gamescom 2015 – Part II

And of course, part II of the gamescom visit. So what does a wargamer do on a video game show? He takes a look at wargames and wargame-themed games.

Neocore Games, a small independend studio from hungary, had Inquisitor Martyr with them, and even some death cult assassins to guard their booth. The game is still in an early pre-alpha status, but you could give it a try. It's a sci-fi hack & slay, where you control an Inquisitor against the foul heretics with already some nice graphics and grim dark feel. Some of the details are missing, but it is a pre-alpha so i am pretty sure, we will see more of it.

A title that i am really excited about, is Total War Warhammer. It is just such a logical cooperation! There were some mods or total conversion as far as i am aware for some of the older titles from the Total War range, but now it's official and it's on!

The graphics are lovely and they really captured the feel from that 6th edition Warhammer. They showed a live game, not only video footage and this crazy detail. If you shoot a doom diver, you can steer it by yourself and aim it into the most appealing unit. It was really funny to see, you could so some nice maneuvers like barrel rolls etc.

They even had a life-sized Arachnarok spider coming from the back of the booth. Nice detail. I think this game could be really something. But a huge question stays for me. How is this going to work out, with the new Age of Sigmar "Warhammer"? As a developer i would be a bit pissed, if an IP that i bought for a game, would be put to sleep over night. Never the less, i am really excited about this one.

EA as the big studio they are, was there as well. Similar in size to blizzard, they had their self-perpetuating brands like Fifa, Need for Speed etc. with them and showed them big. Need for Speed had an insane queue, and it took over an hour to give it a try, even as they had roughly 40 demo systems just for that title. Beside that AT-AT the brought a BMW M4 with them, whos predecessor was an icon in NFS Most Wanted. But they weren't the only ones with cars, Forza 6 got this nice Ford GT. And there it was again, my gear head smile. 🙂

As we are talking about vehicles. If you follow this blog, you are roughly aware that i like tanks. And i am not the only one, almost everybody i talked to when i was in Nottingham, did the same. So visiting Wargaming with their World of Tanks booth was mandatory. The booth was big, and they showed World of Tanks as well as World of Warships, on every plattform that they offer (pc, x-box and mobiles).

I was lucky enough to get up to the VIP area to take some pictures from above and had a chat with the stars of World of Tanks, who did live streaming from the gamescom. Among them Quickybaby. If you like World of Tanks and don't know him, give it a try on Youtube or Twitch. He's so charismatic and humble, it is frightening. Had a great chat with him and even got a picture.

That's it so far, a long day in Cologne. Met some really nice people, it was in total a pleasant experience, but I'll go into detail in a further article, that will cover some big differences and common "problems" with our point of view towards video gaming vs wargaming.

To stay with the calming words of Quickybaby, "As always, thank you so much for reading, you've been epic and hopefully i see you soon".

Read Part I of the coverage here: GamesCom 2015 Cologne Part I.