boss. Neverwinter looks solid, though. This is of course coming from a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan who knows the fluff and crunch already, but it seemed to be a good translation of the D&D mechanics and should be fun for a D&D fan who burned out of DDO. (Though I've also discovered they're adding more stuff to DDO, which seems to be a bid to take it from Eberron to the Forgotten Realms to add more FR signature characters to it.)  I'll drop in more details about Neverwinter in a real writeup.

I went to the panel on the Future of D&D, which was hosted by Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford. I've been following this project very closely, but mostly via Monte Cook who is on the other side of the country right now. So I already knew a lot of the design philosophy stuff they talked about, though there were some interesting tidbids about some of the ideas they have. Really the main reason I was there was to beg for the playtest kit, but they totally didn't know how amazing/special/important I am and gave me the pat 'it'll be out later this month'. So, I guess I'll get it later this month, with the rest of the unwashed masses. D&D5 has me sort of cautiously optimistic right now. I think it's admirable what they're trying with it, which is, quote, "Classic feel, modern design." They're saying things like, they're going to be very careful about power creep in this edition, and, they're going to go back to a game that doesn't absolutely require minis and a battle grid to be playable. All of that sounds great, but... like... don't you guys have to monetize somehow? I got the impression that books just weren't big enough sellers to keep a brand like D&D afloat, and one of the reasons the battle grid was so required for 4th ed was so they could sell more miniatures. That's a direct reason for things like power creep as well. It's possible that their strategy here will be to take a loss on D&D5 from a "selling the tabletop product" perspective, and just have it out there as a brand, focusing on making the real money through these MMOs, tie-in products, and spin-off board and card games. But that's just speculation on my part.

I sat down with a bunch of indie games yesterday, too, though I'm far from seeing all of them. Played with Girls Like Robots, Primal Carnage, A Valley Without Wind. Played Girlfight, which, in brief, is a fairly-standard fighting game that is mainly selling itself on sexy/controversial/exploitative character design. I am increasingly unaffected by sexy/controversial/exploitative character design, especially in fighting games where it is the rule and has been since the 90s. Aside from that, it plays a little like Tekken. The same people are also making an updated version of the Deadliest Warrior fighting game, that was originally a downloadable on XBox Live, and now will be selling as a standalone product on a disk. It is awesomely stupid, because it has a "zombie mode" where you hack off the other guy's limbs, head, etc, and he still fights that way, like the Black Knight from Monty Python.

Primal Carnage is a deathmatch multiplayer where a team of humans fights a team of dinosaurs. This is a pretty fuckin' cool concept, and I think it has legs, though I personally am not much of a deathmatch multiplayer kind of person and I know this about myself.

A Valley Without Wind is a strange game. I want to just sort of screw my face up at the art style; the look of the game is a little inconsistent. It overuses Photoshop filters a touch. It feels fine, once you get past that. This is a platformer made by a company that mostly makes strategy games. The levels are partially hand-generated, partially procedurally-generated. You play with a mouse and keyboard, and I'm not sure that there is any other way to do it because it requires a lot more buttons than a controller has. There is crafting. The characters have a spell tray, like an MMO. I say "characters" because any time you die, you switch to a new character, though they're from an army of similar-looking guys. The fiction is that you're recolonizing a post-apocalyptic planet, and if someone dies, you just sent a soldier in to die and need to get another soldier. But then the next soldier comes in to play with all the old soldier's gear, so it doesn't set you back that much. You might use the word "Metroidvania" for this game, but that's kind of a silly genre name, isn't it? If anything, it reminds me a bit more of Commander Keen, in the sense that the worlds are big sprawling things that don't always make sense (due to procedural levels) and feel huge and intimidating. The game has that feel of an older experimental platformer rather than something that feels as if it was tightly put together precisely for an ideal travel path. I guess if D&D5 is supposed to have a classic feel with modern sensibilities, Valley Without Wind is more the opposite: a 64-bit 2.5D art style with old-school design sensibilities.

I capped off the day by having dinner and drinks with a bunch of cool people. I sat next to Christine Love for a bit, which I mostly mention to annoy Steerpike. She managed to catch the storytelling panel, and said it was only okay from her perspective, but the audience asked good questions.

Speaking of which, the audience this year at PAX has asked remarkably good questions. I wonder what happened. Is it just Boston? People at PAX Prime consistently asked dumb or embarrassing questions.

Today I just hope to get on the floor to see anything that I missed. I'm going to try to hit that Gamification panel, but I also want to get my Dragonlance book signed and I can say right now that's probably gonna make me late.