PAX East 2023 Friday Cosplay Gallery By FirstPerson Shooter Part 1

Nerd Caliber didn’t have a team at this year’s PAX East on Thursday, mostly due to work schedule conflicts. But I was there starting Friday morning, along with other team members, whose galleries you will see in the coming days and weeks. So, how was the convention, in its second year back from the pandemic pause?

A little different, a lot of fun, with some notable and weird quirks.

First up is the change in the nature of the vendors, exhibitors and events. Traditionally a videogame conference with some tabletop elements, this year PAX East was almost a 50-50 split between those two elements. Well, maybe 40-40, with 20 percent being PC gaming parts companies. That shift isn’t new — the convention has been trending that way for years, beginning before the pandemic, when the big gaming companies and publishers started doing their own, online events announcing new titles and DLC. The pandemic just accelerated that trend.

Speaking of the pandemic, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which operates the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center which has been the home of PAX East since its second year, seems to have decided the pandemic is over. Almost gone were the extra hand sanitizer stations around the facility, and while the convention had a mask mandate, few people on the BCEC staff or its security wore them.

As you will see in those galleries, by later on Sunday, I was no longer insisting that cosplayers keep their masks on.

The best part of any convention is catching up with friends I haven’t seen in months or even years, and this PAX East was no exception. It was great chatting with all of you folks, and to the ones I didn’t get to spend more than a few seconds with, I apologize.

Cosplayers in this first of two Friday galleries include Kitteninstrings Cosplay, neocoolstar, ashleydarkphoenix, Carley Winn Cosplay, blunnderland, Lawrence Brenner Media, Kurygeon Cosplay, sisucosplayandcraft, Steel Shield Cosplay, queenofcoatscosplay, leftymakes, jason.kuehl, Curiously Crimson Cosplay, maplesaurcosplay, generalbenkenobi, sunbunnycosplay, lazcosplays, jammthejedi, nessiecosplays, 1313props, shimmywookie, GiveWave Studios, sagittary_studios, Samantha Winslow Cosplay, Vee Cosplay, and many more.

We use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This allows us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.

To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.

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