Games Convention 2008

Introduction

It was that time of the year again when we, a gaming nerds couple nicknamed hexe and T.T.H., took a trip to Leipzig, Germany, to attend the annual Games Convention. We had been there Wednesday, the "business visitors only" day, from which are the photos with few people, and Thursday, the first "open for public" day, from which are the photos with many people. We took a lot of those photos, somewhat around 300, and the most interesting 100 of them can now be found at this review. With those and some accompaning words we hope to give you a somewhat decent impression on what we experienced ourselves during the approximately 20 hours of walking on the convention show floors.

The Witcher

Out of some tradition we want to start (again) with talking about The Witcher, a meanwhile one year old single player roleplaying game by Polish/Czech publisher/developer CD Projekt. Just like the three years before we went to their booth and got a hearty welcome plus a demonstration on what is new regarding The Witcher.

So what is new about a game being released a year ago? Quite a lot actually! Driven by comments of players and the media after the initial release, motivated by their own desire to make a perfect game and backed by supportive publishers they worked hard on The Witcher Enhanced Edition. This version features several improvements, e.x. better ingame user interface, faster loading times between levels, more diversion of appearances for NPCs and monsters, rewritten dialogs for several characters and even a completely redone synchronisation for the German language - plus a lot more. Together with several goodies like a soundtrack, a "inspired by The Witcher soundtrack" music CD, a making-off DVD, the quest editor for fan-made maps, actually two new fan-made quests and a shiny world map they cram all that in a multi-DVD-CD package and put in on the shelves at September 18.

An interessting sidenote is that all current owners of the initial game don't have to spend money again to access those goodies: they can simply register at the official game website and download all - emphasis on "all" - content of the Enhanced Edition. Free of charge. Including the code improvements. And the new content. And the soundtrack. And the music CD. And everything else, too. That's what I would call "being neat to players".

Did we sound like their marketing department? Oups, can happen, but when you are listing to those guys live, eye in eye, you actually start to believen them when they say "this is the quality we always wanted The Witcher to be - we dreamt to make the perfect game and this is as close as possible to that dream."

Aion & Guild Wars

Aion - it was meant to be big: developed by NCsoft, a big player in the global MMO market, made with the Cryengine, one big thing of a 3D render engine, hyped by big announcements, advertised with big billboards on all the roads leading to the convention center in Leipzig, housed in a big and colorful booth of NCsoft and being playable on a big number of PCs at said booth. A lot of people came to have a look at it and even at the "business visitors only" day all the PCs had been manned by curious players - which is not that common on all booths that day. A day later, Thursday, the masses came and I actually do not want to imagine what must have happened there on Saturday. For NCsoft itself it must have been a great success: they built a really beautiful, wide open booth, showed their most anticipated flagship game, filmed those absolutely hillarous "Quest for GC" teaser videos (link), prepared a lot of events during the convention, had tons of boxes of free giveaways, flew in four Chicks of Superior Eye Candy and mixed the cocktail with a horde of NCsoft employees so no question of any visitor stays unanswered (well, at least those question which they had been allowed to answer) - and the masses came to praise them.

To be honest we ain't that "superhyped" by Aion ourselves because its visual style is a bit too "mangaish" for our taste and and because it is a bit too "classic MMORPG" for our taste: pay monthly fee, choose a server, choose a faction, grind your levels, yadda, yadda. Still, from the MMOs we have seen at the convention - and we have seen a lot - it is the most interesting one. Chicks with wings, who can resist that?

Another noteworthy thing is the character creation because that one is absolutely tremendeous! After choosing a character class and your gender you have something between two and three dozen different settings and sliders and color choosers to customize your character to your very personal likings. It's stunning, really, and due to the high quality 3D render engine your avatars simply look gorgeous. A very helpful feature even is that during character creation you have the choice to display your character in a "starter armor", a "mid level armor" and a "high level armor" so you can test whether your character customizations will still look good in case you reached level 50 and acquired a shiny plate mail. Another interesting thing is that according to a NCsoft member it actually should be possible to change all those settings later on, after character creation, so you can't make any irreversible mistakes during that 2+ hours character customization marathon. But please don't take that information for granted - while I directly and clearly asked that question the NCsoft guy said "I am not 100% sure but I highly assume so".

Then some concatenated information staccato about Aion: there won't be any beta in Europe, but there will be preview events, the release will hopefully be in early 2009 and it will come about six months later in Europe than in Korea, it will feature different shards/realms/servers, it won't be as much "grind" involved as in e.x. Lineage 2, there will be a lot of quests to please the European and American audience, playing those quest will develop your character pretty decent in comparison to simply slaying monster, plus that quests will move your personal storyline further.

So much about Aion, now to another game of NCsoft, Guild Wars. Just as announced in the "Quest for GC" teasers there had been absolutely no informations about anything related to Guild Wars 2 and so we didn't even ask for. Quite the same for Guild Wars 1 because there had not been shown anything new during the Games Convention and there had not even been proclaimed any official news. Nevertheless we had the chance to talk with Mike, a person working for ArenaNet directly and having two positions there: first is being the lead of quality assurance team and second being producer of the Guild Wars 1 live team. He ensured us that despite the full throttle work on Guild Wars 2 there are a couple of persons at ArenaNet still working full time on Guild Wars 1. In addition he said they have an internal schedule of changes and new things to come for Guild Wars 1 and that schedule already extends till summer 2009 by now. He even mentioned the magical words "content update", wooohooo, without going into any further details unfortunately. Nevertheless it had been a pleasure to talk to that guy and to be honest it gave us back some hope that Guild Wars 1 won't be the neclected child by ArenaNet now that they are working on something new.

Another non game fact one must mention after visiting the NCsoft booth is the incredible heartiness they spread. Whether we already knew them from the conventions before or not they all greeted us with a smile and took their time for a pleasant chit-chat, whether about their games or their jobs or our interests and whatnoteverelse. We did hang around a lot at the NCsoft booth, mostly because it could always happen that you would start talking with yet another interesting person. On the picture with the two guys looking like bouncers the right one is Martin, lead community coordinator for Guild Wars and the German Guild Wars fansites in particular, and left is Alex, customer support for (mostly) Guild Wars and who already gave us a great introduction to Guild Wars: Nightfall at the Games Convention two years ago.

An interesting sidenote at this point is that all the customer support people from NCsoft Europe could basically do customer support for all games hosted by NCsoft Europe but they are allowed to decide amongst themselves who specialises on which game. In addition they seem to switch between the games once in a while so that the job does not get too boring over the course of time.

Next in the line of Uber Cool People From NCsoft is Tia, community coordinator for City of Heroes/Villains, and if you haven't spot her yet she's the one with the big smile and the blue monster in her hands. Two more people we have talked to but didn't take a picture of them had been Jörg, community coordinator for Tabula Rasa and City of Heroes/Villains and provider of XL Aion nightshirts for little ladies, and Stephen, creative concepts manager, a position he took after defining himself what that position is all about - pretty cool, huh? Last but not least there had been Alex, who once was community coordinator for Guild Wars for the English speaking Europeans, then left for his home country Australia to become community coordinator for Fury by developer Auran and now is back in Brighton to be lead community coordinator for City of Heroes/Villains. Anyway, a pretty wicked fact is that it's hard to remember the positions of employees from NCsoft Europe because they seem to switch and change and rename every couple of months. But I've written them all down this time, ha!

Two more persons we did banter with had been Reyna and Gwen, the models promoting Guild Wars. They are quite funny and out of a sudden one us even got kissed by Reyna! Seems like James, the little blue one, is quite some lady killer...

P.S.: great games, great booth, mega friendly great crew! Thank you so much!

Demographics & Example of the Minority

Aforementioned Stephen told us that according to NCsoft's internal demographics their player base consists of 90% males. Ugh. I didn't expect that to still be that extrem in the MMO world. Unfortunately he couldn't tell which of NCsoft's games that demographics covered.

A little surprise came only 15 minutes later while we had been talking with Martin about Guild Wars, the convention and some other stuff when suddenly a booth babe of a nearby booth appeared: a cute girl, broad smile, blond hair, short skirt and tight shirt clearly advertising super cheap leasing conditions for the new Volkswagen Scirocco right at the place where every men will look at (front side upper chest area). She even had a little Volkswagen flag in her hands and to be honest we had been a little shocked that she would come over to another booth and interrupt talking people to sell them a car. But how wrong we had been. Actually she started asking who Martin is and who we are and what we all have to do with Guild Wars and whether there is any news about Guild Wars and how she could snatch some Guild Wars giveaways because she can't join the NCsoft booth events herself due to having duties on her own booth. It actually turned out that she is an avid Guild Wars player, being active in fansite forums, running her own guild and trying to help beginners to have a good start with the game. With a female dervish being her main character.

So no matter the 90% some of the remaining 10% actually do look as good as their ingame avatars...

Warhammer

At the booth of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning they had several PCs to play the game and they showed the cinematic trailer on a big screen. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. In addition your could get in the line to play at the PCs but before that they brought you in a small cinema where they showed you the cinematic trailer. Again. As if you would not have seen it at least two times while waiting in the line. Still, they managed to impress us by having an ultra bass, flashing lights, blowing fans and even heating lamps fired up at the right moments of the video clip. Seen the fire breathing dwarf sorcerer? Ok, now imagine seeing him in a cinema where you get hot air blow in your face that moment. Impressive. Like totally.

Funny anecdote is that our showing of the trailer in their cinema had been accompanied by Matt Firor, former co-founder of Mythic Entertainment, and Jeff Hickman, current Senior Producer at Mythic Entertainment.

After the cinema we had finally been let at the PCs, right below the big movie screen showing the cinematic trailer over and over and... -ok, you should get the picture by now. Anyway, we clicked a lot through the character creation choises have a look at all the available options. In case we would play that game after it got released hexe would probably pick some scantly clad dark elven slu... -orceress and I would be her green skinned orc body guard. Who could resist such a broad orc butt -as seen on the picture- anyway? Afterwards hexe jumped into the game with some dark elven assassin beach girl (note to self: when going into melee bikini beach wear is not enough protection) and started clicking buttons. It actually took her some time to figure out that there is no key or button or action for "attack" but there is an auto-attack feature as soon as you get in melee range of a hostile creature. In hexe's defense that auto-attack feature is not really obvious because your character is swinging her daggers every two seconds only and the rest of the time standing around in some combat-ready position only. Anyway, she managed to kill some monsters and get some loot and walk around a bit but all in all it didn't really "get" us. Something like a "wow, cool" effect had been missing, something that left any special impression on us, something worth to remember. Except orc butts and dark elven butts. In bikinis. Luckily only the elven ones in bikinis...

Some interesting technical facts: there will be shards/realms/servers and on each of them something between 3000 and 4000 players can be online simultaneously. Each of those "shards" will probably consist of something like 10 "servers", meaning actual server hardware, each of them having a special funtion or simulating a certain part of the world map. Regarding large PvP battles they aim for a number of 150 vs. 150 or even up to 300 vs. 300 but they admit that they had not conducted any stress tests in the beta yet so the upper technical limit of players in a PvP battle is still undecided. One way or the other the game will go online at 18. September and will cost between 13 Euro and 10 Euro per month, depending on how many month you buy at once, the lowest price tag dangling on a 12 months package.

Age of Conan

We don't have much to say about Age of Conan because we didn't spend much time on its booth, still we have a bad news and a good news.

The bad news is about the game itself and the rumors we did hear at the convention and did read at the internet: despite a really good start with 700.000 subscripted players (note: ZOMGIMPRESSIVEARGH!!!1!!ELEVEN) they currently seem to loose customers left and right. We haven't dug deeper yet but that's what we heard and read.

The good news is about the presentation at the convention: nice booth, nice triple monitor gaming rig, nice babes.

Chronicles of Spellborn & Runes of Magic

While we are talking about MMORPGs there had been two other ones sharing the booth of Frogster Interactive: TCoS and RoM

The Chronicles of Spellborn is a Dutch made, subscription based MMORPG and the thing which still interests us the most is the fact that they claim that there won't be any shards/servers/realms on which a player has to decide to put his character on. Nevertheless they claim to have a persistent world and both claims put together might result in a very big number of players stacking at the same places. Actually the more people the more successful Spellborn will be. We're personally not really deep into the technical details of that game but we will closely watch its release and see how they engage that holy grail of MMO development.

Some other bit of information is that it shall be a skill based game, with a fast paced combat system including a crosshair and that funky "multisided skill bar cylinder with five slots on each side and up to six sides dependant on level and rotating by one side whenever you use a skill" which you have to fully load with skills before you charge into battle. Yes, I know that explanation must sound horrible but please feel welcome to read by yourself about the so called "skilldeck" in the official FAQ of Spellborn.

The other game being promoted at that booth was Runes of Magic, a Taiwanese made, free-to-play, pay-per-item MMORPG. Sorry to say but the first that came to mind when we looked at this game had been "grass", or better to say the "absence of grass". Yes, grass! That's the green stuff your fantasy MMORPG character is mostly walking on, the stuff you as player stare at probably more than half of your playing time, so it should be in the best interest of a game developer to make the thing your users will see all the time to look good! Yes, characters, sure, one sees them even more often and, yes, characters are somewhat decent in Runes of Magic, but grass, yes, grass, it's all around your character! But in Runes of Magic it seems you are forced to stare at some flat polygon plain with a "something similar to grass" texture in a bonbon style color of "something like green". Bah! Ugly! Anyway, rant over now.

A more interesting information we got was the fact that you have to choose a primary class at character creation and afterwards you can choose a secondary class after reaching level 10. You now can use both primary and secondary skills from your primary class and all primary skills from your secondary class - but not the secondary skills of your secondary class. The neat trick is that you can go to some special NPC in some town and actually switch your primary and secondary class to get access to another mix of skills: both primary and secondary skills of your formerly second class and the primary skills of your formerly primary class - but not the secondary skills of your formerly primary class anymore. Yes, sounds interesting, yes, had been explained pretty horrible, yes, is covered as "dual class system" in the official FAQ.

Runescape

Runescape, the browser based, Java powered, 3D MMORPG from Jagex got a booth at this year's Games Convention, too, and they did present their new game client: being developed over the course of the last two years all the code and all the content had been revamped to make the game look better and still run on nearly every PC out there having a browser and an Java runtime library installed. Well, with having more than 350 employees and more than 1 million active subscribers they seem to do a good job. An extremly good job...

Mortal Online

They are from Sweden and they say it's gonna be huge, it's gonna look great (Unreal Engine), it's gonna be fast (first person view), it's gonna be player skill based (not character skill based), it's gonna be harsh (loosing all equipment on death) and it will feature PvP everywhere. In case you like that "in ya face" playstyle with a brutal death penatly but even without any "grind" you should put that game on your personal watchlist - at least till summer 2009 when they plan to release Mortal Online.

Metal Gear Online

We don't know much about the whole Metal Gear series but there will obviously be some MMO variant of it coming soon. At the first look it seems to be a first person or third person shooter in an urban environment and on the second look it seems you can pick up and use things lying around everywhere and on the third look it seems that the game features one of the most important equipment pieces for a modern elite soldier: porn magazines. Yes, those are in the game and when you stumble upon one you can actully open it, read in it and get some pleasant distraction from your though soldier's life - till you get headshotted by an enemy sniper. T1z b0ut sh00t1n, n0t g1rlz, y0 n3wb!!!

Word of Warcraft & Starcraft 2

Last name in the MMO block of our review shall be the biggest one: World of Warcraft. Together with Starcraft 2 it was at home at the same booth as Blizzard had last year and it once again attracted a huge crowd of people. Even us actually because we had been looking for something about Diablo 3. Unfortunately there had been nothing during the two days we attended the convention so the only thing left for us at the booth of Blizzard had been the question "how the get our hands on those Diablo 3 stickers without being forced to play World of Warcraft before" - we really don't like that game, you know. Based on superior loot acquisition skills we convinced the "bouncer" of the World of Warcraft waiting line entrance that we are here just for the stickers and being forced to pla... -uhm, wait to play World of Warcraft but that waiting just for the stickers would be so cruel. Gosh, sometimes I am really impressed that serving some cheese to your own whine can easily get you where you want: two Diablo 3 stickers being ours.

Sacred 2

A good impression of a game starts with you walking to its booth and the very first employee you encounter saying "hey, I know you, you are hexe, from that Guild Wars fansite, right?" So, Frank, way cool from you to recognize us and, sorry, pretty lame from us that we could not remember you. Won't happen again, I got pictures from you now. Hehe.

One way or the other we afterwards got a very long and detailed introduction to the game. That got us up to date on all the new stuff that made it into the game since last year's Games Convention. Unfortunately the game was set to some "10 minutes counter started NOW, so go to the arena and beat the crap out of the other guys here at the booth" demonstration game mode so we couldn't see everything there is. On the other hand our personal guide showed us how to leave the arena, hehe, so we had the chance to go exploring a bit without somebody trying out skill chains on us. The arena had been in some town, probably the town everybody starts in, and that town even featured some "portals to the other parts of the world" teleporter area. Basically something like the teleporters in Diablo 2, but all stacked on one place. Quite interesting had been that around the portals themselves the surrounding area had been shaped and sculpted just like the area behing the portal so one could get a decent glimpse on what would wait behind.

Which actually showed us the first problem: sci-fi. We don't want to spoil too much so we only hint at the fact, that in the (fantasy) world of Sacred 2 there are things and creatures which appeared there not in a "natural way". That blue glowing thing in one of our photos does not look like being from a fantasy world but more like if a by-flying spaceship of the United Federations had accidentally dropped a Warp drive which then crashed somewhere on the world of Sacred 2. The other quite obvious thing is that biped techno dog with a electro hammer and an interchangeable cyberarm currently featuring a lazer gun in our demo (sidenote: must be a female techno dog because it seems to like sniffing on flower pots). To be honest, nope, we ain't pleased by such sci-fi things in a fantasy world. Still me might gulp that down and give it a second look when the game is released.

The totally obvious good thing in Sacred 2 is that it obviously looks really, really good. The landscape is built with a lot of love to the detail and there even is grass, a lot of grass, kneedeep and such. Another highlight is the water which's waves gently roll on the coast and which seems to fracture light in a pretty nice way - just look at that Seraphim character standing in the shallow river.

A tiny crack in that good impression comes with something sometimes looking just like cheap plastic. We can't really say why, after all we aren't any kind of graphic artists, but on some objects there is a bit too much "shininess" and "3D shader showoff". So once in a while your gaming immersion gets a unpleasant kick in the balls by reminding you of "(plastic) Barbie in (plastic) Barbieland", e.x. "whoups, that ain't no natural rock" or "whoups, that ain't no natural human". But eventually we are just a tad too picky and have seen to many hyper-realistic Aion characters before.

Another thing worth to mention is the cooperation of Ascaron, developers of the game, with Intel: the good side is that Sacred 2 received a special treatment by adapting it to gaming laptops from Intel, Centrino 2 and that stuff, so even when you are a traveling salesman with a problem you should at least find some leisure by playing Sacred 2 on the way. Or in case you are a gamer and tend to attend a lot of LAN parties a laptop is way more comfortable to carry around than your 30 kilogram case modded water cooled quad core computing machine called "Big F***ing Gaming Rig". The bad side is that they seem to have said "we grant you a license of our newly aquired Havoc physics engine free of charge, so GO USE IT!!!" This results in your nicely animated opponents (in which actually stick all the arrows you or your companions have shot at them, hehe) switching to ragdoll mode as soon as their health points reach zero. So far that ain't bad but their death "simulations" look more like that they have been hit by several cannon balls all from different directions and their limbs go spinning around as if the puppetmaster of Pinocchio having an epileptic attack. Dear developers, yes, ragdoll physics are cool, but 1) a sword attack doesn't have the strength of a cannonball, 2) it does not come from different directions the same time and 3) the hip joints of a human being ain't that flexible. Unfortunately another immersion-nuts-kicker in our opinion.

Finally please bear in mind that our pictures are actually off-screen photographs from TFT monitors so in real the graphics even look better. Even despite all our ramblings here we consider Sacred 2 a really good looking game which will definitely fetch our interest when it hits the shelves. Emphasis on "our" as we we are a gaming couple and we don't play single player games anymore but enjoy cooperative multiplayer games - which Sacred 2 perfectly is, due to the fact that it is multiplayer from the ground. That means even if you start a single player game actually a dedicated server is launched in the background and your client simply connects to that. In addition when your friend with his *hint* laptop *hint* comes over he can simply plug in said laptop into your network and join your game, without a need to restart that game session. We really appreciate such stuff because in Sacred 1 multiplayer was quite buginfested and it seems it will be the total opposite in Sacred 2.

Fallout 3

The big disappointment of this year's convention for us. They built a really big booth shaped like a bunker and had "don't you dare to film anything in there" signs plastered all over it. So curiosity was big enough for us to enter that bunker. Luckily on the "business vistors only" day without lengthy cues of people infront of it, but inside there only had been more hallways to store more lengthy cues of people to finally channelise them into a big cinema. There they showed -after once again reminding everybody at least five times not to film or photograph or record anything- for like 15 minutes a live presentation of a development build of Fallout 3 on the XBox360. Half of that demonstration consisted of running around in a dirty, gray city shooting dirty, gray people with dirty, gray guns resulting in those people exploding in fountains of blood and cutoff limbs. That effect in particular seems to be based on "Bloody Mess", a skill your character can raise - after all Fallout 3 is a roleplaying game with character development and such. The only interesting thing about the "run and gun" part had been V.A.T.S., the Vault Assisted Targeting System: at any time of the game you can hit pause and target the different body zones of the enemy for which a hit percentage is displayed. That way you spend a certain number of action points till you have no more of those and afterwards hit "continue" to now see a slow motion kinda cinematical scene how your character performs those actions. Interesting. Wicked. No clue whether players will love or hate that feature. On the other hand you still can simply run and gun around just like in any first person shooter, too.

The other half of the 15 minutes consisted of the presenter clicking through the "Pipboy", your right arm wrist computer. That thing is responsible for everything besides run and gun, e.x. your character evolvement, you current stats, your quest log, your maps, your equipment, your radio stations, your game options, your everything. All of that usually is accompanied by hillarious descriptions and that "Pipboy" graphic you see everywhere, that smiling boy, is its own running gag in itself. But unfortunately the presenter simply clicked through each and every menu there is and sometimes even lost a word about it, but he never went into detail. While a well made ingame menu is definitely important for the user's experience being a "smooth" one, clicking through dozens of menues definitely did not show us why Fallout 3 shall be a super cool awesome fun game.

The only really good part of the presentation had been that every spectator got a nice Fallout 3 t-shirt afterwards. Whether or not, presentation = fail!

Little Big Planet

Advertised as the other big thing of the Games Convention we, too, had a look at Little Bit Planet - but our "first contact" was not a lucky one: there had been a huge monitor at knee-height with four controllers dangling our of it and all buttons on all controlersls made some wicked effects on the screen. Not having much text but only big icons and symbols might help keeping localisation to a minimum but in our case -two adults without any clue but with four controllers with twelve buttons each- it was not that helpful. Even not helpful is it when your Little Big Walking Cloth Bag Thiny Man was heavily customized by the person before you on the console and left the poor bastard more looking like a fully stuffed Katamari ball than a little movable biped creature with a defined "front" and "back" and "top" and "bottom". Neither really helpful was the friendly booth babe who realised our suffering and tried to help us. No offense, she really tried and she actually seemed to have a clue about the game she is talking about -which is not self-evident for most booth babes- but in our special situation -two minus clue times four times twelve- even she had been overwhelmed. Anyway, a lot of clicking later we knew there had been two levels only shown at the convention and we even somehow found out how to get through those animated "Pokemon meets Naruto meets XrossMediaBar interface" menues. We tried both levels, one being very simple but not showing whether you finished it sucessfully or not, you simply "finished" it, and the other one always leaving us in some pit we did fall into - but which did not "finish" the level or "kill" us but simply leaving us there till we once again found the menu clicky thingy way to "restart" the whole damn thing. Narf. At some point I stood up and said "I have now clue how this works and I don't want to waste my time now trying to do so".

Miscellaneous Photos

Dinner

Thursday evening, after walking around a convention for 10 hours straight for the second time we drove downtown for some dinner. It may sound like an advertisement but whenever you should get to Leipzig somewhen you should visit Hacienda Mexicana, "best mexican in town". Friendly, cheap, really good and if you have a look at the picture you will know what a man's real joy is after not having eaten anything for the last 11 hours.

Loot

As usual one of the last things in our review is showing off the loot and, yup, we once again got some really decent stuff this time: t-shirt needs for the next months are covered, the posters we got are really nice, the Witcher dice sets are pretty cool and even all the other stuff is worth to have a closer look at it.

2009

The last big news of course is that there will be a "Games Convention" in Leipzig in 2009, despite the fact that the so called "BIU - Bundesverband Interaktive Unterhaltungssoftware", an alliance of the nine biggest game publishers in Germany, decided to leave the Games Convention and start a new-but-similar convention named "gamescom" in Cologne next year. Wow, what a news! We expect that the upcoming 365 days will be a competition between both convention locations for exhibitors, business visitors and common visitors to become the leading games related convention in Europe. Will be thrilling to watch, both have a lot to loose and so far it's totally unclear what will actually happen where and who shows what where and who goes where and whateverelse. Our own, very personal vote is pretty clear: Leipzig made it, Leipzig shall keep it. 'nuff said.

The End

So much about our Games Convention trip, hope you did like our review! In case you have some further questions or even some corrections of infos -we have the notion of accidentally misquoting people- you can reach us either via the forum of the (German) Guild Wars fansite Guild-Wars.info (user "hexe" or user "T.T.H.") or send us an email to the address within the speech bubble of the Bog Elemental in the picture to the right (sorry for complexity, a little spam protection on that).

Thanks for stopping by,

hexe & T.T.H.

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