None the less, for those of you that do not know what PAX is, well, it's the Penny Arcade Expo! It takes place twice a year, once on the west coast and once on the east coast. This is the second year they have held the convention on the east coast. The centerpiece of the convention is the exhibition floor where developers/publishers/vendors/retrogaming shops come and display their in-development creations.
The majority of booths allowed you to walk right up and play the game, even though the game may be a few months out from being completed. Some of the more prominent demos and games include (but not limited to): Battlefield 3 (Of course!), Portal 2, L.A. Noire, Duke Nukem Forever, Homefront, and many, many more (see pictures!). The latter two allowed you to walk right up and play, while the former were closed room demonstrations. Besides the exhibition hall, there were many panels going on through out the day, from sites like Wired, GiantBomb, Kotaku, Joystiq, Penny Arcade, etc, on a wide variety of subjects. There was a massive table-top gaming area where you could play board and card games. There were also modern console, classic console, and PC free-play rooms where you can simply walk in, sit down, and just play whatever games they had available. LANFest was also taking place at the time, and was in its own room in the convention, but the tickets sold out pretty quick so I wasn't able to get in (the BDU gents were probably hanging out in there). Most importantly, there was a room filled with classic arcade machines (from Funspot in NH), and I spent a good amount of time wandering through and playing the machines.
However, back to the exhibition hall; All the content there was great. The hall was much better than last years, mostly due to the larger number of publishers and vendors that were present. I picked up a couple games one of the few retrogaming booths, but wasn't anything significant. One of the more prominent stores to show up was a Japanese import shop from New York City. However, I didn't pick up anything there as I purchased nearly all my desired Japanese games and consoles when I was in Japan back in November of last year.
As far as demoes are concerned, I didn't play around with many of the games, only a couple indie titles. This is merely my personal preference as I don't like downloadable single-player demos in general (as I feel it spoils the game when I do decide to go through it). The only closed-room demonstration I waited in line for (as the lines were 2+ hours long) was Battlefield 3.
I would've broken my demo exception if they had something available for play, but it was live-play through by a product marketer or developer. Anyway, time to get to the interesting part (Note that this probably contains "spoilers" for future marketing content that they'll release in either the coming days or months):
The demonstration was done in an enclosed room, seating around 25 people at a time, and was approximately 20 to 25 minutes long. They had a large LCD in front with what I would assume was a nice 5.1/7.1 sound system (forgot to check) in the room. The demonstration appeared to be live and being played by the developer. I was sort of distracted at times trying to see if he was actually playing it, or if it was a video and he was mockingly going along with it (I have no idea why I would think the latter, probably because it looked freaking amazing). Anyway, the demonstration was a play-through from what appeared to be from the beginning of the game, or at least a mission, and jumping through the mission in 3 different segments. The first segment is actually the same play through that DICE released the trailer for a couple weeks ago. It had some extra content in the beginning, mostly some additional text explaining the situation (which was still vague), and some harassment between the soldiers before the vehicle stopped and they got out. At this point, it was pretty much the exact same as the trailer for the next 7 or 8 minutes. During the whole demo, the sound quality was amazing. Granted, this was probably my first time in front of a decent sound system while watching an FPS being played, but I was surprised by the many different sounds and the audible level that they were at (very loud). Definitely gave it a more "realistic" feel to it. (Side note: If anyone subscribes to Game Informer, the magazine went into more detail about the audio and the effort DICE has made to kick it up a notch).
The animations of the soldiers throughout the entire demo were excellent. This is one of those things that significantly irks me if the studio does it poorly. I certainly don't mind the animations of old games because every animation was at least consistent in its complexity. There have been many recent games where there's one amazing animation (e.g. sprinting), but then the transition to or next animation is a complete failure, causing it to be incredibly distracting to gameplay. While there is some refinement that needs to take place, what I have seen has been pretty good in that category. The only exception to this is the facial animations, although that's mostly due to absurd expectations set by L.A. Noire and Half Life 2. They're certainly not horrid, and actually pretty decent, but don't match up with the quality of the other animations mentioned.
The demonstration continued past the Part 1 trailer with a little more fighting before the soldiers retreated back in the direction they arrived. The second part involved a soldier following a red wire through a building (suspected IED) and down into the basement. I won't go into too much detail about it but this part demonstrated hand to hand combat, which was fairly interesting to watch. It's mostly scripted play, prompting you to hit various buttons, much like Fahrenheit (although much less frequently).
The third part involved a open-space firefight (still single player), mostly demonstrating the physics aspects of the Frostbite 2 engine, via breaking stone, falling panels, exploding cars, etc. The engine being used in the game is the new Frostbite 2.0 engine that DICE has been refining since BF:BC1 was released. The demo continued until the end when an earthquake struck (which was subtly mentioned by soldiers throughout the demo) and caused the environment to crumble down. (Unfortunate situation that the studio has been placed in to demonstrate the engine's capabilities given the events that occurred in Japan, so please excuse me when I say that this particular scene was fairly impressive).
In the end, they only showcased Single-player, and not any Multiplayer unfortunately. Although, they indicated that multiplayer is their number one priority. They also mentioned that this is a PC game first, console game second (not in those exact words, but this is also the spin they've been publicly indicating now for a while).
I'm certainly looking forward to this game, and it'll be the one that I'll finally be building a new computer for (as I only have laptops left!). I'll be pre-ordering it soon for PC as I am ashamed to say that I haven't done that yet. Feel free to ask any questions about the demo or PAX!
Cheers!
