Early 2017!
Thanks, looking forward to it!
Early 2017!
Early 2017!
Polyphonia - NFTS joint. First time trying the HTC Vive actually. Was pretty cool to alter these floating spheres in the sky, like twisting them with the left stick to change their shape and right stick to alter their colour. Wasn't much of an objective, just mess around with objects. Asteroids would fly past and you reach out to break them apart. The controllers become drumming sticks that you can use on a bunch of circles that acts as a xylophone, although not quite 1:1 accurate. Still, cool to see indie VR games.
Dead Cells - Wasn't much for this to stand out against so many other metroidvanias, but looked really colourful and played well enough. Although I really hated that the common enemies just jump at you from a distance and if you don't have a shield, you'll get hit as you can't block. Although I just remembered you can roll, so I could give it another go. It had procedural generation, which is seen as a bad word these days, but didn't see that much penalty.
Uncanny Valerie - Another NFTS joint. This was easily the funniest game I played at the show! The dialogue is witty, with some pretty good voice acting. You play as a woman who's decided to get a robot servant and has foolishly decided to put the personality of her ex-girlfriend into it. It's a 3D tablet game and you can shift the perspective by flipping around the house to find out where the servant messed up. Finally a game where you have to deal with incompetent robots and how abrasive they can be if they're given a personality heh.
Loved your post. Very informative.
41. If you were at EGX for more than one day, where did you stay?
Hotel in 'Brimingham'
I told them in the feedback, to keep the indies at the front and centre like they did this time. And keep the giveaway and loud stages away from them
It was my fourth year and as usual I did a fair amount of queuing! Totally shocked at the complete absence of a MS (and Nintendo) stand, seemed like Sony had gone all out this year judging by the sheer amounts of posters around the place. Got my slot for PSVR on Friday and got to choose Driveclub, really enjoyed it maybe a bit pixelated in places (but I think the headset needed tweaking a little) but really found it immersive. Friend had his slot on Saturday and was treated totally differently, had to queue couldn't pick the game he wanted and got Battlezone which we'd already played (and loved got the headset sorted this time). Luckily he got the bloke I had in the booth the day before who was cool and he got to play something else! Also got to play Tethered which isn't a game I would normally even consider and seriously got hooked! Some of the guys are ex-Evo and we're really into the game and explaining all the facets of it. Played Yooka laylee nice platformer with a sly sense of humor! Not impressed with having to book for Horizon that was just stupid and the queues need to sort them out! Not sure if I'm going next year will have to see if the finances can take it!
The Fall part 2 Unbound (PC Gamer did a video on the whole demo) - I had NO IDEA this was on the showfloor! I walked past it and thought, hold on is that The Fall? But why are you playing as a robot butler who still serves a house with dead guests? Very Norman Bates. And a mansion setting? But that's the original character from the first game. Then I look up and see that it's part 2. They're doing some quite ambitious stuff. I didn't see any combat, it felt an English mystery thriller but with sci-fi trappings. The dialogue was great and hilarious. The Fall was bloody excellent, so I can't wait for this.
I missed the Little Nightmares booth but it looked awesome from the outside.I said much the same - I complained that the loud Twitch and tourney stages were spaced out so that you had to listen to the shrill youtubers shrieking over each other no matter where you were and that it would be better if they had their own area.
I also complained about all the gaming tat stores taking over & the lack of effort in themed displays (Little Nightmares and the Chocobo Ranch being the obvious exceptions!)
I've been going to EGX since 2010 and I REALLY don't want it to keep going south. Hopefully next year, for EGX X, they'll improve things.
I mean, Nintendo should be back as the NX will be out, Microsoft should be there in a big way with Scorpio either announced properly, or more likely, actually out.
Hopefully they can entice Paradox to support the show in a bigger way, as that would really fill out the PC side of things, and maybe some kind of support from Valve.
Would also have been nice to have more board games there, as it seemed pretty reduced this year.
I missed the Little Nightmares booth but it looked awesome from the outside.
The Horizon Zero Dawn pre-booking thing to play the demo was enough to lose interest. At least I got to play one AAA game, Dishonored 2, which was awesome! Couldn't get enough of this ability
The situation with PS VR and especially Horizon was inexcusable. Really annoyed me.
Did the system not work well? Pre-booking slots doesn't seem like a bad idea to me - you can do other stuff and just focus on showing up in time for your allocated time.
I can only speak from my experience last year as I didn't attend this year's event, but it was a total shit show back then. Loads of people hated it and I can't believe they brought it back and even doubled down on it by now keeping AAA titles behind it. Bloody awful idea.
Honestly, does any other games convention do this?? I've never heard stories of Gamescom or Pax doing this, and they're bigger than EGX.
Anyway, what happened last year certainly was you had to book online in advance to get hands on with the PSVR and Vive, and even then it was a lottery drawing (I managed to get a PSVR slot but not a Vive slot). If that failed you could go up to the booth and see if they had any free slots or cancellations (which they never did, and I still hold a grudge against the rude arsehole at the HTC booth last year). Also on top of this, was the fact that this booking system was horribly communicated to those attending - I found out about it on gaf, Eurogamer nor EGX had even mentioned this anywhere. It was shameful.
Now from the sounds of this thread (unless I'm missing something), they've done away with the online booking stuff. but now you had to run for the appointment check in desk first thing. This doesn't sound much better though cos even then you'd still need to be one of the first people inside the venue cos there are simply not enough slots available for a hall serving thousands of people.
Rough math from figures earlier in the thread:
The hall is open for 8 hours I believe?
The Horizon demo was a half hour long, so that's 16 bookings per day, and they only take like what was it 16 people per booking?
So that's about 250 people per day that can get to play Horizon out of the multiple thousands attending.
It's a bad system. Any other game you can play as long as you're patient enough. It's even more egregious in my eyes given how there were barely any AAA titles beyond this fall at the show anyway.
I'd have flipped my nut if I was there and saw that Horizon was an appointment only demo given how bad it was last year, and once again EGX's website does not mention that it's by appointment only.
This is a prime example of why (in my eyes and some others I see) this show has really went downhill compared to the previous years when it was in London, the organisation is a mess now and they certainly never used to do this shit.
Out of curiosity, how would this number increase without the bookings? It's still the same number of stations, and same amount of time per demo. Appointment or not, 250 sounds about like the most that are getting in each day.
Ok, yeah that's fair actually, I can see your point, but why have the stupid appointment system in place then at all?
You're not then artificially limiting the people that can play it to the die hards who manage to get to the front of the queue to the venue each day.
Haha I dunno man, I see implementing a system where I can just stroll up to my appointment 5 minutes beforehand and walk into playing the game as a good thing. I don't exactly cherish the time of wasting two hours in a queue when I could be playing games. It might not be a perfect system, but it makes for a better organized and less cluttered booth.
I think it's only really fair for the massive games, where standing in line all day doesn't necessarily guarantee you access. For the smaller titles, an appointment system would be overkill. but I'm willing to bet that a healthy chunk of the people at EGX would play Horizon if they could, so I don't begrudge them trying to organize it.
Haha I dunno man, I see implementing a system where I can just stroll up to my appointment 5 minutes beforehand and walk into playing the game as a good thing. I don't exactly cherish the time of wasting two hours in a queue when I could be playing games. It might not be a perfect system, but it makes for a better organized and less cluttered booth.
I think it's only really fair for the massive games, where standing in line all day doesn't necessarily guarantee you access. For the smaller titles, an appointment system would be overkill. but I'm willing to bet that a healthy chunk of the people at EGX would play Horizon if they could, so I don't begrudge them trying to organize it.
But I think you can say that about every AAA game there though, but instead those titles provide loads of stations and just let you queue. Unless you're joining a 3 hour+ queue half way through the day basically anyone who wants to see something can see it as long as they wait. And while it's nice to just stroll up 5 mins before you walk in to play Horizon, you're forgetting the queuing you'll need to do in order to be one of the first at the appointment desk; those slots are gone in rapid time, you basically need to be a die hard queuer in the first place to get into the venue first just to see the game at all.
Again, does any other convention do this? It seems grossly unfair to me; you're basically only letting the first couple hundred people who are first through the door into see the game throughout the whole day.
Plus this appointment system wasn't even mentioned anywhere, what if you were attending the show and Horizon was the game you were most excited to see above all others? It wouldn't necessarily ruin the event for you but it could put a serious downer on it for you because of a bad idea coupled with poor communication.
It's not a convention thing, it's a Sony thing. I'm sure they did the same thing at Gamescom and PAX for Horizon.