PAX Prime 2013: All the games and news, live from Seattle

The post-apocalypse of Naughty Dog’s survival-action game (and TV show) The Last of Us is a bleak and hopeless one. But one of the game’s scrapped alternate endings, which took a turn for the improvised and musical, provided a swelling, romantic sense of hope (and plenty of laughter).

Way back at in 2013, at PAX Prime in Seattle, The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley and creative director Neil Druckmann walked Naughty Dog fans through the original pitch for the game, offering a very early look at the game’s story, combat mechanics, and influences. They also showed off a surprising alternate ending to the game that’s far less bleak.

Majesco will soon launch Romans from Mars, an endless wave castle defense game for iOS and Android devices where players will have to defend earth from waves of brainwashed Martians.

The game begins when Mars, the god of war, is banished from earth by Jupiter and retaliates by going to the planet Mars, brainwashing its inhabitants and bringing them to earth to destroy Jupiter. The player, taking on the role of a lowly Roman soldier with a crossbow, has to hold the line and defend Jupiter’s castle.

The real-time action of side-scrolling brawlers like Double Dragon and Streets of Rage has been given a tactical, turn-based twist — think Fallout’s VATS system — with Treachery in Beatdown City by NuChallenger. The PlayStation Mobile game, due later this year, turns the classic arcade genre into a strategy game with intriguing results.

Rather than focusing on quick reflexes, Beatdown City presents its street fights like a turn-based RPG. When a player engages some enemy street scum, they’ll pause before they punch, pulling up a menu of moves, each with their own risks and rewards.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing 2, NeocoreGames’ action adventure title, adds multiple character classes to its previously unchangeable system, a representative told us at PAX Prime 2013.

Van Helsing 2 is a direct sequel to The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, which was released earlier this year. Players take control of the legendary monster hunter as they fend off beasts with the help of a ghostly companion, Lady Katarina. The game will include the Hunter class — the sword and pistol-heavy skills players of the first game are familiar with — as well as the Thaumaturge or Arcane Mechanic class.

Kiz Studios, creators of free-to-play multiplayer battle arena SmashMuck Champions, are trying to avoid “making Dota” by speeding up gameplay and involving the community, art director Allen White told us at PAX Prime 2013.

According to White, Dota continues to act as the template for the genre. When the indie developer began working on SmashMuck Champions, it sought to stray away from other titles by taking a fast-paced track.

Picomy Games’ action adventure title Heroki combines quick, easy to use touch controls with eye-catching visuals and charming characters, as demonstrated by our hands-on time with the game at PAX Prime 2013.

Heroki features a visual style inspired by Japanese art, manga and games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. During the demo, we were able to control the game’s titular, flying character by dragging one finger across the iPad. Heroki switches directions quickly, but has a slight recovery time, which made navigating him through the game’s colorful environments a challenge. The areas we explored were largely based on our flying ability, and required moving around obstacles mid-air.

In the lead up to launching their next-generation consoles, Sony and Microsoft have made strong declarations that their respective platforms will be home to a wealth of indie games and the freedom for smaller developers to self-publish. The other big console player, Nintendo, has been comparatively quiet on that front.

Nintendo already has similar policies in place. It just doesn’t have the same level of awareness, in part because it hasn’t been delivering its message during E3 and Gamescom press conferences. What Nintendo does have is some confusion about its stance on indie games, self-publishing and content restrictions on what can come to the Nintendo eShop.

Forced, BetaDwarf’s tactical role-playing game, requires players to work cooperatively while solving puzzles and taking down enemies, as demonstrated by the hands-on time we spent with the game at PAX Prime 2013.

In Forced, players take on the role of gladiators undergoing different trials. In addition to fighting off waves of enemies and larger bosses, the game requires players to work together intellectually. Much of the game’s tactical presence comes from the players’ Spirit Mentor, Balfus — a levitating blue orb that players can pass back and forth.

Aztez, an Aztec-inspired beat-em-up from Team Colorblind, aims to empower its players by giving them agency over their actions without a lot of handholding, artist and designer Ben Ruiz told us at PAX Prime 2013.

The game “smashes together” two genres: turn-based strategy and beat-em-up. Players jump back and forth around different areas of the Aztec empire about 20 years before the Spanish invasion. According to Ruiz, Team Colorblind wanted the game to feel more like an arcade title in terms of instruction.

During the creation of Apotheon, a side-scrolling combat adventure game with an ancient Greek aesthetic, developer Alien Trap Games took an unusual path. What started out as a space shooter-platformer with a comic book style eventually evolved into something wildly different.

Alien Trap’s latest project started as a successor to its last game, Capsized. Initially, the game was designed as a space shooter with a comic book look. According to Lee Vermeulen, co-designer and programmer on Apotheon, artist Jesse McGibney started experimenting with Greek mythology-inspired visuals for some of the game’s bosses and weapons.

Proletariat’s upcoming faction-based strategy game for iOS and Android tablets, World Zombination, lets players choose to play as the zombie or human factions, both of which utilize very different strategies to win over cities.

Set in a massively-multiplayer online world where players can form guilds and go on asynchronous raid-like battles together, the game lets players choose which faction they wish to play as.

Simutronics’ upcoming free-to-play aerial shooter, Dragons of Elanthia, was created to fill a very dragon-lacking space, developer Brett Sweeney told us during a recent interview.

We spoke with Sweeney at PAX Prime 2013, where the developer had its game on-hand at the Indie Megabooth. Dragons of Elanthia is a multiplayer-based title where players select a rider and saddle up on a dragon of their choice. According to Sweeney, the fantasy twist was added because dragons are underused in shooters, and the developer wanted to use them “if no one else was going to.”

During a recent hands-on session with the iOS and Android tablet game, we were able to experience both the defensive base-building mode and the offensive asynchronous multiplayer mode. In the former, we were able to build a piggy bank and ticket machine, which generates in-game currency based on a timer, set the path to our base and line it with defenses. We had upgradable turrets at our disposal and could use a combination of anti-air and anti-ground units, all of which are upgradable up to 10 levels. We could also set bubblegum on the path, which inflicts damage on plush-type units.

In the multiplayer mode, we were matched with another player and had to take down their base using our offensive units. Both offensive and defensive units come in the form of cards that can be acquired through booster packs. Players can spend tickets to buy booster packs, and every pack will come with a random combination of plush toys, beast units (plastic toys), robots and defense units, and every card will have a different level.

Speaking with us during PAX Prime 2013, Tanton explained that the developer wanted to do something more narrative heavy than the genre typically allows. After watching the music video for “Tonight, Tonight” — which features a surreal, stage setting — Tanton felt a connection.

“What really endeared us to it is this idea of people wanting to show something spectacular without quite the technology to do it,” Tanton said. “I think that resonated with being an indie developer. You’re always fighting a battle. It seemed like a really interesting fit for a brawler. We didn’t want to just do Castle Crashers again.”

Big Fish Games’ upcoming mobile title Zombie! Zombie! Zombie! or Zx3 for short) is putting a new spin on match-3 puzzle games. Instead of tasking players to match three or more of a kind to clear columns and rows, it tosses players onto a field where hordes of different zombies rain down the screen — the only way to clear the level is by drawing triangles around the zombies to destroy them.

In Zx3, when players connect three zombies of the same type — creating a triangle — every zombie within that triangle gets blown up. Players have to stop the zombies from reaching their base, so they have to use a combination of triangle drawing and environment power-ups to wipe out the hordes. Every level is played out in a different environment, and each environment has its own unique power-ups.

In an interview with Polygon this weekend, Kamiya says the Nintendo all-stars version of that game would have played a bit differently.

“Considering the wide range of backgrounds of different Nintendo characters,” Kamiya said, “I imagine [if we’d continued] down that route it could have had some of the edge taken off of it. Not to say that it wouldn’t have come together in the form it is now ... being this sort of bright pop design, but it’s actually quite serious, in terms of being an action game.

Majesco’s recently announced indie game publisher, Midnight City, aims to be “more than just a game publisher” by working with a variety of different partners to bring new ideas into the space, founder Casey Lynch told Polygon during a recent interview.

We spoke with Lynch during PAX Prime 2013, where the publisher was showcasing different titles from its recently announced lineup. According to Lynch, the publisher is taking an unorthodox approach that doesn’t necessarily follow the traditional chain of publisher, developer, press, consumer.

We can thank Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-good 2003 movie The Room for the existence of Samurai Gunn. According to creator Beau Blyth, also known as Teknopants, the idea to create the brilliant, fast-paced multiplayer experience that combines samurai swords with guns started with yet another viewing of Wiseau’s oft-mocked cult film.

“[Samurai Gunn] was made at a party,” Blyth told Polygon at PAX Prime. “I was bored watching Tommy Wiseua’s The Room. I’d already seen it before, so I was like, ‘I don’t want to watch this again. I’m going to make a game.’ I turned to my friend Jake and asked him what kind of game I should make. He said, ‘Samurais. With guns!’”’

Game It Forward’s upcoming trivia game for the iPad, Quingo, turns casual gaming into a charitable endeavor; through in-game ads and microtransactions, players can give to charity while they play.

Quingo currently features six different charities, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle Children’s Hospital and PAWS. Each time players watch ads or make an in-app purchase, they contribute to that charity.

Crytek’s free-to-play first-person shooter, Warface, will reward its most talented players with the renown they deserve, but it won’t neglect those who can never match their high level of skill, executive producer Joshua Howard told Polygon during a recent interview.

Speaking with us during PAX Prime 2013, Howard said that one of Crytek’s core principles for the game is that skill is the “premium currency” and that no amount of real-world money can make up for that. Warface’s in-game currency, crowns, are earned through ranking on leaderboards for players with the most kills, best time and so on.

Phobic Studios’ Glare allows players to traverse a lush world of plants, darkness and spikes through jumping, gliding, swinging, bouncing and grappling — all through the power of light.

Players take on the role of the Shiner — a beam of light encased in armor who has been sent to from above to eliminate a darkness that is encroaching the planet. The game will let players explore different parts of the world through six levels, and in each level they will learn of new ways to interact with the environment.

Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, the revamped version of Square Enix’s massively multiplayer online game, faced a rocky start with full servers due to “conservative estimates” on how many people would pick up the game, director Naoki Yoshida told Polygon.

Speaking with us at PAX Prime 2013 via translator, Yoshida explained that the team expected players to be cautious due to previous issues before jumping back in.

Independent studio Splash Damage, best known for its work on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Brink and the forthcoming Batman: Arkham Origins’ multiplayer mode, had plans to self-publish its free-to-play shooter, Extraction, before it signed up with Nexon America.

Speaking to Polygon, Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgwood said that when the studio first start concepting the game in 2010, it wanted to make a spiritual successor to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory that it would give away for free. The game was completely self-funded by the studio and was later renamed Dirty Bomb before recently switching back to Extraction. Wedgwood said the studio didn’t think that anyone would want to publish it.

In PixelJunk Inc., players harvest ingredients, create massive factories and defend against enemy onslaught, all in the name of making soup. Players can create their soup empire with the help of friends; the game’s co-op allows people to move independently of one another and accomplish tasks as needed. That’s a good thing, because PixelJunk Inc.’s procedurally generated world is constantly moving.

“The world is completely deformable and terraformable,” Parker said. “It’s a sandbox world ... [It] is a whole ecosystem working where animals will eat different plant life and then grow and evolve. You can come back later and there might be a whole nest [of animals]. Even when [an area] is offscreen, it’s updating.”