It was the first time for to join the gamescom, and from first impressions, I'm happy that I did it.
Several of the well known companies where present at the Gamescom. EA, Blizzard, THQ, Konami and Square-Enix to name a few. Ofcourse we had various indy companies present and some more known names out the F2P industry such as GPotato and Burda-IC.
The first goal on the Com was to walk around and get a good understanding of the size and layout of the Com. With 4 hall filled out we had our trajectory set out. First we did the Xbox stands to see what was new and play with the kinect. After that we tried the Playstation variant.
Several games made their official debut on the com. DragonAge 2, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy XIV and Star Wars : The Old Republic to name a few. We watched the cinematics and trailers presented to us from the games and they simply looked astaunishing.
One thing that put us off, was the noise. The place was crowded and various stands such as RockCat and Razor where pumping up the music louder and louder across the halls to compete against each other. While my common sense agreed with the competition, my ears disagreed for the most part.
One thing that struck me odd was the crowd. The stereotypical view someone has from a gamer, is a real potatocouch, someone who dwells in the basement and doesn't stand sun light. Often having a few pounds overweight as well.
While there were definitly people present on the com that fit the description, the majority of people there were young adults in good shape and even more elderly people who still held laptops, PSP devices or gameboys. The term "gamer" affects a wider population then most people can imagine.
We followed various Q&A rounds of the large developers explaining why they implemented certain features or left them out. A great Q&A occured at the EA stand when they were discussing some of their new games comming out. There the audience really got involved with the discussion and they actually picked people out for good solid questions.
One thing that scared me was the hourly giveaways. Every hour people would swarm in masses to the large game stands in the hopes of getting their hands on some freebies. First they start with some T-shirts. People almost knocking eachother senseless for the T-Shirt, went totally beserk when they threw in free copies of the games.
We had a small let down when we tried to get our hands on the latest Aion beta disks for the next expansion/version. When we finally got close to the stand we noticed there were none left.
When the day came near an end, we had loads of keychains, posters, cards, stickers and other gadgets from the Com. We're definitly looking forward to the next one.
What would you say was the most immersive of the 2, the Kinect or PS3's equivalent?
ReplyDeletehmmm hard to say. I think I'll probably go for the Playstation one. It appeared more "natural" to me then working with the Xbox version. Still when given to me as gift I wouldn't be picky about it. Both are great technologies.
ReplyDeleteIn the end I think it just boils down to your personal favourite or brand.