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This year I was able to get out to PAX 09 for a look at all the latest news in games and to bring you as much of it as possible. Over the course of three days, 75,000 gamers from all over the world descended on the event to check out all things cool and, of course, to play games. To start things off, here's a look at the backbone of PAX, the overworked escalators that carried people from floor to floor all con long.

On the first day, I was able to get in ahead of the crowds to visit the Stardock booth where Brad Wardell and a pack of Stardock game developers were giving the first public showing of Elemental: War of Magic, as well as chatting a little about the upcoming Sins: Diplomacy expansion letting people play Demigod on a few stations. Before checking with them about Elemental, I dropped a surprise in their lap - the LEGO Rook I built when Demigod was first released.

From there I jumped onto one of the Elemental stations to try out the pre-Beta build of the turn-based fantasy 4X title.The story is that the world is falling apart and several Sovereign wizards with the power to channel either life or death mana are fighting amongst themselves to change the world to one that suits their magic. As you play, you research magic, build troops (single units, squads of 10, or more as the game progresses - eventually battles of 10s of thousands will be possible. Unfortunately, you can't break up squad units into 10 single units,) and explore the world in search of treasure, mana nodes and cities to conquer.

One really interesting feature of Elemental is the family tree. As you play, your immortal Sovereign can marry and have kids. The kids turn into units with random special powers, and can be traded to other Sovereigns as part of diplomatic arrangements. Just make sure you don't get them killed in battle or mom/dad will kick your ass. One piece of internal debate at Stardock is whether or not you'll be able to imbue them with Essence and turn them into heroes. The random powers might make them too strong. But, seriously, family empires have to happen - go spend some extra brain cycles play-balancing that one folks!

The game editing was shown as well - from the transmorphable terrain that Sovereigns will be able to use magic to muck with in-game, to how you can custom-build map tiles and more. Once things are built, they will be uploaded into an online archive along with all the random scraps the developers put together but didn't include in the final build, and then the game will grab those and use them to build random maps so the game will be constantly shifting and changing as you play. Quest and spell editing is still up in the air, and creating new monster models will take Maya or 3D Studio Max, so we'll have to wait and see on those.

I was able to ask a few questions about the online play as well. It turns out that the persistent online game world is more that multiplayer games can be saved to an online server, letting players log into that rather than making sure the game host is online so they can log in to take their turn(s). There is still no one answer about how multiplayer battles will be resolved, whether through instant-resolution, strategic combat or other. Once something is decided, we'll have the info.

One interesting feature of Elemental is the ability to play the game with the world map set to very, very, basic tile system. With this mode enabled you can pretty much run the game on any computer that can handle Minesweeper.

At the end of the day, Elemental is screaming with potential, but it's just barely into the beta. Much of how the game is going to work is still up in the air and won't be decided for some time. This spiritual successor to Master of Magic will be hitting the closed beta in a week or so and we'll have more info on that soon.

Next - Shank, Ron Gilbert's Keynote and the Gabe & Tycho Q&A!