Cliff Bleszinski on BlueStreak The Gears and Unreal designer on his next game

The polarizing designer of Gears of War and Unreal returns to PC gaming.

II’m going to wind up with a game about crafting hats or something. I don’t want that

n July, Gears of War and Unreal designer Cliff Bleszinski revealed his next project: a free-to-play, PC-focused arena shooter called Project BlueStreak created by Boss Key Productions, his new studio. Following a Reddit AMA that answered some surface-level questions about the game, I talked to him about what kind of shooter he’s trying to create.

BlueStreak, which won’t be the final name, mainly exists as concept art at the moment, so when I get the elephant-in-the-room question out of the way, monetization, Bleszinski says it hasn’t been figured out yet. “I like to use my restaurant metaphor: we’ve picked out the space, we know what genre of food we’re going to be in, we’re currently crafting the menu... how much it’s going to cost for a side of butter, I don’t know yet, right? And that’s one of the things with working with [my publisher] Nexon, they’re like, ‘Go build a fantastic game and a community around it, and we’ll work on figuring out how to make it hopefully make a lot of money.’”

Though the business model may not even exist on a napkin yet, as one of the fathers of competitive FPS, Bleszinski is openly wary of ‘pay to win’ infiltrating BlueStreak’s design. “Everyone else that I talked to about the free-to-play space, they’re like, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta lead with your monetization strategy.’ And I’m like, well, then I’m going to wind up with a game that’s about crafting hats or something. I don’t want that. When you look at the success of League and

Dota, those are fantastic gameplay experiences first but they then kind of worked through figuring out what each one’s monetization scheme was in that space... I still see a lot of hatred in the pay-to-win category, and I said initially in the AMA I would like to avoid that as much as possible. There might be pay for slight perks, or pay for variety, but it’s anyone’s guess right now. And with using the community to help develop this game, they can help dictate this a bit.”

Likewise, though it’ll be a competitive, five-on-five game, Bleszinski isn’t committing to

BlueStreak being an e-sports-driven experience out of the gate. More important to him at the moment is nailing arena FPS essentials, like player movement. “When I look at your average Call of Duty match it’s ‘twitch to ironsights, pop-pop, randomly come around a corner...’ that’s fun as a core loop, but for me it doesn’t have that FPS dance, which

Halo still nails, where one person acquires another, starts opening up shots, and the other person has a shot at turning the table if they either find some health or a pickup or get lucky. As long as a game is skill-based,