PAX East 2011, Day 2

The sun came out in Boston this morning, both literally and figuratively.

All of my frustrations from yesterday kind of melted away. I found out that the lines I was bitching about yesterday were only really bad for 1 particular theater, and that was because the people running the convention center wouldn’t let the line stretch where the event planners had intended it (along an elevated section of hallway). So they had to really cram people in to make up for the lost space.

Other lines were long, but more relaxed. A good thing, though in the end I only went to one panel but it was a good one; a Q&A with a group of MMO big-wigs. At 1:30 in the morning I’m not even going to try to remember everyone’s name, but 38 Studios, Turbine, Trion, Bioware, ArenaNet and other MMO dev companies were represented. Most of the panel was Q&A and there were some pretty good questions and lots of good discussion among the panelists.

The show floor was *packed* today but having got over our travel-induced grumpiness, Angela (@g33kg0dd3ss) and I dove right in. We saw a lot of interesting games; I’m now looking forward to Dungeons from Calypso, Swarm from Hothead Games, Smuggler Truck (??) an iPhone game, Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment, DragonNest from Nexon, Faxion (the last two being free-to-play MMOs) and Slam Bolt Scrappers from Firehose Games.

Yeah, there were a lot of “big name” games there too but their booths were still a bit too crowded for me to deal with. Specifically I didn’t play SW:TOR or Guild Wars 2. But in the end that didn’t matter.

In the evening was our Tweet-up, Jazz (@girl_vs_mmo) was there. She’d had the chance to play Guild Wars 2 and had gone to a panel on it as well. I’m not a fan of Guild Wars and have been turning my nose up at Guild Wars 2… but after hearing all about it, now I want to play! Ditto SW:TOR… @MMOGC had a chance to play that one, and now I’m excited about it, too. I think it might be more fun to listen to friends talk about a game than it is to test it your self.

We left PAX at 6, freshened up a bit then went out for a quick meal which took forever… really the eateries around the convention center were over-whelmed this weekend. We got back to the Tweet-up location right at 9 to find the bar we’d planned to have it in packed. We had to improvise and I was fretting about how lame the whole thing was turning out, but then everyone pitched in, we grabbed tables and scoured the lobby for chairs and pretty soon there we sat, a dozen gamers, most of whom only knew each other previously from twitter or reading blogs, having a few drinks and yammering on about the show and games and Star Wars and Star Trek and Munchkin and on and on… I had a great time (and remember, I can’t stand people) and I hope others did as well.

List of attendees of our first PAX East tweet-up: @Scopique, @adarel, @sera_brennan, @kylehorner, @girl_vs_mmo, @MMOGC, @Hawkinsa1, @_jwgoodson & of course @g33kg0dd3ss, plus some spouses/relatives/friends who aren’t on twitter. Thanks again to all of you for making the effort to fit this little sojourn into your packed PAX schedules!!

OK the clock just sprang forward an hour… I better get to bed. We’ve still got another day to get through!

One thought on “PAX East 2011, Day 2

Comments are closed.