We sat down with our North American team members Dubz and Mike to talk about PAX West, the best games there, and what to keep in mind when visiting any PAX event:
You guys have another PAX event under your belt! How was the event for you, what did you guys do all day?
Dubz: Walked. (laughs)
Mike: A lot of walking!
Johannes: PokemonGo egg hatching?
Dubz: Yeah plenty of eggs hatched! Nothing good though. But yeah we walked from a lot of different corners of the convention center to a lot of different hotels and apartments, Airbnbs of developers, meetings, and getting a lowdown on some new and upcoming indie games.
Mike: Which was really good! We met so many awesome people and got to see so many amazing games, we are really excited to work with them.
Dubz: SAME! Oh man, some new favorites for sure!
People love lists, I love lists, give us your top 5 video games from PAX West!
Dubz: Oh, Mike you want to start?
Mike: Okay, so…that is such a tough call! I think my top five are:
Dropzone was great, so much fun. It’s kind of a MOBA-style game, but a brawler. Not your typical ‘3-lane destroy the base at the end’ game, but a true battle arena. It’s even got map control elements, you can capture these little cores and turn them in, in the middle of the map.
The best part about it is that it’s 3v3 as to the number of heroes, all controlled by the same player! So think of it as League of Legends but controlling three heroes, and you swap between them as you move them around the map. The developers are great people and I am so excited with what’s going to come out of that.
My next would be Atlas Reactor which is a turn-based MOBA from Trion Worlds and it’s SO FUN! We’ve been having an absolute blast with it, I cannot wait to see more come from the game. The characters are great, we got to talk to the lead designer about all sorts of fun competitive stuff.
I have always been a fan of Trion Worlds in general, all of their other games like Rift and that stuff, I love it. So I was already excited just for the publisher and then I got to play the game and I was like ‘wow that was amazing’ so I have been playing a lot of that since we came back.
Also the game called Super Senso looks SO fun on mobile. That game is going to take up so much of my time. It’s kind of a turn-based, combat strategy style mobile game. I am such a huge fan of that genre. I love just everything about it, I got to demo it with one of the devs, I cannot wait: It’s going on my phone, tablet, everything!
It’s well balanced, the abilities and ideas of the 
Sensos being kind of this big super mechs that you have on the battlefield to fight with and then all the other units and the way you build your armies to specialize in different things. It seems like it’s going to be a really easy to pick up game with a high skill cap. So you can easily start playing it and have fun, but there is going to be a competitive edge to it too.
Gigantic was just a blast! It’s so nice to see those guys up and running again. I have been playing Gigantic since the closed press alpha. I followed the game and love all of the devs. They have teamed up with Perfect World and those guys a great as well, we love them!
So getting to see Perfect World combined with Gigantic was AWESOME, and we are really excited for where the game is going. It’s kind of an action brawler, and I feel bad for saying this that it’s in the vein of Overwatch and Paladins because it’s very different but it’s the closest analogy that I can draw. It’s so much fun to play, very fast action and team oriented, you pick it up really quickly! Also they have really fun characters, that’s kind of the biggest takeaway I have.
And probably Brawlout, I had a lot of fun playing it and it’s exciting to see a nice platform fighter for PC! The mechanics were a blast, it felt perfectly fine even being in Alpha. I got my butt kicked, but I had a lot of fun. (laughs) The characters were neat and everything was responsive and felt good and I can’t wait to play more of it at Hitbox Olympus!
Dubz: For me, in no specific order, I would have to say:
Dropzone is definitely on my list as well, can’t wait to see what kind of stuff comes out of that game as far as tournaments go.
Gigantic I hadn’t played it before PAX West so I was out of the loop. It has now become one of the most anticipated games for me. I am really looking forward to playing more.
Also a game called ‘Vikings’, I believe it’s called Vikings Wolves of Midgard. It’s a game by Kalypso media and it’s like what I always wanted Diablo to be. Everything is kind of Norse and obviously has Vikings, that’s totally my thing, I love it! The game is super polished, super fun, I am really looking forward to the release in early 2017. I hope I can get a beta before. (laughs)
The other two would have to be Forts, which is a tower-based RTS with all sorts of silly and fun and explosions, but is super competitive at the same time. And lastly I would have to say Guns of Icarus, because they are releasing a new update where it’s PvE instead of PvP. They will still have PvP, but you will be fighting against other NPC gunships and hordes of monsters, enemy ships and monster ships and stuff like that. It’s a really really fun and cooperative experience. You get even better, bigger and more unfair guns. It was a crazy experience.
Any other games you would like to mention?
Dubz: I have one to bring up! There was corner in the main show floor that was dedicated to a Polish indie game dev group called ‘Indie Games Poland Foundation’. There, I was playing one game called ‘Detached’ which was a VR experience. So these guys have created something where you are like an astronaut or a robot, and you are in a spacesuit, moving and flying around in zero gravity Virtual Reality!
So you could boost yourself and move around in zero gravity and you could turn the camera upside down so it felt like you were upside down, it was one of the most disorienting experiences I have ever had in my life. Yes it made people want to throw up, it was just SO COOL! (laughs)
I usually don’t get motion sickness but you can trick the triggers or the thumb sticks in, to turn the view and rotate it to left and right and you could go all the way around like 360 degrees which is not something you can do in games and it completely messed up my sense of direction.
I didn’t know what was up or down the entire time I was playing, I just knew ‘that’s a door I need to go through, let’s fly over there!’ Really looking forward to the release, I’m thinking about getting a PS4 for that one!
Mike: For me definitely Dawn of War 3! The original Dawn of War is one of my absolute favorite games of all time – I played it thousands of thousands hours in competitive multiplayer. I kinda fell off with Dawn of War 2. But I got to play through a campaign mission of Dawn of War 3 and…it was AMAZING – I am so excited and I can’t wait to see what they are planning for the future of the game and how it’s going to balance competitively or at least for multiplayer and all that – so I am super super excited!
Dubz: I’ve got one more game as well, it’s called Deckbound Heroes, which is a deck-builder strategy game, a really interesting concept! It’s a different experience to the old ‘you play your card on one set battlefield and your enemy responds’. It looks like a tower based game, with various really interesting aspects of the game!
What else happened at PAX West?
Dubz: Oh I’ve got a story! So I went to PAX for work, and my girlfriend and streamer from Hitbox, MiniMoosey joined me. She also works with DeliciousCinnamon, my main channel. She has been playing this game that just came out called Obduction, made by the guys who made Myst. So Obduction came out, really amazing game, she just actually finished it last night.
So the devs of that game apparently were doing VR tests there and she was super excited for that, and so she goes to the booth and Rand Miller was there – the guy who was one of the main characters in the first Myst game and a founder of Cyan Worlds, the company that made the games. So he was there signing autographs, and he is like a hero to MiniMoosey, so she got to have a fangirl moment where she geeked out and told him how much she loved his games and stuff, it was really good to see!
After all these years, you get to see a childhood hero. There was no media saying that he was going to be there until he decided ‘Hey I’m coming out here!’ Those random things that happen at events I think are really really awesome. Some guy saw her reaction and he ended up filming us for a documentary! (laughs)
What are your most important survival tips at PAX?
Dubz: If you ever see a hand sanitizer station, use it immediately! Think of it as if PAX is a video game itself, with collectibles in the game. Those hand sanitizers are the collectibles, those are the things you want to have a hundred of at the end of PAX. The other thing that I recommend is scheduling your time. Use Friday or your first day to scope out the area, try some stuff out, don’t try to get to too many things on that day, just know what you want to see and then use the next day to see the most interesting things that you discovered the day before.
Mike: My big one is mostly about not getting sick! Bring Airborne medicine, take care of yourself because there are a lot of germs. Drink a lot of water! I was sick last year but I was okay this year. The other thing is just that there are a lot of cool games and stuff to see, but also it’s such a great opportunity to meet up with old friends and other people that will be there.
So my tip is not to get too invested in playing this one demo of a game that’s going to come out in a few months anyway, and then miss out on some of the fun opportunities you could do, like some of the nice community stuff there, and meeting cool people. I would hate to see someone miss that just to stand in line for the latest AAA title. Sure, there are awesome opportunities to play games but I saw a line that had a 5 and a half hour wait and I was like ‘WOW that’s one entire day of PAX to play one game for 10 minutes.’ That just blew my mind.
Thank you guys so much for taking the time, it’s been awesome to hear your stories and I’m looking forward to hear more after your next event!