4-Player: PAX East is Still the Best Gaming Convention on the East Coast

4-Player is a new, weekly video game column examining gaming culture on campus and online, documenting a previously unrepresented segment of BU’s culture. 4-Player is co-written by Jon Christianson, Ashley Hansberry, Allan Lasser, and Burk Smyth.

If the title didn’t clue you in, I went to PAX East this year. And it was fun. PAX East (or Penny Arcade Expo East) is a gaming convention put on by the folks over at the Penny Arcade webcomic. It’s in its fourth year of existence, and man is this thing getting big. Held Friday through Sunday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC), PAX features a show floor filled with as many booths as possible—Riot Games, Bethesda, Microsoft, Sony, Ubisoft, etc.—a zoo of panels, a whole bunch of Magic: the Gathering and other tabletop games, and lines. Lots of lines. Think E3 if it were open to the general public or Comic Con if getting a ticket were actually possible.

The League of Legends booth was packed for most of the convention - photo by Burk Smyth
The League of Legends booth was packed for most of the convention | Photo by Burk Smyth

This was my second time going to PAX. I went all three days, and I have to say that the convention was significantly better this year. The expo hall lineup was much stronger, organization was better, and the Penny Arcade guys have managed to make the thing still feel like a fan convention even as the giants of the gaming world make their presence known. Pretty cool.

First and foremost, I have to mention Riot and their League of Legends booth. League of Legends, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (or MOBA), is currently the most played game in the world. They have 32 million registered accounts and something like 5 million concurrent players. That’s an absurdly high number. What most impressed me about their booth and presentation was, despite the fact that they were showing a game that came out in 2009, they managed to make their game feel more fresh and exciting than most of the other big presenters. The booth was staffed by an incredibly personable and friendly group of Riot employees who were giving out skin cards and lanyards. They also featured some cool collegiate LoL matches (NYU won the whole thing while BU was nowhere to be found), some Riot vs the community matches, and other presentations. The entire booth was just incredibly fun, and it was packed with people.

Riot weren’t the only ones showcasing games that are either already out or easily playable. I took the time to play a match of Gears of War: Judgement, which I somehow won (my brother was not happy about that). I also played EVE developer CCP’s FPS Dust 514. Dust is meant to interact with EVE, and the least I can say is that it seems like a fun, competent, multi-player shooter. We’ll see how the rest shakes out.

I also got the chance to play a few unreleased games. Marvel: Heroes, a surprisingly fun little action RPG from Gazillion Entertainment. It plays almost exactly like Diablo, but there’s something about killing dinosaurs as Thor that makes the game stand out from the crowd. I also saw a gameplay demo of Watch Dogs, Ubisoft’s upcoming Person of Interest-esque game. It’s hard to write much about what amounted to a trailer, but I can say that the game still looks incredibly cool. Deep, I know.

I also waited in line for nearly three hours to play The Elder Scrolls Online. The result? I got to play around in Daggerfall City for 20 minutes. I actually had quite a bit of fun: this game is obviously an MMO, but they managed to capture enough of the Elder Scrolls feel to make it seem different. The game could still bomb, but my limited time had me pretty excited.

PAX is a great convention, and if you have any interest in gaming I urge you to attend next year. I didn’t go to any panels or play anything other than video games, and still I easily got my three days worth. The show keeps getting bigger, which means it could be moved to a larger convention center, but for now you should absolutely take advantage of having it here in Boston.

About Burk Smyth

Burk Smyth is a music writer for The Quad. He is from Baltimore, Md. and enjoys punk, indie, black metal, baseball, Magic: The Gathering, Everton Football Club and being terrible at Dota 2. Follow him at @burksmyth, where he tweets about Trent Reznor, Leighton Baines and dotes, mostly.

View all posts by Burk Smyth →

4 Comments on “4-Player: PAX East is Still the Best Gaming Convention on the East Coast”

  1. Hi there,

    Thanks for the bit of coverage on Marvel Heroes! I was one of the guys working the booth and would like to just to point out that it is not Cryptic but Gazillion Entertainment who is developing the game.

    Thanks!

    1. Yeah that was a dumb screw up on my part. Don’t know how I did that, maybe some repressed Champions Online feelings?

      Nonetheless, I edited that, and your game was good!

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