Live from GenCon!

Reported 80,000 people for opening day of GenCon.

Walking around yesterday, I saw quite a bit of CCGs, lots and lots of dice. OMG the dice, bins and bins of them. Most of the eGames have a very low key presence with the expection I guess of CCP for EVE, but they are focussing heavily on the EVE card game, which I was able to get a full starter set and a brief preview with Petur Orn Thorarinsson, Game Designer and Ingolfur Vignir Aevarsson, Marketing Director about the game.

The title of the card game is EVE:The Second Genesis. The game is based on the popular MMO, Eve. The idea is of the game is that you choose a race (easy version) or mix and match races much like you do in Magic. The slight twist is that you start of the game with a home base and 3 outposts. You can play outputs and thus get bonuses to hit/defense among other bonuses. Outposts can be captured as well. Petur actually sat and played around with me showing me the different cards and tactics. Can I just say one thing? Don't play the game designer and expect to win. I got my ass handed to me on a silver scout ship. Money (ISK) is used for playing the cards down on the table from your hand. Much like lands if you are used to Magic. I won't go into all the detail of playing, but it was interesting.

The card game has been in development for 2 years, so they started about a year after launch of Eve Online. I asked why? Both Petur and Ingolfur said Why not? They continued to say we just always felt it was the natural progression of the game and they are looking into other options as well. The goal is to build an Eve Community.

The card game is scheduled for release in October, with starter sets being sold/given out at GenCon, along with their $10,000 contest on Saturday. Pre-orders are available on the EVE Store site. Nearly 1000 pre-orders have already been made.

On the Warhammer front from Mythic, I received a short walk through of the game and saw a few of the quest designs. They are building the game ground up with PvP in mind, taking the parts of DAoC that were awesome about PvP. The goal of the PvE game is truly to build your character up towards the PvE zone. You will be able to go straight to the zone if that is all you want to do. If you want to be PvE only, well you are a sissy pancy and will get bored around level 50 after you have maxed your character on stats and loot.

Interesting points I got on Warhammer were mounts at lvl 5, all quests have a purpose so no taking a cooking recipe from one city to another to find out you have to go cook it afterwards. If there is a delivery type quest you will get there and have a reason to be at the destination. Collectible quests will drop items every time, and the whole party will get the item. So no killing 200 mobs for 5 items because 1) they don't drop every time, and 2) because you have a party of 5.

More live coverage news tomorrow.