So EGX Rezzed 2014 is over. It was my first ever games convention and I loved every single day I went. In this post I am just going to talk about what I enjoyed on all three days while I was there.
Day One
On the first day I walked around and played some of the big games (FEZ on PlayStation Vita, OlliOlli on Xbox 360, Not A Hero on PC and many more games). One of the games that stood out to me was Alien: Isolation. It is the first game that made me jump in a very long time. But because it made me jump on a scripted scene, it makes me wonder how much it will make me jump if I play through it again.
I also went to the Volume and Tango Fiesta Developer Sessions. Both were good and talked about their game features, the decisions behind why they are making the game like this and showed the audience game-play footage.
Day Two
I spend most of today going to the Developer Sessions. I first went to the Fear And Horror In Games session where DayZ and Project Zomboid developers talked about making players scared, why people play these kind of games and features of the game. It was a interesting talk especially considering I don’t really play many horror games.
The second Developer Session I went to was about Alien: Isolation. The Creative Assembly (the developers behind Alien: Isolation) discussed how they made the game, why they made it and how supportive Fox was in helping to develop the game (they provided Creative Assembly with 3TB of data about the original Alien movie!).
The last Developer Session I went to was Dreamfall Chapters where they discussed what role narrative plays in their game, giving players choices which don’t distinguish between good or bad and not putting in any combat in the game. They also showed footage of their new upcoming game Draugen, which will see the developer continue with narrative focused games.
At the end of the Developer Sessions I think I might have played one or two games (Hotline Miami 2, LUFTRAUSERS) before I got too tired and went home.
Day Three
Today I decided to play more games than go to Developer Sessions. I played some brilliant indie games such as Biome (fingers crossed it comes on PlayStation Vita as it would be brilliant on there), Narcissus and Orbitalis (according to Alan Zucconi I was one of the few people who completed the game :D). I also got the chance to try the Oculus Rift for the first time by playing Dream. The game was amazing and so was the Oculus Rift. The motion blurring had not been fixed since this was the developer kit version 1 of the Oculus Rift. I actually started feeling some motion sickness near the end of my playthrough.
I also went to two Developer Sessions today. The first one was about Storytelling In Games, where developers from different game companies discussed about creating emergent stories, cost of creating stories and choosing between giving the player freedom with (finite) choices or making them stick to the script with a linear narrative. The second Developer Session was called Oh No! More Zombies, which was about why zombie games are so popular, the rise of survival games and why gamers like these type of games.
So this is what I pretty much did on all three days while I was at EGX Rezzed 2014. I must say I enjoyed my first ever games convention very much and I will definitely be coming back here again next year but hopefully as a developer that time.