RPS@PAX 2022: Thursday daily round-up

PAX East 2022 opened its doors for the first time in two years today, welcoming the masked and vaccinated masses to the Boston convention centre. As mentioned earlier in the week, Liam and I are out there in person, and we're making exclusive behind the scenes videos for RPS supporters. To kick things off, we've put together our first daily round-up video, where we tell what we got up to today, along with the biggest news from the show floor. Come and join us for our first daily rundown of PAX East.

We spent most of today putting together a tour of the show floor (coming Friday), which meant whizzing round all of the booths, marvelling at all the insanely detailed decorations, and getting a lay of the land. With the big platform holders still absent from worldwide events, it means there's more floor space for smaller indie publishers to take centre stage at PAX East this year, with some of the biggest stands belonging to Thunderful, Larian, TinyBuild and Gearbox. To see them all up close, make sure to keep an eye out for our full floor tour very soon.

Punctuating the day was Gearbox's Main Theatre Show, where hundreds of cell-shaded cosplayers and Borderlands fans packed themselves into the convention centre rafters for... a fair amount of old news, a 20 minute magic trick from Randy Pitchford, and one exciting announcement. The main focus was on Gearbox's publishing arm, who announced two new titles - the monochrome roguelite platformer Eyes in the Dark: The Curious Case of One Victoria Bloom, and the top-down hack and slash multiplayer 'em up Relic Hunters Legends - but the big takeaway was the return of Tales From The Borderlands.

They didn't reveal very much about the game, other than that it's being made in-house at Gearbox (with 2K on publishing duties), will feature all new characters and stay true to its 'interactive fiction' roots, but more news is due sometime in the summer, they said. It's also meant to be coming out later this year, but given how far removed it is from the excellent Telltale original, only time will tell whether it will be able to recapture Tales' former brilliance.

After Gearbox, it was back to the show floor to play a couple of games, digest our thoughts about Gearbox, and shoot this daily round-up video. You'll have to excuse the face masks - they're mandatory on the show floor, even when everyone's gone home for the day - but Liam's wizard edits should hopefully mean everything still sounds nice and clear, despite you not being able to see 80% of our faces. Enjoy!