Post Script

Cliff Bleszinski, co-founder, Boss Key Productions

Lawbreakers is Cliff Bleszinski’s first game since 2011’s Gears Of War 3, and his first since leaving Epic to establish Boss Key. Here he discusses the challenge of launching a new shooter into fierce competition without the support of a platform holder as publisher. What has launching Lawbreakers been like? It’s been good. It’s been slower than we expected, but that’s one of those things. Everybody’s so used to the traditional triple-A splash – you sell a million copies in week one and then slowly watch your playerbase go down over the following months. Whereas, y’know, we’re starting with a small core group of fans and engaging with them on the regular, continuing to work on new content, continuing to fan the flames of the small kindling that we have. Are player numbers a concern? It’s a matter of awareness, right? It’s a matter of continuing to work with our partners at Nexon to make sure they spend the money in the right places to get people to try it. We know we made a good product, it’s just a matter of being consistent with it, reminding people that we’re not going anywhere. Was there an awareness that making the game with a higher skill cap might alienate people, and mean that the playerbase is smaller? Initially I was very uncompromising with what the game needed to be. One of the things that I think we could have done a better job with was onboarding. We’re continuing to work on ways to make it so players learn the game. Here’s the catch-22 of the game that I’ve spent the last three years of my life on: people like to dismiss things and be like, ‘You’re just a clone of Overwatch’, but people who have actually played it are like, ‘Wow, this is actually original and different’, and then onboarding becomes a challenge.

I didn’t want to do the exact same stuff that every other shooter does. I didn’t want to do the traditional sniper, the traditional dude with a bow, the guy that builds the turret. But when you give people something different they get confused, but they also want to insist that it’s the same thing – it’s this weird contradiction. Why was it important to you to not do what every other team shooter is doing? I’ve played other games, and I’m not going to name names, but it feels like they’ve got the same archetypes that everybody else does. Even going back to fantasy – to Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons – it’s the same stuff over and over again. Until you can prove that you can make a medic that can actually hurt people as well as heal, or you can make a character that’s a sniper without a zoom, people don’t believe it – they want to rest on what’s already been made. Did you deliberately set out to riff on ideas from classic arena shooters? It was conscious, and people like to label us as an arena shooter, but if you look at the arena shooter in the classic sense they’re often paper-thin for what people expected out of a game back then. There was no progression, you weren’t a character – you were the gun you picked up. There’s some of that DNA in this game, but ultimately it has the depth that I believe is needed for a game in 2017 and beyond.

When you talk about those games, all that is feel – it’s games where you really have to aim, it’s a good community and a sense of flow. It’s all the little things about movement. The walls are very smooth in the game so you don’t get caught up on anything. There are ways to maintain your momentum with bunnyhopping, all this stuff that feels like it’s been lost from the modern era of shooters, that takes a little while to learn. Why was that stuff lost, do you think? I honestly think that as good as Call Of Duty is there’s almost this ‘everyone’s a winner’ mentality that took over in games. Call Of Duty works because it’s a great equaliser where the maps are very porous – if I come around the corner and I pop two shots into you, you’re dead. There really wasn’t a dance – Halo was one of the last games that had that good ‘dance’.

Overwatch still has it, but Overwatch is so dependent on the meta that if your teammates out in the wild don’t pick whatever classes the game thinks are necessary, you’re ultimately going to get stomped. It feels that a lot of Lawbreakers’ complexity is in how you play the objectives, not what characters you pick. Well, our meta is there but it’s not as important as in a lot of other hero-based shooters – and the fact that, played right, any character can defeat any other one depending on the situation. One of the things about making a game like this is teaching players how to, er, play the fucking objective.

We’re considering adding deathmatch and team deathmatch because especially with a game like this, you just want to get in and shoot some shit. Onboarding was an issue, and we’ve got to course correct with it. Is there a concern about splitting the community? At this point, it’s one of those things where I just want players to know that we’re on the other end, we’re listening, and we’re adding stuff.

“I didn’t want to do the traditional sniper, the traditional dude with a bow”