Nexon showed off the first gameplay video from Cliff Bleszinski’s new first-person shooter game Lawbreakers.
In advance of the PAX Prime game fan event in Seattle, the trailer from Bleszinski’s Boss Key Productions, the developer, and publisher Nexon shows off the different characters that you can play in the title, which debuts in 2016.
Gears of War designer Bleszinski, who formerly went by the handle CliffyB, has grown up, left Epic Games, and started his own game studio. Lawbreakers got its big reveal this week. The first announcement explained the plot. In the future, government experimenters manage to blow up the moon in an event called “The Shattering.” (Here’s a hilarious analysis of that possibility). The result is that Earth’s gravity has been changed, and jumping huge distances becomes possible, as it is in prior shooters games such as Titanfall, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and this year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops III. You’ll be able to manipulate gravity and shoot while flying. That’s going to take a lot of skill.
By the time this game comes out in 2016, big jumps are either going to be a requirement of all shooters — or something that gamers are tired of seeing. Add some extra special vitamins, and you have some super soldiers that either uphold the law or break it. That’s probably not going to be an Academy Award-winning screenplay, but it’s as good a premise as any for a lot of shooting. As long as we see some more innovation, the game should have a chance at getting some traction. Lawbreakers will at least be available at the right price, considering it is a free-to-play title with full support from micro-transaction pioneer Nexon.
The world of Lawbreakers is another post-apocalyptic scene, akin to Gears of War. It’s gloomy and gray. But the new video shows that the first playing field — a mutli-level building on the cliffs of the Grand Canyon — looks like a Call of Duty multiplayer map. Society has recovered but has been divided into two factions fighting for control. One side is a peacekeeping group, while another is a crime syndicate bent on breaking the law.
The first character we meet is Kitsune, an assassin, who is armed with twin katanas, a cool electronic grapple rope, and some kind of shotgun. She uses the grapple to latch on to a point, jump off a cliff, and then swing into the battle in the air. She’s a highly mobile melee fighter, but she’s vulnerable to attacks.
Maverick is a “skirmisher,” who is “what you what you would get if you strapped armor made from an F-15 Fighter Jet onto a Spec Ops soldier.” Maverick uses her jets to take to the sky and move around the battlefield. She can rain down fire from a Vulcan Gatling cannon and drop a pretty big destructive force called Starfall. And she’s got some attitude, saying, “You want some more, asshole?” that is reminiscent of Gears of War and Bleszinski’s Bulletstorm shooter game.
Breacher is a gunner made for “run-and-gun gameplay.” Novice and experience shooter players will like this one, as he carries an assault rifle and a sidearm. He has a nice move — shooting backwards while jumping.
Lastly, Cronos is a Titan, or a tank. He’s a brute with high durability and high damage, but low mobility. He charges in frontal assaults, dealing twice as much damage with his rocket launcher and ricochet grenades as compared to other characters. You have to stay away from him. Cronos’ big ability: he can do rocket jumps, a throwback to the old Quake games. Gosh, I feel old for remembering that.
These are all pretty familiar characters in a good-looking setting. It’s a CliffyB game, alright. But is it original enough? I don’t know. I have high expectations for Bleszinski, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of that special touch.
South Korean publisher Nexon has been making a concerted effort to expand its reach in the West. It’s formed a number of key partnerships of late, the most recent of which is to publish the unannounced project from Dallas Dickinson, formerly of BioWare Austin.
This online action game is the first project from the newly formed studio, QC Games. The staff includes a number of industry veterans from studios across the gaming landscape, such as NCSoft, Harmonix, and Maxis. None of the people who have formed this studio are household names, but their games certainly are. Star Wars: The Old Republic, Rock Band, The Sims, and Doom 3 are all represented here, which hints that this studio may be worth taking seriously.
What’s most fascinating is that Nexon is continuing to gain ground outside of its own territory. The publisher formed Nexon America exactly to fund Western projects, and it has been making serious headway in that area. Its most notable partnership is with Cliff Bleszinski, the mastermind behind Gears of War. His studio, Boss Key Productions, is creating LawBreakers, a free-to-play, first-person shooter that debuted last week at PAX Prime. Nexon has also formed a partnership with Sleeping Dogs’ developer United Front Games (untitled free-to-play game) and Batman: Arkham Origins’ developer Splash Damage (Dirty Bomb).
Nexon’s expansion could be a good thing for people across the globe. LawBreakers is its most touted partnership, but a less-heralded one may prove to be even more important. The South Korean publisher is set to release Titanfall for the PC in Asian countries. The most glaring problem with the PC version of Titanfall is its small player base. By expanding to more territories — especially on a continent rich with PC gamers — people who stuck with the online shooter for the last couples years may finally have an ample community to compete with.
That worldwide audience could be a key part of QC Games’ fate as well. Nexon is publishing and marketing that studio’s first game worldwide. That means a much bigger potential audience and, considering it’s an online-centered game, that could spell the difference between success and failure.
Nexon’s push to expand its reach could have a sizable impact on the gaming landscape. South Korea has a huge community of online players, with more than half its population regularly spending their free time in digital pastures. We could see a spike in gaming communities if Nexon continues to release games across the globe.
Nexon is a pioneer of free-to-play online games in Asia, and it wants to break into the West in a big way.
A couple of years ago, the Tokyo-based, South Korean-born company appointed Owen Mahoney, a former Electronic Arts executive from the U.S., as its CEO. And he has been on a quest to sign up as many third-party Western game developers as he can to help Nexon expand into the global $30 billion mobile gaming market, as well as the online gaming market worldwide.
And he’s not signing just any developers. Nexon has concluded deals with Titanfall maker Respawn Entertainment (and its mobile studio Particle City); Big Huge Games, an independent studio cofounded by PC game industry veterans Brian Reynolds (Civilization II) and Tim Train; Shiver Entertainment, a studio started by former Zynga executive John Schappert; and Cliff Bleszinski’s and Arjan Brussee’s Boss Key Productions, which is making an online shooter game called LawBreakers. Bleszinski is one of the most notable developers of shooter games in the world, working on
Mahoney has had luck getting these deals because his view of gaming is similar to those of seasoned developers. He views games as an art form, and he explained his strategy in a fireside chat with Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, at our GamesBeat 2015 event.
Here’s an edited transcript of their conversation.
GamesBeat: You’ve been at Nexon for four or five years now, and you’ve been the CEO for the last couple of years. You had a couple of big transactions during your time. What about Nexon made you want to go there? How are you seeing things shape up?
Owen Mahoney: By way of quick background for the people in the room who aren’t familiar with Nexon, because we’re relatively small in the United States, we were founded in Korea. We moved our headquarters to Japan about 10 years ago. We’re headquartered in Japan now and listed on the Tokyo stock exchange. We listed in the end of 2011. We do about $1.8 billion in revenue every year. We operate around 35 percent or so operating income margins.
Our largest region is China. Our second largest is Korea and our third largest is Japan. U.S. and Europe together make up less than $100 million of our total, so they’re small as a percentage, but they’re both growing very quickly. That’s the background on us.
You mentioned Pointcast. When I was at Pointcast I met the founder. They were in a room, the whole company, about the size of four times this table. It was really small when I visited them. When I joined EA in late 2000, by then they had become the second largest game company in Korea. We’re now the largest in Korea.
What impressed me so much when I visited them from EA was—again, this is dating me a little bit, but it was late 2000. EA had invested several hundred million dollars, about $400 million, in a very smart idea, which was that the internet was going to change the games business. We laugh at this now for being so blindingly obvious, but in those days EA was the only large company thinking about this in a very forward way.
Above: Titanfall for Xbox One.
Image Credit: Respawn Entertainment
The problem and the challenge was that if you didn’t have a lot of experience online, it’s very hard to change the core of your company from a packaged goods business to an online business. Nexon was one of the few companies around the world that was very forward thinking. What they showed me the second time I visited them in 2000 really blew my mind. It was incredible creativity. Not around graphics fidelity and polygons on the screen and story, but about setting up gameplay that was fun, easy to learn but very hard to master, between thousands of people in their country at that time.
Korea itself was of course way ahead of the U.S. and Europe in terms of online gameplay. And still is, in my opinion. It was very fast broadband, very cheap, and everybody had it. It reached saturation of about 45 million people, the total number of the population in Korea, somewhere around 2004 or 2005. 100 percent saturation. Every man, woman, and child has broadband. It was way ahead of the United States, and it was very fast broadband.
Nexon, NCsoft, a lot of the game companies that were early pioneers were way ahead in their thinking. That got me very interested. I tried to buy Nexon at that time. Jay turned me down. Invited me to come over and worked for him. I turned him down.
GamesBeat: You don’t want to tell us the price, by any chance?
Mahoney: No, I don’t. You would throw me out of the room, as a businessperson. Later on I tried to buy Nexon again and Jay invited me over again. Late in my time at EA, around 2009, we tried again, and he said, “Thanks but no thanks,” and invited me over. By the fourth time I lost, or won, or whatever the case may be, but I came over to Nexon. All along what impressed me about Nexon was the very forward thinking about online specifically.
Above: Owen Mahoney [left] is CEO of Nexon. He is talking with Mike Vorhaus of Magid Advisors.
Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat
GamesBeat: Building on top of that heritage, what’s your strategic plan over the medium and near term?
Mahoney: We come at it from a very particular angle, which to game-makers and a lot of the people in this room would seem very obvious. But to a lot of the games industry, particularly recently—unfortunately a lot of the games industry, in our opinion, doesn’t think this way. But the core principle is that games are very much an art form. If you want to build a game company that’s sustainable over time and that grows over time, you have to build great game art.
The core factor that you judge a game on is whether it’s fun or not. It’s that simple. Like all art, you sort of know it when you see it. You think about the game when you’re not playing it. You want to play the game again. You enjoy talking about it with friends, like all great art. But unlike other game art, particularly online games, it’s the one art form where you write your own story.
Other art, like books and music and movies and so on, they will tell you a story and you sit and watch what some screenwriter and director have given you. In games, particularly online games, on PC and mobile, any other platform, the game emerges from the gameplay between the players. Those are the games we like.
Some people think of us as a free-to-play game company. We invented free-to-play in Korea many years ago. But we think of ourselves as an online game company. We like the fact that great games emerge from that. When we think about our forward plan, with that as context, we think that the most important thing is that we create great games.
Again, that seems blindingly obvious. Unfortunately we don’t meet a lot of companies that talk about it in the way we think about it. That’s number one. The other thing about online games is, it’s actually really hard to do live game operations and live game development. Building a game so it builds up over time. The technical aspects of running a client-server system that can support gameplay, particularly in an MMORPG or a sophisticated game, is actually very hard to do. And so that’s an expertise we’ve been able to build up.
The other aspect is live game development. If you want to build a game that, like many of our games, has gotten bigger and bigger over a period of more than a decade, you have to invest a lot in live game development, putting new things into the game. Many companies have not realized this, which is why their games tend to blow up quickly and then go down.
A lot of what we’ve been doing in the last year and a half since the new management team took over is to sort of sweep out the brush that had developed and then go back to that core. That’s a very strong core. It’s proven itself over and over again. The companies that we respect around the games industry, in Asia and in the west, tend to have that same orientation, and they’ve been able as a result to build up their companies in a very healthy way over time.
GamesBeat: I love the fact that you think of yourself a story platform versus a storyteller, what all the other media are.
Mahoney: That’s the best part of the games business. It’s what I love about the art form.
Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski is the man who brought us chainsaw bayonets in Gears of War. Now he’s back with a multiplayer-only fragfest called Lawbreakers.
Coming soon from publisher Nexon, Bleszinski’s PC game is a fast-moving sci-fi first-person shooter with factions: the Law and the Breakers (anti-heroes). The title features a bunch of different characters who have a lot of abilities, and they all offset each other in some way.
I was able to play the game in a long hands-on session with Bleszinski and his crew at Boss Key Productions. The shooter is going to be one of many at the Electronic Entertainment Expo game trade show this week in Los Angeles. But it’s a memorable offering with Bleszinski’s indelible personality stamped all over it. It is a game of skill, and I was reasonably good at it, even though I was playing it for the first time. Some of my colleagues in the press, however, were far superior. It’s a highly mobile combat experience where you have to use a combination of your abilities, weapons, gravity, and terrain to gain an advantage.
“There are threats from every angle, with full 360-degree vertical violence,” said Bleszinski during a press presentation. “You have to watch your six and always look up.”
We played on a couple of different maps that reimagined the future after a catastrophic event. The world is recovering, but it looks very different from how it once did. One map was called Grand View, set in the Grand Canyon. Another was Promenade, a reimagining of Los Angeles.
Each map is symmetrical. Each faction starts out at opposite ends. Each sector has multiple levels, including a central area in Grand Canyon where players could gather in the middle and defy gravity. You can use the zero gravity zone to jump to a superhuman height and then rain death on your enemies. The locations on the map have gravitational anomalies, but some of the characters can create these weird effects on their own.
The multiplayer combat modes aren’t just centered on team deathmatch. One of the modes we played was Overcharge. In this one, your team has to move out on the map and grab a battery. You take the battery back to your base and charge it. If you can protect it for 20 seconds once it is charged, you win the game. This “capture the flag” mode forced a lot of intense firefights around the battery carriers and the home bases. If your team scores two battery charges, then you win. This mode creates matches where the result comes down to the last second.
Bleszinski also showed off the game’s new domination mode, known as Turf War. “This domination is more like speed chess,” he said.
Above: No one escapes the Palpatine hands.
Image Credit: Nexon
In Turf War, each side has a zone. These zones unlock after a short time, and then you can claim them. If you hold a zone for a while, your team gains it. Then, you can either stay and protect it or go after the enemy’s zone. I had one really good run with Bomchelle where I was able to electrify several other players in the central zone, and keep it out of enemy hands.
The game has a lot of nice touches. If you hold down the CTRL key, you can fire behind your character and take out someone chasing you.
Each character is unique. Hellion has gems embedded in her face. One character, Vanguard, can use afterburners to speed quickly and take out players who are slower. Starfall has the ability to create a zero-gravity area.
I spent a lot of time playing the tank characters, such as Bomchelle or Chronos, who can wreak havoc with rockets. You could use the E key to drop a neutron mine or use the Q key to initiate berserk mode. Bomchelle was very powerful, but she was very slow moving.
Each battle we played was very exciting, with the skills evenly matched among the different players. When it came down to a few seconds of gameplay, we were often shouting at each other to get the winning point.
I noticed one of the funniest touches was I leveled up my ability for the berserk mode. When I pressed the right key, my hands appeared before me, and I could zap other players with an electrical charge. Bleszinski said it was an homage to Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars films.
Overall, Lawbreakers has enough unique touches — through characters or abilities or modes — that will feel fresh to first-person shooter fans. I’m very excited about this game.
Cliff Bleszinski feels vindicated. The former game designer at Epic Games felt like he had to leave his old company to make a new game that he wanted to build from scratch. He has done that at Boss Key Productions. PC gaming giant Nexon is publishing his new multiplayer-only first-person shooter, Lawbreakers, sometime soon. And we got a good look at it during a play session at a recent event. It’s a lot of fun.
“It feels good to be back. The stakes are pretty high considering that it’s my company, and I’m CEO now, as opposed to just design director,” said Bleszinski in an interview. “But it’s a kind of redemption. Toward the end at Epic, people were a bit jaded. I think they’ve turned it around, as I’ve said before. I could walk into a room and pitch any idea, and I’d have somebody with their arms folded in my office saying, ‘I don’t buy it.'”
Bleszinski left to start his own company and hired a big crew to turn his vision into a reality. Lawbreakers is the result.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Kitsune is an assassin character in Boss Key Production’s Lawbreakers.
Image Credit: Boss Key Productions
GamesBeat: How long have you been working on the new game?
Cliff Bleszinski: It’s been almost two years now. More than a year and a half. It’s one of those things for me — you have an idea, and you think it’s going to be cool. You don’t know. When it comes through and people like it, it’s really rewarding. Everyone at Boss Key knows that I could always say, “Do it because I said so,” when it comes to features. But I’d rather not do that. I’d like to convince them that things are a good idea.
The first example is the character of Hellion, the bubbly blond character we have in the game. She looked cool. She had two swords. She’s the Laws version of the assassin. It’s one of those things where … she needed more to her character to bring out her history and everything. It’s the future. Fashion can be unique, so she has these gems fixed to her face.
Then there’s the idea that she lost both of her legs from the knees down from an IED. I went into [art director] Tramell Isaac’s office and said, “Dude, robo-legs.” He says, “What, like in Grandma’s Boy? ‘I hate your face. I have robo-legs?'” I’m like, “No, dude. If anybody can make that look really futuristic and awesome, it’s Jay Hawkins, our concept artist.” Lo and behold, he did it, so now we have this iconic character. When you kick in first-person you see these really tough prosthetics kick someone off the map. It’s a good feeling.
The other one … I think the term Andrew Witts, one of my designers, used, was “Palpazinski hands,” as in Emperor Palpatine [from the Star Wars saga]. When Chronos gets big and Bomchelle as well, you shoot lightning out of your hands and just fry the other team. As it turns out, that’s incredibly rewarding. But developers sometimes get cynical and skeptical.
GamesBeat: I got a couple of double kills that way.
Bleszinski: When they said, “We want to do Palpatine hands,” I was like, “Yes, that’ll be awesome.” And then the first time in the play tests everyone was hooting and hollering, and I was like, “I fucking knew it!”
Not every idea I have is always the best. I always use the example of [gameplay programmer] Matt Fischman coding the class of our skirmishers, Maverick and Toska, which I had basically nothing to do with. That’s when he earned my trust as a programmer. It’s been a fun, awesome journey but lots and lots of travel.
Above: Cliff Bleszinski, the boss of Boss Key Productions, still likes to clown around.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney gave a talk at our summit a couple weeks ago. He was saying that inevitably, one of the conversations he has with seasoned game developers is, “Can I talk you into making the game you really want to make? What’s holding you back from making that? Why do you make a game you think will sell well instead of making the game you want to make?” I don’t know if you had that conversation with him.
Bleszinski: Not in detail, with Owen. One thing about Nexon is they know we have a lot of vets, and they knew to get the hell out of the way. Not have some mid-level producer saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t have that character because of sales in this one country.” They know we can make something cool.
I know the game I really want to make, eventually, for a personal project. I think I’ve pitched it before. I’d love to make a game about a lost dog. Family’s at the Grand Canyon. They leave in the station wagon, and the dog has to make his way back to New Jersey. He encounters all these other kinds of dogs … like a Dreamworks film and whatnot. Because I just love dogs. At the same time, who knows if that would be profitable?
Lawbreakers is the kind of game I want to make, but also, everything in there is made based on a surgical decision to make some money and keep the darn lights on. This is a business. As much as I’m a creative, I do like to feed our employees and their kids.
GamesBeat: How do you like this dual role as both CEO and game designer?
Bleszinski: I did a talk on this. One of the last boondoggles I allowed myself to do was going to the [Reboot Develop] in Croatia. We went out there, and I did a 40-minute lecture on being a creative CEO, finding that balance. I wouldn’t be able to do what I did if I didn’t have the leads and the team I have, especially [Boss Key cofounder] Arjan Brussee.
With him as COO … the other day I went on Amazon, and I bought him the Hand of the King pin because he deals with so much crap to let me focus on the fun. I get to focus on doing lightning hands or the Grand Canyon or tweaking weapon balance or getting disco balls for the studio to hang in the office. That kind of stuff. I get to focus on the game, the fun, and the studio culture. He unfortunately gets to deal with a lot of the crap on the back end.
Above: Getting killed in Lawbreakers.
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: Did you get more responsibility for making the final decisions?
Bleszinski: They can buck it up the line, and I can make the call. But I generally hire people to do their damn jobs. Three-quarters of the time, they’re able to make the call for me. Sometimes, you do have to step in and say, “Look, this is what you’re doing.”
That was never more useful than at the start of the project. When I hired people on board, they’d ask, “What are our pillars?” “Gangs, guns, gravity. They’re all fighting over grams of supplements.” Any time anybody asked what kind of game we were making, I’d point to the board and say, “See those four Gs? That’s what we’re doing. If you don’t like it, there’s the fucking door.”
To some extent, you have to be like that at the beginning of the project, as far as being a defiant creative and knowing what you want. Otherwise, your game winds up being pulled in 18 different directions because programmer one likes Dark Souls, programmer two likes Mario Kart, programmer three likes Final Fantasy. You wind up getting nowhere, and the ship never makes it to port, just drifts in the middle of the damn ocean.
GamesBeat: Did you ever feel restrained, creatively, in the shooter market? Because there are just so many games out there.
Bleszinski: If you were to put it into buckets, you have military fantasy type games. Not just Call of Duty, but Gears comes into that as well, even if it’s sci-fi. The other bucket is the character-based games. You look at games like Overwatch and Battleborn. Sometimes people like to lump us in with that. As flattering as that is, we made a conscious decision to double down a few months ago on being a more grown-up version of that.
Overwatch is fantastic. I haven’t played Battleborn yet. But Blizzard can do no wrong. We’re going to be the kind of … when they zig, we zag. If they’re releasing the romantic comedy, we’re releasing the movie about an assassin.
Above: You can electrify enemies, Palpatine style, in Lawbreakers.
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: So that wasn’t really difficult for you? You knew you could do something different.
Bleszinski: The saying I always go back to … it’s like with game modes. “You gotta have [capture the flag].” Says who? Where is it written you have to have team deathmatch? Is there some kind of first-person shooter guy who’s coming by the office to see if you’re observing the building codes? No. You look at MOBAs. They’re incredibly intricate and deep games. People learn them. If we make our own new game types that make the most sense for our drama, we’ll do that.
In my heart of hearts — this game is more colorful than a Gears type of game, but it still has blood. I always wanted to see what blood would look like flying through zero-G, which is something we put in the game as well. And gibbing people and all that. These character-based shooters still feel like they skew toward a younger demographic. We want to be the more adult version of that.
GamesBeat: For players, is mastering the shift, control, Q, and E keys the way to get there?
Bleszinski: That’s how we get the depth. I play some recent titles that came out that try to hearken back to the glory days of an arena shooter. Like I said in the presentation, I feel like I’ve seen everything I needed to see in 30 minutes. I’ve gotten the 10 weapons. I’ve shot some dudes. There’s a jump pad. Big deal. By having these characters and these roles that each have their own unique Q, E, shift, double jumps, alternate fires and everything, we can put the depth on the character as opposed to having 8,000 maps like the traditional arena shooter.
Above: Guarding a capture point in Lawbreakers.
GamesBeat: How many maps and characters and other bits of content do you plan to come out with?
Bleszinski: As far as the roles, for the first version, we’re targeting five or six. Remember, the fiction is asymmetrical, but the game is actually symmetrical. We plan on launching with a good stable of maps. We’re not ready to commit to what the number will be.
We’ll probably have an alpha with friends and family. We’ll start with 500, move up to 1,000, move up to 5,000, and so on. The big takeaway, though, is that when the game first comes out, officially, that’s when the real work starts. Traditionally, in the triple-A space, you’d have the $60 game, maybe pump out some shitty DLC, and then move on to the sequel. You’d look at the sales trajectory with the majority of your sales at the beginning, and then it spirals downward. We want to reverse that.
You look at the concurrent users for [Counter-Strike: Global Offensive], it starts out small to medium and then just builds and builds and builds. You wind up with something that becomes a staple in the shooter community.
GamesBeat: Does it help you to be able to focus on the PC?
Bleszinski: Yeah. We’re only 55 people right now. If we were doing a console version ourselves, that would crush us. The verticality would be tricky. One thing I can tell you I don’t want to do is cross play because keyboard-and-mouse players would absolutely decimate controller players, especially in this game. Some people tout that like it’s a feature. I don’t really see the benefit.
But I was going to make a weird comparison. If we were a restaurant, we’d be the restaurant you go to because it has three things on the menu, and they’re all amazing. As opposed to the Cheesecake Factory, where [there are] 5,000 things, and it’s all spectacularly average.
GamesBeat: And single-player was never something you were interested in?
Bleszinski: When you look at the cost to benefit, it’s one of those things. If you’re going to do single-player these days, you basically have to be Skyrim or GTA. Especially at a $60 price point. For us, being at the lower price point — we didn’t want to be a multiplayer-only game that was $60. That’s a huge mistake that a lot of traditional devs have made in the last couple years, which has led to games not being as successful as they could have been. The amount of effort compared to the outcome with single-player … for this game, it’s not worth it.
Above: Healing yourself in Lawbreakers.
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: Do you miss Epic in any way? Or do you feel like you have your own culture here now?
Bleszinski: I’m still friends with [Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and cofounder Mark Rein]. Tim was like my big brother, like the whole Polygon article was kind of outlining. Epic’s trying to be the many-headed hydra made up of so many different entities now. They’ve grown. It’s one of those things. I like the size we’re at right now. I like our office. I like our studio culture. I wouldn’t change it. I like their engine, so we still stay friendly.
GamesBeat: Has working with Nexon gone well for you?
Bleszinski: They’ve been a good partner. No publisher is perfect. It’s just one of those things. We need to take our partners at Nexon and hold them off the balcony by their ankles and make sure to shake millions of dollars of marketing money out of them. As much as we’re using multiple paths to get the word out about this game, like talking to journalists such as yourself — later on, we’ll have some YouTubers and Twitch streamers as well — you gotta throw a bunch of money at it. We’re in a world where you have to do TV spots, trailers, firing across all fronts. That’s one thing we need to keep them honest about.
GamesBeat: The new world of influencers.
Bleszinski: Yep. It’s yet another venue for getting the word out.
After three long hours of arguments, counter-arguments, and at least one bloody brawl, GamesBeat settled on the best games made with Unreal Engine at E3.
The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo is where publishers and developers of all sizes come to Los Angeles to make exciting announcements about their upcoming games. And for the second year in a row, we partnered with Unreal Engine creator Epic Games for our Unreal E3 Awards by GamesBeat. Though we made some changes to last year’s criteria, the 10 categories for the 2016 awards are a better representation of the diversity of Unreal projects at the biggest industry trade show in North America.
The addition of a second category just for virtual reality reflects the rapidly growing list of developers using this new technology. But a few of the more straightforward awards were still difficult to figure out. Someday, we’ll be telling our grandkids about the vicious battle for “Best New IP”. (Just ask GamesBeat lead writer Dean Takahashi, who fought valiantly for the open-world zombie game Days Gone in multiple categories.)
Here’s our list. The winning teams will receive a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card.
The underwater exploration game snagged a few Unreal awards at E3 2015, but it also has dramatically improved since then. Unlike the solitary gameplay in Journey, which Abzû creator Matt Nava also worked on, Abzû’s gorgeous rendition of the sea teems with life. The developer is Giant Squid, and the publisher is 505 Games. Abzû debuts on August 2 for the PlayStation 4 and Windows.
Other nominees: LawBreakers, Batman Arkham VR, Paragon, Injustice 2, Obduction
Above: You could see thousands of fish at once in Abzû.
Absolver is an online action game with an innovative approach to melee combat. After choosing a fighting style, you can customize your combos with a wide assortment of punches, kicks, and stances through its innovative Combat Deck system. The developer is Sloclap, and the publisher is Devolver Digital. It has as 2017 release date for PC, and the team plans to bring it to console as well.
Other nominees: Days Gone, Sea of Thieves, LawBreakers, VR Sports Challenge.
Above: Absolver takes place in an open world where you can meet other fighters.
LawBreakers is a fast-paced shooter with a cool anti-gravity hook. If you want to survive, you have to learn how to fight in zero-G as opponents attack you from different angles. We can’t wait to play more. The developer is Boss Key Productions, and the publisher is Nexon. It comes out later this year on Windows.
Other nominees: Sea of Thieves, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Above: No one escapes the Palpatine hands.
Image Credit: Nexon
Shut Up and Take My Money! Again: Best established IP
Gears of War 4 kicks off a new story and set of characters in Microsoft’s multimillion selling franchise. This makes it perfect for people who never played the other games, and older fans will appreciate the return of familiar faces. The developer is The Coalition and the publisher is Microsoft. It comes out on Xbox One and Windows on October 11.
Other nominees: Tekken 7
Above: Marcus Fenix, the hero from the first trilogy, returns in Gears of War 4.
We Happy Few had an impressive showing at Microsoft’s E3 press briefing. It’s a first-person survival game where you seek to escape an alternate-history England where the Allies lost World War II. Everyone in the country must take a drug called Joy, and if they don’t (like the character you play), bad things happen. Compulsion Games is self-publishing We Happy Few. It hits Xbox One, Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS later this year.
Other nominees: Sea of Thieves, Days Gone, LawBreakers, Abzû, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Paragon, Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom
Above: The masked people in We Happy Few are kinda creepy.
Rare’s Sea of Thieves wowed us with its emergent swashbuckling gameplay. One memorable moment during our demo (as seen during Microsoft’s E3 press briefing) was when our ship started sinking after taking too much damage from a battle. The water moved in fast as we repaired the ship in vain. We had to accept that our prized vessel was gone. Rare is the developer, and Microsoft is the publisher. It debuts for Xbox One and Windows in 2017.
Other nominees: Days Gone, Batman Arkham VR, LawBreakers, We Happy Few
Above: Sea of Thieves has a ton of neat multiplayer interactions, but you don’t need friends.
Image Credit: Microsoft
The Great Escape: Most immersive VR game
Winner: Statik
Statik excels at hand presence in VR with the PlayStation 4’s Dualshock controller. When you look down, you get the sense that you really are sitting in a lab and that someone is forcing you to solve the puzzles before you can get your hands back. The developer is Tarsier Studios, and this game is for PlayStation VR. Tarsier hasn’t disclosed a release date yet.
Other nominees: Here They Lie, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, VR Funhouse, Batman Arkham VR, Raw Data, Farpoint, Everest, Dragon Front
Above: You’re part of a weird experiment in Statik.
Image Credit: Tarsier Studios
VR Voodoo: Technical Achievement
Winner: Raw Data
Raw Data is a first-person shooter in VR, and you can fight different robots alongside a friend in cooperative multiplayer. It’s filled with fantastic details, like the trails bullets leave behind when you use your slo-mo ability. Raw Data is being developed by Survios for the HTC Vive. Early access on Steam is coming soon.
Other nominees: VR Funhouse
Hardware Mover: Awesome games that’ll sell hardware
Winner: Raw Data (for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive)
Raw Data is also incredibly fun to play. You defend your core from waves of robots by teleporting to different points in the base and using a wide variety of weapons and powers. Unlike other VR shooters, this one doesn’t feel like it’s just a gimmick. Raw Data is from Survios for the HTC Vive. Early access on Steam is coming soon.
Other nominees: Gears of War 4 (Xbox One), Days Gone (PlayStation 4)
Above: These robots aren’t your normal crash dummies.
Image Credit: Surveys
Unreal Underdog: Developers who push the limits
Winner: Abzû
Shortly after the release of Journey, some of Thatgamecompany’s employees left to start new businesses, including art director Matt Nava. Nava founded Giant Squid to create Abzû, which has been in the works for more than three years. With a small team of 10, Giant Squid has managed to make one of the prettiest games about ocean exploration. 505 Games will publish Abzû on August 2 on the PlayStation 4 and Windows.
Other nominees: Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom (Enigami), Absolver (Sloclap), Friday the 13th: The Game (Gun Media), We Happy Few (Compulsion Games)
The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is about to fade into memory but not before I let everybody know what my favorite games were.
We had a team of six writers scouring E3 for the best games, and we had to occasionally elbow some of the 50,300 people who attended the Los Angeles event out of the way. As our GamesBeat writer Jeff Grubb pointed out, it was the year of the grappling hook. Last year, it was female heroes and companion dogs. There were plenty of strong women characters in the top games this year, and there were very few “booth babes” at the show.
Sony once again showed its dominance of high-end gaming — at least when it comes to the right way to present games — at its E3 press event. Microsoft had good announcements too, but the games just didn’t come off as inspiring as the Sony demos. Seven of the 10 games below will run on the PlayStation 4.
Toys-to-life took some time to cool off this time, as Disney vacated its booth on the show floor and canceled its Disney Infinity toy-game hybrid. Warner Bros. is still trying with Lego Dimensions and Activision has Skylanders Imaginators coming with customizable digital toy characters. But to me, E3 maintained its relevance because it was the place where I got to see some of the best games coming in the video game business. This list doesn’t have any mobile titles because, frankly, I didn’t see that many mobile game companies at E3. But it has a virtual reality title that I hope is a sign of the future.
Here’s my list of favorites from last year. And below are my favorites from E3 2016. None of these games are out yet.
1. Days Gone, from SCE Bend Studio and Sony
As I noted in last week’s column, I can’t tell you how stirring it was to watch this demo on a big screen at the close of Sony’s press event, with a live orchestra playing the score.
Earlier in the event, it introduced the character, Deacon St. John, a drifter, bounty hunter, and mercenary. He is one of the survivors of a virus outbreak that triggered a zombie-like apocalypse. He talks about the broken road as all that is left. At the close, Sony showed the gameplay. St. John goes into an old sawmill in pursuit of a bounty target named Two Dog. He scavenges for supplies, searches for Two Dog, and then has to shoot a frighteningly fast zombie child who almost bites St. John’s neck. Two Dog escapes to the roof of the sawmill, and St. John pursues him. Two Dog launches an ill-considered surprise attack at St. John, knocking them both off the roof. As they fall, they draw the attention of a swarm of zombies, known as Freakers.
The creatures are fast, and they come sprinting. St. John leaves an injured Two Dog behind to be devoured by the Freakers. He flees and the sea of zombies pursues him. St. John fires his automatic weapon at them, emptying clip after clip. But still they come. The music is pounding. St. John yells, “Come on.” Then the camera pulls back, and you can see how hopeless his situation is as he’s surrounded. Still, he yells, “Come on! Come on!”
It’s not a perfect demo. I kept thinking that St. John is dumb for trying to shoot so many Freakers at all. He should just run away. But that would have quite boring by comparison. He also seems to pause and slow down for alarmingly long periods of time as the zombies have him trapped inside buildings.
But the speed and number of the zombies — amid the backdrop of such beautiful scenery — reminded me of the panoramic scenes in World War Z. I think it was as gripping and intense as a demo can get. I felt a lot of emotion at St. John’s foolishness and his bravery in the face of impossible odds. There were plenty of other zombie games at E3, but this was the only one that seemed so powerful.
2. God of War, from Sony Santa Monica and Sony
I have not been such a big fan of the God of War games. So when this demo started at Sony’s press event, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. As soon as the fans saw Kratos, the God of War, they started cheering. I wasn’t all that excited.
But as the video went on, I began to reconsider. The relationship between this boy who clearly wasn’t a god and his anger-prone father, Kratos, was interesting. The boy’s mother is gone, and Kratos is teaching him how to hunt as a kind of coming-of-age lesson. The woods are beautiful, and they become ominous when something spooks nearby birds into flight.
The boy spooks a deer, and his father scolds him. The boy apologizes, and the fierce god replies, “Don’t be sorry. Be better.” The boy tries again to shoot a deer and fails, and Kratos hits the boiling point. He has to contain his anger and return to the lesson. Then they run into some demons and Kratos pulls out an amazing magic ax that returns to him after he hurls it. The action is frightening, but I just worried about the boy.
Next, Kratos has to fight a giant troll. He asks for the boy’s help in shooting an arrow at the troll. Instead, the boy narrowly misses killing his father. Kratos dispatches the troll on his own in an epic battle. Then, as the boy apologizes again, Kratos cooly tells him his deer is getting away.
Finally, the boy shoots the deer, but he cannot plunge the knife into the dying animal. Kratos shows him how to finish what he started. And there’s a moment when the boy almost reaches out to the father, and the father almost pats the boy on the back. It closes with another ominous scene. The game’s director, Cory Barlog, told us in interviews that the game character is maturing just as gaming is. It’s a new beginning, Kratos tells his boy.
3. Sea of Thieves, from Rare and Microsoft
Sea of Thieves isn’t much to look at. It’s a cartoon-style pirate game where multiple players can band together and control a pirate ship. But when I played it, it started growing on me. It’s a fast-moving game where you have to act as a member of the crew and sail the ship. One person can steer the ship as the captain, but when the sails are properly raised, that person can’t see which way to go. Someone else has to direct the captain. And when you close in on another ship for combat, other players have to man the cannon. There’s no heads-up display to tell you whether your shots are going too far or too short. You have to eyeball it. And when you’re hit, someone else has to race below decks to repair the damage. It’s all quite intuitive to perform these tasks, but you can only sink the other ship if the crew works in unison. We knew we had failed when the waterline came into view and we sank into the deep. Mark this down as one of the surprises of the show.
4. Battlefield 1, by EA DICE Studio and Electronic Arts
Battlefield 1’s gameplay is going to be pretty epic, with 64 players squaring off against each other in multiplayer combat. The game looks beautiful with its Frostbite-based 3D graphics, with plenty of explosions, landscape details, and even the respawn system. Battlefield 1 will play like past Battlefield games, with better-looking visuals and slower action. But the new setting of World War I and the wide variety of infantry weapons, vehicles such as tanks, biplanes, and even zeppelins will give players plenty to do besides just snipe at each other in trenches. I think the shift to World War I is a fresh twist that will keep fans interested in yet another rendition of this shooter series.
5. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, by Infinity Ward and Activision
I can’t sing the praises of Battlefield 1 without recognizing Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare as well. These two games are the shooters with the best production values. And Activision’s Infinity Ward is taking a risk as well with a change in the setting — this time into the future with sci-fi combat. It’s a military shooter at its core, but now the battleground is the entire solar system as Earth defends itself from its colonies dubbed the Settlement Defense Front. Like many of the fans who had a negative reaction to the initial disclosure, I was worried about this shift so far from Call of Duty’s roots of boots on the ground.
But the E3 demo convinced me that it’s going to be a lot of fun to play. It starts with an infantry battle in Geneva where the grunts have to take a hill. They do so — with help such as an air strike and the ability to hack the enemy’s systems.
Then the demo takes you to the stars as you take off for a strike against an enemy space destroyer. You can engage in dogfights in space as a fighter pilot and then land on the enemy’s capital ship. You can use a grappling hook, either pulling yourself to different parts of the ship or pulling enemies to you for a deadly melee. You board the ship and, once inside, the familiar Call of Duty infantry combat returns front and center. Haters can hate, but this Call of Duty promises a lot of fun gadgets and familiar gameplay.
6. Horizon: Zero Dawn by Guerrilla Games and Sony
This is an amazing new intellectual property with a setting 1,000 years in the future, after the fall of mankind. But while mankind has moved back to the Stone Age, mechanical dinosaurs roam the lands, providing very dangerous threats to the surviving humans. The title has a strong female character, Aloy, as its hero. She’s on orphan with a mysterious past, and she’s trying to find out the connection between her lost parents, what happened to the world, and secrets to defeating the mechanical monsters. But her own superstitious and religious leaders stand in her way. It’s an intriguing story with some beautiful graphics and epic moments of gameplay.
7. Abzû, by Giant Squid and Sony
I’ve had my eyes on Abzû since I saw it for the first time last year. And the game is now releasing on August 2. I finally got some hands-on time with the title, and it has progressed very nicely.
The underwater exploration title isn’t like many of the boring “undersea adventure” games that we’ve seen in the past. I found it soothing, serene, mysterious, and sometimes scary.
Abzû does a fantastic job of simulating the ocean, without simply trying to reproduce a video view of the ocean. Abzû has stylistic art that gives you a sense of moving around in three dimensions. The lighting and colors are spectacular.
The ocean has a tremendous variety of fish. They are simulated independently, and they naturally form into schools. Each scene can have tens of thousands of fish. Those fish act on their own to stay away from walls, align with their neighbors, and avoid predators.
If you get close enough to a big fish or a turtle, you can grab on to them and go for a ride. That gives you a greater sense of speed. But the fish will look out for its own interests, particularly if it’s hungry and wants to each smaller fish. You can even ride on a giant blue whale. The food chain works naturally, with the sharks going after smaller fish. But beyond all of this, there’s a mystery to the game. It has a story and a quest, leading into the dark and light waters alike.
8. Lawbreakers, by Boss Key Productions and Nexon
You can consider this game to be Cliff Bleszinski’s attempt at a redemption, as he said so himself. He doesn’t have to apologize for his past games like Gears of War or Unreal. But since leaving Epic Games, he recognized a need to get out of a rut and create something new. He’s done that with LawBreakers, a shooter game set in the future with a lot of foul-mouthed, tough talking brusiers and femme fatales. It has some clever twists on gameplay, such as zero-gravity zones where players can take advantage of vertical gameplay and yet float through the air in a kind of slow motion that makes it easier to hit enemies in motion. It also has some tense, time-driven multiplayer modes that will have teams screaming during the last seconds. LawBreakers may have to worry about our collective fascination with Blizzard’s Overwatch, but I think it has a lot to offer in the first-person shooter genre.
9. Detroit: Become Human, by Quantic Dream and Sony
Quantic Dream has caught some flak over the years by making games that are more like cinematic movies than games. It relies on interactivity at key moments in a scene, where you have to make a split-second decision about what to do. I like this style of game play in this one particular case, because Quantic Dreams’ games are absolutely beautiful to look at. No one renders human faces better, and Detroit: Become Human, shows this once again.
In Detroit, we have a familiar story of a battle between humans and A.I. robots. But these robots are more like the good guys, and the humans are suspect. We see this in a gripping scene in which Connor, an android police negotiator, talks down an android who has gone rogue. The android is holding a human girl as a hostage, and he is threatening to jump off a ledge of a skyscraper with her. Connor’s decisions, which you control, mean life or death for the girl. The scene is intense, superb storytelling drama at its best.
10. Raw Data, by Survios
This game has been in the works for a while, and it has morphed. But no other title delivers that feeling that you’re surrounded on all sides by attacking humanoid droids and you’ve got to fire in multiple directions at once. It works with the HTC Vive where you can move around at “room scale.” And it taps the power of the separate hand controls that allow you to fire at different objects simultaneously. You need this ability in order to hit the targets as they approach you. The game will have different kinds of modes and a big selection of weapons, from bows to machine guns. After a short session with Raw Data, you’ll emerge sweaty and tired.
For my honorable mentions, I also liked Titanfall 2, Here They Lie, Spider-Man, Dead & Buried, For Honor, Gears of War 4, Civilization VI, and We Happy Few. I wouldn’t say I’ve seen enough of these games to make me push aside other titles in the top ten. But I’m very interested in seeing more.
You could get a taste of Cliff Bleszinki’s first game in years later this month.
Lawbreakers, the upcoming team-based first-person shooter from Cliff Bleszinski’s new Boss Key Productions studio, is getting its first closed beta for PC via Steam from March 16 to March 19. You can sign up for it here. Betas let developers test for bugs and other issues, but they can also serve as glorified demos. They give people a chance to try a game for free and (hopefully) spread buzz.
Cliff Bleszinski used to work at Epic, where he helped create notable shooter franchises like Unreal and Gears of War. He left Epic in 2012 and stared Boss Key in 2014. Lawbreakers will be the studio’s first game.
“It feels good to be back. The stakes are pretty high considering that it’s my company, and I’m CEO now, as opposed to just design director,” said Bleszinski in an interview with GamesBeat last year. “But it’s a kind of redemption. Toward the end at Epic, people were a bit jaded. I think they’ve turned it around, as I’ve said before. I could walk into a room and pitch any idea, and I’d have somebody with their arms folded in my office saying, ‘I don’t buy it.’”
Lawbreakers will also be playable at PAX East, the gaming convention that will take place from March 10 to March 12 in Boston.
Owen Mahoney, CEO of Asian gaming giant Nexon, has been fed up with the mobile game malaise where millions of rivals are competing with each other in a race to the bottom. He wants them to be in a race to creativity as the only way to stand out in the pack.
While Mahoney is a business executive himself, he wants the artists who create games to win. Usually, he finds, these creators are often shouted out of the board rooms by the more eloquent business executives who are better trained when it comes to making PowerPoint presentations to boards.
And to get his point across, Mahoney is investing heavily in creative talent. Nexon continues its expansion into the West. Last week, during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I spoke with Mahoney about this strategy. Just a day later, Nexon announced its investment in connected play startup PlayFusion, which has a hybrid game-toy product.
Mahoney is speaking on creativity at our GamesBeat Summit 2017 event on May 1-2 in Berkeley, Calif. During our interview, Mahoney said he was hopeful about the course of the game industry, and how it has retreated from a pure focus on user acquisition and pushing games on users that they don’t want to play. He’s hopeful that game developers will realize that they need to focus on creativity to win.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Owen Mahoney, CEO of Nexon, at GDC 2017.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GB: What’s interesting to you at this GDC?
Owen Mahoney: I’m hopeful. I see more developers who are talking about making games that are very high quality, highly differentiated, and last a long time. Those are the things that drive Nexon. As I’ve said before, I wish our industry had a lot more of that.
People ask me, “Well, if you had that, wouldn’t you have more competition?” I don’t think that’s the case. More people would be drawn into video games if we had more people who cared deeply about building a really good game that delights us, that makes us happy. I spend a lot of time in Japan, because that’s where our headquarters is. That’s one of the reasons everyone in Japan is still excited about Nintendo, because Miyamoto clearly believes that.
I wish we had a more active M&A pipeline right now. But at least for us, that’s not going to come from more companies trying to figure out how to sell to companies like us. It’ll come from more companies that are trying to figure out how to move our industry forward in new, interesting ways. The next Nexon or the next Riot or the next Mojang. This is purely anecdotal, but I see less of the cynical approach and more of the aspirational, romantic approach to game-making.
I remember talking to you around the time of our IPO, five years ago. When I was CFO at the time, the number one question we got was, “When are Dungeon Fighter and Maple Story going away?” Every single fund manager we talked to asked us that question. And of course every equity analyst. Their model was, games go up and games go down. This was the time of Zynga. They had the all mindshare, even though we had the bigger IPO. That was everyone’s model.
Fast forward five years. We just closed out Q4. In Q4, Maple Story, our second-biggest game, is now 18 percent bigger. Today Dungeon Fighter is twice as big as it was at the time of the IPO. What I take from that is that you can make a great online game grow for many years. That’s the skill Nexon does better than anybody else. It’s the core thing that makes us special.
By way of comparison, we’re also running the numbers on how big Dungeon Fighter is at this point, just in terms of IP. Life to date gross revenues for Dungeon Fighter is $8.7 billion after 10 years. Guess what the biggest movie franchise of all time is? Star Wars. Life to date box office gross, that’s $7.6 billion. We’re a billion dollars bigger and we’re only 10 years old, a quarter as old. To me, that speaks to the power of playing the long game. I don’t think our industry talks about that enough, but I feel like some people are talking about it more. I’m more hopeful than I’ve been in years.
You ask me a lot about VR. I think I told you at one time that I didn’t think much of it. We weren’t spending any money on it. Our industry continues to try to glom on to the shiny thing that sounds cool. But if you actually play the games, if you spend time in the user experience, you find that it’s a very different story. In the meantime I’m playing a lot of good games coming from two- and three-person shops. They’re mostly offline games, not online games, but there’s some exceptionally good stuff out there. I play with my kids. They’re starting to be a bit more into mobile.
Cliff Bleszinski‘s next game is coming together after more than a year in beta testing, and when the game finally launches it will do so on more than just the PC.
LawBreakers, a class-based online shooter from developer Boss Key Productions, still doesn’t have a specific release date, but the studio has announced it will launch the game for $30 later this year on both PC as well as PlayStation 4 at the same time. Boss Key is promising to enhance the game for PS4 Pro, and it is planning online tests before releasing the final version on Sony’s console. On both PC and console, buying the game for $30 will get you the whole game as well as any new maps or characters.
“We can confirm that we are coming out on PlayStation 4,” Bleszinski said during a roundtable with reporters. “I cannot tell you how good it feels to actually say this to someone outside the development team because it is the No. 1 question that I’m asked. It shines on PS4. And on PS4 Pro, it’s even better.”
Bleszinski said that the team has worked hard to get the game working on a gampad after building it originally for PC. The studio wants to maintain the game’s skill-based nature, so the designers didn’t want to overly rely on aim-assist or similar tools.
“It was a challenge,” said Bleszinski. “It required a lot of iteration, but we’ve got it to a really fun place.”
When the game finally does hit PlayStation 4 and PC, LawBreakers will enter a crowded market with a lot of competition. The studio heads say that they are aware of that.
LawBreakers just had another beta over the weekend. Boss Key began closed testing for the PC version in April 2016, and that’s afforded the company a lot of time to figure out what makes its game special. Bleszinski explained that his crew has spent much of the last year digging into each character and designing abilities that make them feel unique. That’s crucial because — as Bleszinski puts it — consumers have a lot of entertainment options vying for their time.
“We always talk about the elephant in the room that is the success of Overwatch — and more power to them because it’s a great game,” said Bleszinski. “I remember sitting with Matt Fischman, one of our star gameplay programmers when Overwatch was just announced. And I remember the look on his face and him going, ‘oh, fuck!’ And I told him, ‘this is a good thing because now we know what not to do.'”
Bleszinski said that just how Unreal, the 1998 shooter from Epic Games that he worked on, defined itself as something that was similar but distinct from Quake, he wants LawBreakers to do that with Overwatch. And now, with the game coming to PS4 as well as PC, more gamers will get a chance to see what that looks like.
Xbox One and Nintendo gamers are going to miss out on Cliff Bleszinski’s new game — at least at launch.
LawBreakers, a new character-based shooter (think Overwatch), is going to launch on both PC and Sony’s PlayStation 4 later this year. It doesn’t have an official release date, but it is currently in beta testing on PC and it should get a test on PS4 as well. But what about Xbox One or Nintendo Switch? Well, the studio is not actively working to bring LawBreakers to Xbox or Switch alongside the PC/PS4 releases. When asked if that was something that could eventually happen, the Gears of War designer and cofounder of Boss Key Productions didn’t commit to anything.
“Anything’s possible,” said Bleszinski.
As for why Boss Key chose PlayStation 4 over Microsoft’s or Nintendo’s machines, the company had a simple answer.
“We liked PlayStation best at that point in time,” Boss Key chief operating officer Arjan Brussee said. “And we had great conversations with Sony.”
Brussee explained that the PS4 and PC are enough to keep the Boss Key team busy
“We needed to focus,” he said. ” We can’t do everything at the same time. We’re not Call of Duty, with a five studios and a thousand people. So, yeah, we just focused on PlayStation 4. And PlayStation 4 has a lot of different configurations. It’s almost like mini PCs with different versions, specs, and resolutions. So, already, PlayStation 4 is not just PS4 — it’s Pro as well. It’s not simple.”
And that amount of work on top of ensuring the PC and PS4 versions launch at the same time is already taxing Boss Key enough.
“We’re a small studio,” said Bleszinski. “We have 65 people, and they work hard around here.”
And the studio wants to put maximize their efforts, so — for now — that means no Xbox One or Switch versions of Lawbreakers.
The former director of Gears of War is getting ready to launch his month later this summer.
LawBreakers is coming to PC and PlayStation 4 on August 8 for $30. The new character-based arena shooter from the Boss Key Productions studio and founder Cliff Bleszinski features a cast of sci-fi supersoldiers battling it out with distinct abilities and attacks. The obvious comparison is to Overwatch or Quake Champions, but Boss Key is working to separate this game from those others by challenging its designers to think of new kinds of ways to play as opposed to cloning classes from Blizzard’s game. LawBreakers is also far more vertical, with lots of double-jumping and a focus on aerial combat.
Bleszinski also said that the studio is still running tests since last year to get the game as balanced and stable as possible before launch. He also addressed fans that have criticized the developer for taking so long to go from beta to full release.
“We don’t do those bullshit marketing betas,” Bleszinski said. “You see publisher doing betas and then the game comes out the next week, and no — that’s not a real beta.”
But now LawBreakers has a real release date, and it’s only two months away. And who knows — maybe Bleszinski can still find time for his own bullshit marketing beta.
Microsoft backed away from virtual reality on the Xbox One X at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week. But it said that VR on the Windows PC is a good fit, and graphics chip maker Nvidia is all in favor of that idea.
VR has moved into its gap of disappointment, but there are plenty of believers who still say it will become a huge market over time. The market could reach $17.8 billion in VR hardware sales alone by 2020, according to SuperData Research.
E3 2017 had plenty of VR offerings, from Bethesda’s Doom and Fallout VR games to Sony’s plentiful PlayStation VR titles like Moss. More than 126 VR companies displayed products at E3 2017, compared to 54 a year earlier.
I spoke with Jason Paul, general manager for virtual reality product strategy at Nvidia, about VR at E3. He is one of the VR believers. Here is an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: Jason Paul of Nvidia.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: What’s your task here at the show?
Jason Paul: Honestly, it’s mostly meetings with partners and developers this year. We have a couple of VR demos we’re showing at our booth. We have Arctic One from 4A Games, the guys who make Metro. It’s a beautiful VR first-person shooter. The other one is Star Trek Bridge Crew, which released a couple of weeks ago, but they’re coming out with a patch here pretty soon that brings IBM Watson voice recognition to the game. It’s a neat example of how AI and VR are coming together, using AI to recognize what people say and translating that into voice commands for the game.
GamesBeat: Microsoft explained why they didn’t talk about VR at their E3 press conference. They said that they’re going to let the Windows side focus on VR. They’re not emphasizing on Xbox at the moment. I asked if that carries over into the future, and they said yes. It sounds like they’re not going to do that much with VR with Scorpio, at least in this generation, which is an interesting shift.
Paul: We’re definitely excited to see the next generation of headsets come to the Windows platform. We have a lot of partners working on holographic. We’re excited to see those headsets come out and bring some new features — like inside-out tracking and higher resolution displays.
GamesBeat: It seems like with the platform changing, it’s more suitable for the PC.
Paul: The PC has always been the leading-edge platform for new technologies. That’s true with VR as well. Being able to have a very high-performance computing platform that can drive the displays, as well as the openness of the platform for content innovation and different types of headsets and input devices. It’s natural that VR would start on the PC.
Above: The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti .
Image Credit: Nvidia
GamesBeat: Does it seem like there’s still as much excitement for VR right now, despite all this talk about being in a trough?
Paul: At Nvidia, we’re very excited. Any major computing transition takes time. When we look at GPU computing and AI, we’ve been investing in that for 10 years. Self-driving cars, we’ve been investing in that for 10 years. Nvidia makes long-term investments. We don’t expect major technology transitions to happen overnight. But we’re excited for all the momentum behind VR this year. If you look at the top publishers in the world, 10 of the top 10 have announced that they’re working on VR projects. You have great headsets already hitting the market and more headsets coming from LG and Microsoft’s partners. A lot is happening over the next 12 months in VR.
Our big focus at GTX was expanding our VRWorks SDK. We released a 360 video SDK, and also demoed a live 360 4K stereo video stream, running on two Nvidia GPUs. We also released the VRWorks audio SDK.
GamesBeat: I think they said there are twice as many VR companies here at E3 compared to last year — 120 versus 54, something like that.
Paul: Over the last day or two, we’ve seen some big titles for VR. Fallout 4 VR, all the Bethesda announcements. Some great high-end content coming to VR.
GamesBeat: What about the PC itself? It seems to be in a prime period right now.
Paul: You have a combination of factors. You have 4K monitors, HDR, VR, esports, and a ton of great triple-A games. All of those are converging to make the PC a great gaming platform right now.
Above: Nvidia GeForce GTX with Max-Q design.
Image Credit: Nvidia
GamesBeat: On the GeForce side, you guys have more efficient laptops.
Paul: Right. At Computex, we announced our Max-Q notebooks. The challenge with gaming notebooks has always been, you want the best performance, but you want it in a portable form factor. Our engineers obviously spent a lot of years examining this and finding out how to reach something optimal. With Max-Q, we have some new approaches as far as how to design for that optimal point of performance in a thin, lightweight, quiet notebook. We’ve introduced a number of those with our partners at Computex, and we’re showing them here as well — MSI, Clevo, and Asus notebooks. If you compare the dimensions — we have a great slide that shows the size and weight of the prior generation compared to these. It’s one-third the thickness and half the weight.
GamesBeat: It seems like that could be very appealing for the esports crowd. The performance meets their needs, and they tend to want something more portable.
Paul: It’s compelling for esports. It’s compelling for VR. You want to take VR around and show your friends. It’s compelling for the development community. They want to be able to show off their content without lugging around big systems. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback so far.
Above: LawBreakers in action.
Image Credit: Boss Key Productions
GamesBeat: We saw some interesting announcements out of the PC gaming show yesterday. They talked about Age of Empires: Definitive Edition. LawBreakers has a launch date.
Paul: We’ve been working with the LawBreakers guys on a feature we call ShadowPlay highlights. Basically, it gives the developers ways to tell GeForce Experience and ShadowPlay when to record video. If you get a kill streak or an amazing play in a game, the game will automatically record that for you, and after your session’s finished, it’ll show you your highlights. That’s one thing we’re looking forward to from those guys.
GamesBeat: How do you distinguish ShadowPlay in the market among all the different ways people can record and stream?
Paul: It comes down to GPU acceleration and quality. Because we have a built-in hardware encoder, we can capture and encode that video very quickly with very minimal performance impact on a game, and we can do it at very high quality, up to 4K at 60 frames per second. The other thing is that it’s just easy to use. It’s built right into GeForce Experience, which many people already have on their PC. You hit alt-Z, pull up the interface, and capture.
Above: E3 2017.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: Streaming and influencers [are] exploding. It’s an interesting way for everybody to get the word out and receive information now.
Paul: One of the other things we use ShadowPlay for, we’re using it to do live streaming as well as video capture. You can use the exact same technology to live stream out to Twitch or YouTube. Earlier this year, we announced streaming to Facebook Live as well. It’s an interesting phenomenon. All sorts of game content sharing is happening now. Games are obviously an art form, but capturing content in games is becoming an art form too. That’s why we’re investing a lot in Ansel, which you’re probably familiar with.
GamesBeat: That’s the picture capture technology?
Paul: Right, our in-game photography mode. It’s been doing really well. We announced another couple of game integrations here at the show. There’s about 13 titles now with Ansel support. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback from the gaming community. They can capture their favorite characters and environments in new and interesting ways.
GamesBeat: Any other subjects that are on your mind right now?
Paul: We’re showing some of the G-Sync 4K HDR monitors at our booth here. You may have seen those before, but we’re showing off more with a few partners. And the rest of the booth this year is some of the top upcoming PC games. The core of our presence is 40 Destiny 2 PCs, showing it off in 4K on GeForce GTX. We also announced a bundle this morning with Destiny 2 and our GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti. That’s coming at the end of the month.
Cliff Bleszinski retired from Epic Games in 2012, after two decades making Unreal and Gears of War video games. Two years later, he started Boss Key Productions, and in 2015, he revealed LawBreakers, a first-person shooter set in a sci-fi universe. It’s a game where you can float through the air in areas where the laws of physics are “shattered” and players have to decide whether to uphold the law or break it.
Nexon will publish the game on August 8 on the PC and the PlayStation 4 for what Bleszinski calls the “no bullshit” price of $30 (or $40 for the Deadzo Deluxe Edition). I played a round of it at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles last week. I was totally bad, getting just two kills and dying seven times. But I enjoyed it, and then I interviewed Bleszinski afterward.
He said he still enjoys E3 and seeing old friends in the game industry, and he was remarkably open, as usual, about LawBreakers’ prospects, as it will go head-to-head against Blizzard’s enormously Overwatch in the first-person shooter free-to-play genre. Bleszinski said his game would either bomb, do well, or be successful beyond the team’s wildest dreams.
“I’m just proud. I got a little emotional this week,” Bleszinski said. “For me to un-retire because I was getting bored, to have a seat the table here, and to know that with my scrappy team of 65 folks I can compete with the heavyweights—it’s a pretty amazing feeling.”
LawBreakers will have a “Rise Up” PC beta event on June 28. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: LawBreakers
Image Credit: Nexon/Boss Key
Cliff Bleszinski: My voice isn’t fucked yet.
GamesBeat: That’s not bad for Thursday.
Bleszinski: I love it, dude. So what’s doing?
GamesBeat: I’ve confirmed that I just want to use an Xbox controller for everything so on. I’m so bad at a mouse and keyboard now.
Bleszinski: Have your abilities atrophied that bad in your old age?
GamesBeat: Yeah, yeah.
Bleszinski: The only reason I’m half decent at our game is because I play it every damn day. We have playtests once or twice a day. We do the bullhorn announcement, everyone comes running down, and honestly it’s still fun for me. I still enjoy playing and watching the thing, which is a really good sign. I’ve worked on games that shall not be named where we’d have to schedule playtests to force people to come down and play the game. We don’t have to do that at our studio.
GamesBeat: So it’s August 8 and a no-bullshit price.
Bleszinski: I ran into Vince Zampella, because everyone goes to the hotel lobby and has a couple of drinks and catches up. Vince is like, “Oh, multiplayer-only $60 bullshit, huh?” I said, “Well, you know, Vince, even you put in a campaign at $60 the second time around.” What’s a good way of putting it? There’s a rash of games coming out that are multiplayer-only at $60. I swear there’s some kind of GameStop illuminati saying, “No, if you put it on disc, it’s got to be $60 so people can trade it in and we can keep our stock price up.”
I’m not going to play that game. We’re going to be digital only, and we’re actually on the front of Steam right now, which for me is a career milestone. It’s amazing. We’re going to be $29.99, or $39.99 if you want a bunch more cool skins. We’ll have a crate system with microtransactions, kind of like Overwatch. If you want to do it, feel free, but we hope that people buy the game, play it, tell their friends, and participate in the stash drop system. We can keep the studio going, make more games, and keep LawBreakers going. I’m not ready to re-retire yet.
Above: Cliff Bleszinski, CEO of Boss Key Productions and creator of LawBreakers.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: It must be nice to be able to speak up on behalf of your fans.
Bleszinski: I announced that at the PC gaming show. We had already announced the price point. But I was over at the Ace Hotel theater. I came out and the crowd was happy to see me. I’m like, okay, contrary to the popular belief, the internet doesn’t always hate me. I said, “Hey, what’s up, how’s it going? We’re at $29.99, August 8, PC, PS4, and none of that $60 multiplayer-only bullshit.” The crowd lost their minds.
I’ve been fortunate in life that I’ve done well with Epic and some of my investments. It’s easy to forget that $60, for your average kid, is a lot of fucking money. I remember when I was—the standard price of games has always been $50, $60, occasionally $70 in the SNES era. I remember scraping together my paper route money. I’d get $20-25 a week on my paper route as a kid, eventually building up enough to buy a Nintendo game. Or I’d borrow them from friends. The local video store started to rent them out. I was so voracious, getting my hands on anything.
When it comes to having a fair price point, Overwatch is the elephant in the room, obviously. It’s a damn good game. I have my issues with it, though. There’s a bit of cheese in that game. I want to make something a bit more mature. I’m hoping that with the lower price point and the open beta, people at least give it a go and see that myself and my team–the majority of us have been making shooters for many years. We might have a decent idea of what we’re doing. We made a damn fun game.
GamesBeat: I notice how I do in my first game these days. It was interesting. I got two kills for every one death in Battlefront. I got about one kill for every four deaths in Battlefield. It was about two to seven here. That tells me a bit about skill level.
Bleszinski: That’s where matchmaking comes in. We use Glicko in the game. When we did our first alphas and betas the success rate was maybe 20 percent for the average person. They’d win 20 percent of their matches, which ties in to what you were saying. Once the matchmaking kicks in, we got that close to 50-50. You want your game to be literally win some, lose some. Nobody likes a blowout. Even if you’re the one doing the blowing out, it’s not fun. The sweet isn’t that sweet if you haven’t had some bitter. You need it from both ends.
With the game types we created in this game, we wanted drama. The marketing term that’s thrown around is buzzer-beater moments. Looking at the way the Super Bowl went down this year with the Patriots, it looked like they were going to lose, and then in the second half they rally. You have drama. That’s what eventually leads to compelling esports. Everybody’s trying to force the esports thing without building a community and a compelling game first. They’re just throwing money at it. You’ll get something that way, but I want to build something watchable, something compelling.
I find myself going to the test lab on the way to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I end up slack-jawed, staring at the screen while people are playing. We’ve tested all these verbs strung together to get this amazing sense of shooting and flow. Right now, I’m enjoying talking to you and I know this is part of my job, but I really want to be watching the match over there. Good problem to have, I guess.
Above: LawBreakers
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: What do you feel like is the defensible niche that you’ve found yourself in?
Bleszinski: If Overwatch is Coke, I’d be happy to be RC Cola or Pepsi or whatever. There’s room for more than one or two of these games. I think our art style—everybody chased that Pixar look that Blizzard does. I’m gonna make a character-based shooter for the Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo crowd. That’s the look we’re going for. I don’t want to go full MOBA and have a catfish with a top hat. You’ve probably heard me say that before.
I’m okay being mature. I’m okay with the occasional swear. We have blood in there, not because I’m a gorehound, but because I like feedback. When somebody has low health you can slide in and kick them with the Wraith, shoot them with the specter gun, and then stab them and they explode. It’s incredibly gratifying. Especially in low gravity.
GamesBeat: What do you think of some of the things you’ve seen here at the show?
Bleszinski: I’ve been able to walk around the show a little bit with my wife. This hall, I actually prefer it to the other hall. The other hall feels like the hall of insecurity. “Look at my booth and how big my booth-dick is!” Right? Guys, do you know how much money this costs? Booths are about functionality. We actually got an award for best-looking booth. It’s not the biggest, but it gets the job done of filtering people in and out, having stage shows, showing the LawBreakers experience, giving out swag. Replay did a fantastic job with the booth. You need a quality partner like that with Nexon to get the word out there.
I feel like now, finally, we’re kind of coming around the corner. People are starting to be aware of the game. I’m happy that they weren’t before, because I like said, the alpha was kind of “eh.” It was okay. Now the beta is going into open beta, and the anecdotal evidence is on my Twitter feed. People aren’t saying, “You should go back to Gears!” They’re saying, “Oh my God, LawBreakers looks great! I got the beta! It’s so much fun!” I was walking around the Marriott last night and I saw YouTubers and Twitch streamers wearing the Deadzo hoodie. Culminating in a point where this fan got that tattooed on his arm the other day. I reimbursed him the hundred bucks for it. That’s the least I could do.
This is incredibly important to me. You knew me when I was under Mark’s wing. For me to start the studio by myself with Nexon and build the team over the last three years, to have the banner on the side of the convention center—by the way, that’s the only new IP on the side of the convention center. It’s kind of weird and telling as far as what people think they want. To see the logo in the wild, to see that guy getting the tattoo, it’s like I’m back. It feels amazing.
The thing about this business is—you’re press, so we’re always on the record, off the record, blah blah. But when it comes to so many people I know in this business, when I see them we hug. I saw Phil Spencer the other day. I gave him a hug. I hugged Vince. This industry is just—when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. It’s very much family. I just went full Fast and the Furious on you, I apologize.
Above: Cliff Bleszinski, CEO of Boss Key Productions and creator of LawBreakers.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: It’s good to have that kind of place in the industry.
Bleszinski: I remember when I first started dragging my poor wife around all these events. “Oh, this is so-and-so, we go way back.” “How far back?” “15 years? 20? 25?” Now she’s gotten to the point where she knows so many people and she’s such a wonderful person that if she goes on the show floor, she can barely see any games. She runs into so many friends we know. It’s a good feeling. The big thing after these shows is coming down after it all, though. Coming down from all the noise and chilling at the house.
GamesBeat: What do you think about bringing consumers here for the first time?
Bleszinski: I have mixed feelings about it. I’m flattered to get recognized. “Let me get a selfie with you” and all that. It fills a bit of the gap. But a lot of them were getting in anyway. The ESA and E3 realized that PAX has been eating their lunch for years, and the energy at PAX is really palpable. I’d honestly rather have genuine fans showing up and being excited about the game than a bunch of hungover and jaded journalists. Journalists, to be fair, have been very fair to me over the years.
Just getting the people out there going, though. We’re giving out cool hats and I’m up there on the microphone. They’re screaming. I’m happy that we’re able to staff the booth with some of our people, because they take that energy and it carries them through ship. They come home and they’re like, “You have no idea. This was amazing. People were lining up and screaming. It was so good.” We show them the videos back home.
GamesBeat: Are you going to do a shift manning the booth?
Bleszinski: The most I do is I go up there and start throwing hats and take the microphone. I’m too busy trying to talk to nice folks like yourself. I have to make sure my voice doesn’t get fucked. It’s E3. It’s the Super Bowl. I think the show needed to evolve. Nexon’s been getting behind us. There’s been a lot of people who say, “You’re all over my YouTube and Twitter feed because of Nexon ads.” People want to know that I can make another game, me and the studio. It’s a goddamn fun one with a lot of great characters in it.
Above: LawBreakers in action.
Image Credit: Boss Key Productions
GamesBeat: With all the DLC coming for games like Call of Duty, they want to own the consumer for the whole year.
Bleszinski: Right. Until next year.
GamesBeat: I feel like generally that’s a bad thing. People should try new games.
Bleszinski: I think Activision’s addicted to the annual spike in stock price that comes from annualizing Call of Duty. It’s a business. They’re welcome to do that. To make Call of Duty an esport, what I would do is make a separate Call of Duty that’s deliberately made for esports, that stays that same Call of Duty.
GamesBeat: Like Counter-Strike.
Bleszinski: There you go, right? They’re essentially reinventing the sport every year. Maybe they can do it. Quake Champions may be able to be an esport, because there’s plenty of people who play Quake and love the Quake mechanics. It’s been around for 20 or so years. Call of Duty, though, who knows? What system are they putting in now? Wall-running? Another perk system? Air drops? The good lord knows. But they’re a slave to the stock price. I respect the hustle.
GamesBeat: Where would you like to see this go after you launch in August?
Bleszinski: I’ve said before that it’s going to go one of three ways. It might bomb, though I hope it doesn’t. I think we’ve made something pretty fun. It could do well, which is a good problem to have. Or it could explode in a good way, in which case we’re frantically hiring and oh my God what are we going to do, the servers are on fire. Are we going to turn into Riot Games? I don’t know.
I hope what happens is really a mix of two and three. It does really well and we skirt that point so it’s just, “Okay, let’s get the next character up. Let’s get the next environment going.” That’s already being worked on, mind you. But let’s get it out there for the fans, because it’s going to be a straight-up download. It’s not going to be nickel-and-diming people with bullshit DLC like we used to. We’ll keep the fans engaged.
I also have another couple of game ideas I want to get around to. I’m already noodling with my art director on a few ideas. I like creating IP. I always have. When Kojima—I was flattered when he said, “Do you want to work on Silent Hill?” I couldn’t believe he asked me. I love Silent Hill. But that’s not for me. Now more than ever, me being the primary owner of the company and owning the IP, I need this to be all of my own volition. It needs to be my gig. I need to make this world that I believe in, that I think is going to last.
Above: Lawbreakers has fierce first-person combat.
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: Some companies feel the stress of having to constantly produce updates and add-on content and DLC and so on, as opposed to doing new IP.
Bleszinski: Right, so people won’t trade their game in. It’s the perils of the disc-based market. That was our mantra on Gears 3: keep the disc in the tray by any means possible. The problem from a development standpoint, what gets tricky, is you have a team that’s trying to get ready to ship a game, which is hard in and of itself, and then you have to surgically pry a few people away to work on the next characters. We’re shipping with nine roles and 18 characters, but I’ve already played the tenth. I know what that is. It’s coming. We already have a ton of ideas for what we’ll do with 11 and 12.
The other thing is, when we do our betas we actually listen to feedback. We did the alpha and people said, “The game’s too slow.” We sped the game up. With the beta they said, “The shotgun’s too spammy.” We dialed that back. “Overcharge feels a bit boring.” We made Overcharge faster. All the stuff that we’ve been listening to—like I said at the PC gaming show, these aren’t bullshit marketing betas. These are real betas. We’re listening to feedback. You establish a cadence with your audience, where they know you’re listening and adjusting. You’re not just giving them lip service.
GamesBeat: There’s an interesting indie feeling at this show. It’s funny how Microsoft seemed to flip it and embrace the indies this year, while Sony dropped them.
Bleszinski: Right. That was always the million-dollar question — why didn’t you do Xbox? Because PlayStation has more installed base and I only have 65 employees. We’ll probably get around to it. Just calm the fuck down, salty fanboys. It is what it is.
GamesBeat: Any final thoughts on your mind?
Bleszinski: I’m just proud. I got a little emotional this week. For me to un-retire because I was getting bored, to have a seat the table here, and to know that with my scrappy team of 65 folks I can compete with the heavyweights—it’s a pretty amazing feeling. Being at the Marriott and catching up with everybody, everybody was coming up and shaking my hand and saying, “Congratulations.” I’m like, “Okay, I guess we’re doing all right?” They weren’t putting their hands on my shoulder and saying, “My condolences.” It feels good to be back on my own terms. I’m gonna sleep well after this show.
LawBreakers is just a week away from its August 8 launch for PlayStation 4 and PC. And now director Cliff Bleszinski revealed today that his studio, Boss Key Productions, is teaming up with Twitch to offer in-game cosmetic items to subscribers of the streaming site’s premium service.
Twitch Prime members will unlock a character skin, three weapon skins, four weapon stickers, and the Kappa (an emoticon popular with Twitch users) account portrait.
Above: Twitch Prime’s LawBreaker’s promotion.
Image Credit: Twitch
The subscription gives its members ad-free viewing and a way to support streamers with free subscriptions, but it also doles out in-game goodies like this. Modern hits like Overwatch and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds have had similar promotions.
Twitch Prime is included with Amazon Prime, an $11 a month subscription that gives Amazon users discounts and free shipping.
Lawbreakers is the first game from Cliff Bleszinski’sBoss Key Productions, is out now for PC and PlayStation 4. It is a team-based hero shooter where you choose from a roster of super-powered beings before going into battle in a variety of objective-based matches. It is $30, and it is in its full 1.0 state after more than a year of beta testing.
GamesBeat reviews editor Mike Minotti and I (PC gaming editor Jeffrey Grubb) dug into with the kinetic action of Lawbreakers, and you can check out our gameplay in the video above. As Boss Key and Bleszinski have said, Lawbreakers emphasizes skillful play and explosive mechanics. At the same time, as many have pointed out through Lawbreakers’ beta period, it has a lot in common with Blizzard’s hero shooter, Overwatch.
After playing ourselves, the parallels to Overwatch are apparent, but it has almost just as many differences once you dig into how it works. That makes sense considering Lawbreakers was in development before Blizzard announced Overwatch in 2014. In the video, you’ll see some examples of how Boss Key’s game deviates from Blizzards, including low-gravity combat where players can zip through the air without falling. Our hour-long clip also gets into the match-type variety. All quick-play matches were team-based, but they have more in common with classic arena shooters like Unreal Tournament — the shooter that Bleszinski built his career on before directing Gears of War — than something like Overwatch.
In one match, the two teams fought over a battery. The goal was to bring the battery back to your base to charge it. Once it was full, it would then discharge it into your base and give your squad a point. But if your team can steal it before it discharges, you can return it to your base and continue the charge where it left off in the enemy’s HQ.
Another objective type was domination mode where the two teams had to battle for control over three key spots on the map. A variation on this in another game type had teams battling over a single spot on the map that would move after half-minute or so.
But the comparison to Overwatch is unavoidable. Blizzard’s game is hugely popular and contributes significantly to the publisher’s monthly active player count. And it’s hard not to think of Tracer when you are jumping through space-time as the Gunslinger class in Lawbreakers.
For now, that comparison isn’t something I would automatically hold against Lawbreakers. Bleszinski’s new shooter is fun in a vacuum, and having Overwatch out in the world doesn’t quite take away from that. But I don’t know if Lawbreakers will have the appeal to take players away from Overwatch.
Among the pantheon of video game superstars, Cliff Bleszinski, founder of Boss Key Productions and former Creative Director at Epic Games, holds a unique position. Still only 42 years old, he has racked up a resume the envy of many, with multi-million-selling hits headlined by the Unreal series and Gears of War. Given that his career began as a 15-year old, it seemed that Bleszinski had been around the industry for as long as anyone could remember, which unsurprisingly then prompted retirement.
It didn’t last. It was just two years, in fact, until Bleszinski announced his return with a new company and a new game. “I was bored,” he admits, “I missed the creation of games, from the inception all the way through.” Downtime during this off-time, when not traveling for fun, was spent playing other games. “I dipped into CSGO,” he says, “and my wife is really good at them…but I got bored. And there really hasn’t been anything else that captured my attention like that.”
The brief tenure outside the industry didn’t dampen Bleszinski’s popularity with gamers and the games press, in large part for his unfailing pleasantness and good humor, willingness to answer questions with real opinions, and live a remarkably public life through social media.
As a result, building a company from scratch, convincing a team to uproot lives and families and move from around the country to Raleigh, NC, and designing a new game in a crowded marketplace, was all in the gaming public’s overbearing interest. Undaunted, the studio has now grown to 65 employees and seen this new game take shape over the course of three years.
Above: Innovative use of changing gravity and gameplay functions like blindfiring ensure Lawbreakers should stand out from the crowd.
So was born Lawbreakers, a competitive shooter that plans to be another entry in the crowded arena of first-person shooters, newly dominated by games like Blizzard’s Overwatch. “The game started as my baby,” says Bleszinski, “and when we began with the concept art, it immediately took shape.”
Given his background, it’s no surprise that Bleszinski is keenly aware of all the big-brand players among this popular genre. “There’s no lack of shooters, and Halo, Call of Duty, and Battlefield will all keep going given the popularity of character-based action games,” he says. Understanding that, Bleszinski explains that this new game started life as a form of spiritual successor to Unreal Tournament 3 and Quake. “Once players mastered Quake III, more people came in to play these games, but then Quake Champions added even more with effects, personalities, and more,” he adds.
That has led to a process of constant iteration for Lawbreakers, which provides a fast-paced playing field for two teams competing in four thematically familiar but stylistically distinct game modes. “We were asking questions like ‘what happens if you shoot in zero gravity?’ that led the maps in some crazy directions, and ‘we want to see a character that shoots electricity from its hands’.”
While Bleszinski retains the role of creative lead on Lawbreakers, directing gameplay from his distinct and defined personal perspective (a situation he says had changed during his end days at Epic Games, where the scope of big business resulted in a diluting of that personal touch, and which precipitated his retirement) he now adds a crucial second responsibility at Boss Key: CEO.
Above: Teams battling in fast-paced FPS modes pits Lawbreakers against Blizzard’s powerhouse Overwatch (and others).
Leading from the front
“It’s been about making important core decisions,” he says of the responsibilities, “and being available to employees so I can talk about their 401K or whatever. And if someone is going through something personal, we can cut them a bit of slack.”
Always comfortable in front of a crowd or speaking to the press, running the company has changed some of the public-facing events that made Bleszinski the poster-child for “famous” video game developers during the height of the Unreal and Gears campaigns. He cites presenting the original Gears of War at Grauman’s Chinese Theater as a career highlight, and now accepts that “While I will “do my share of events, I’m reducing the number of boondoggles — like going to the DICE conference in Vegas, that kind of stuff.”
The change of focus these responsibilities bring is in part due to a settled, married life, and the maturity of having enjoyed tremendous success and recognizing that it’s not just about designing chainsaws on guns or new movement techniques and map designs, but considering the lives of employees. “I’m nervous, but in a good way,” he says of the days dealing with the pressures of the game design and execution, publishing deals, and promotion.
While a new studio, the employees include many industry veterans that Bleszinski persuaded to move their talents to North Carolina, just another example of the pressures of being the boss. The move to blend a veteran and enthusiastic new staff already seems to have paid off with Lawbreakers passing the “Plays Great on Intel” performance tests using Intel integrated graphics. Additionally, the netcode has also been independently reviewed as some of the best in the world.
These new responsibilities and pressures manifest quickly in the quick response Bleszinski had to being asked what he hoped his legacy in this industry might be.
“I want the perception to be of a game designer who actually did something, who could throw ideas and see them happen,” he says. And how other people might perceive and write about him? “Not too cool for the nerdy kids, and not too nerdy for the cool kids!” It’s a line that Bleszinski has used before, emblematic of his thoughtful consideration of the communications with press and the wider gaming audience.
While Bleszinski’s journey now looks impressively distant from the kid who appeared in Nintendo Power magazine for topping the leaderboard in Super Mario Bros., it’s clearly far from over.
Retirement: The Sequel may have to wait a while.
Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.
Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney thinks that mobile game publishers lost sight of what was good for players when they turned up the crank on monetization in the past seven years. That helped mobile gaming rocket to the top of the entire industry, growing to $46 billion in 2017, but it also soured a lot of players on excessive monetization practices.
Mahoney is working with developers like Cliff Bleszinski (head of Boss Key Productions, maker of LawBreakers) and others to make games with fun gameplay and live operations that serve players long after a game has shipped. Nexon is in search of more games like the free-to-play title Dungeon Fighter Online, a multiplayer PC beat-’em-up game which has generated more than $8 billion in revenue in the past decade. (That’s more than the box office receipts for the Star Wars movies over time, Mahoney noted). And Mahoney wants game developers to lose their Hollywood envy and focus on games with unforgettable gameplay.
In Nexon’s most recent quarter, games such as Dungeon Fighter and Maple Story are generating more money than ever, and Mahoney talked with us to explain why.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Above: LawBreakers in action.
Image Credit: Boss Key Productions
GamesBeat: What do you think of ideas like applying the Moneyball ideas, or advanced analytics and extracting lessons from big data, to games?
Mahoney: My take is that we went through these five to seven very bad years in the games business. That was a function of people looking at surface stuff in games. When the topic of Moneyball came up, to use that analogy, it was really about saying, “We’re going to use analytics to find out who the biggest moneymakers are and maximize those. We’re going to turn the crank on monetization as hard as we can.”
Thank goodness, the game-makers are slowly but surely taking back the games industry for players and for developers, which is exactly what it should be. We certainly believe heavily in this, and some other companies have driven the way. There’s a newfound respect for thinking deeply about what games are about at their core. Companies like us around the world have shown that if you think of games as games, rather than as some method for monetizing a generic user, it does better.
Now, to use the Moneyball analogy again, we’re talking about stuff like what you were talking about – advanced analytics to find out about influential people in the game and why they matter. Or to think about powering new and interesting concepts of what games can and should be, rather than powering ways of thinking about lifetime value (LTV) versus (effective cost per install) ECPI, which at its core is not a very sophisticated thought process. It’s just straight math.
That sounds very abstract, but the main thing I think about—this all gets informed by our core understanding of what games are and why we play games. If you keep going back to those fundamentals, over time you’re going to have much more success.
Above: Dungeon Fighter
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: Is that mostly Dungeon Fighter and MapleStory making these contributions?
Mahoney: Dungeon Fighter has continued to do extremely well. It appears that we’re the number one PC game in China again. We’ve been somewhere in the top three, but I think we’re back to the number one spot. MapleStory continues to be very strong. When you look back five years, the biggest question we got from outsiders was, “When do these two games go away?” And they’ve been doing the exact opposite.
It shows a number of things. One is our teams are working very hard at live game operations and live game development, because they believe so strongly in developing this long-term relationship with customers. They’re dedicated to this process. In many companies it tends to be an afterthought. “Oh, wow, we can make a game grow for a while.” What I love about the Nexon teams is they’re dedicated to that as a core of what they do.
It’s other games as well, though. FIFA Online has been doing very well, through our partnership with EA, and some other less well-known games. If you look at a game in America we’ve talked about before, which is DomiNations, the retention numbers are wonderful on that game. The stability has been terrific. There’s a variety of different games that all prove out the same thing in different regions.
Above: Titanfall Frontline is a new mobile game from Nexon, Respawn, and Particle City.
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: I wonder how much you benefit from a greater maturity of your audience. The South Koreans, the Chinese … they seem to understand digital economies well. Blockchain seems to do well there. People are willing to pick up this new kind of currency and spend it. You have a more receptive market in a lot of ways, to innovative thinking on the digital economy.
Mahoney: It might be hard to get a receptive ear to this topic when we’re sitting here in San Francisco, but I would respectfully posit that places like Korea and China are some of the most forward-thinking and advanced areas in the world when it comes to topics of virtual politics, virtual sociology, virtual currency. Free-to-play was invented in Korea by Nexon. The first graphic MMORPG was invented in [South] Korea by Nexon. That was in the ‘90s, 20 years ago.
This was in the days of packaged-goods games. Online was still so far away. But they were very early to fast and cheap broadband. There was this explosion of thinking. They had no existing industry to worry about. There was no channel, no boxed product. It was all online right away.
For some things you look to the San Francisco bay area for the forward thinkers in technology. Whatever’s happening here will happen a year or two years or five years later somewhere else in the world. You mentioned Moneyball. I was speaking to some investors last quarter. Sometimes I feel like it’s 2002 over again when I’m talking to investors, because we’re a company with a very international footprint, but we don’t look like a lot of other game companies are supposed to look to a western audience. Our games look a little different. Kind of like Moneyball, you have guys who look like they should be hitting home runs, and then you have the guy who looks out of shape, but consistently gets on base. It turns out that getting on base is what wins games, no matter how you get there.
What fascinates me, and what makes the game industry so interesting—oftentimes the stuff we talk about and what seems so interesting is actually not what players are really doing and where value really comes from. We do some things well and some things not so well, but the thing we do better than almost anyone in the world is make a game last and grow for a long time. Just looking at our P&L and that of a few other people in the industry—you think about it for 30 seconds, you realize this is one of the most important topics in video games. Some other companies are starting to talk about it now, in the west. They’ve seen how powerful this idea of longevity is.
Strictly from a player’s perspective, a game can get a lot cooler over time because it has been around for a while. They can age like wine. The more you know it, the more you study it, the better it is, the more interesting it gets all the time.
GamesBeat: It almost seems like the audience needs to be taught this, to learn it. If they’ve been playing games like this for decades elsewhere, they’ve learned it already. They’re open to the idea of playing a game for the long term.
Mahoney: Look at Riot. When League of Legends launched, nobody was thinking about League of Legends. Everybody was thinking about Facebook games. We got asked all the time, “What’s your Facebook strategy?” Our view was, we had none, because it wasn’t an area where we thought we could make a business and make a great value proposition for the user.
Riot has gone through a very similar experience to some of our games. They were tracking several years behind, but it’s a similar experience around the world for them. The game got better. The user base got bigger and more interesting. It just gradually builds up over time. Early on it didn’t look sexy at all. It was very retro in a lot of ways. But in fact it was incredibly forward thinking. We’ve been talking about this for years because we’ve been seeing this in advanced markets like Korea and China, but it’s come later to western markets.
Above: MapleStory
Image Credit: Nexon
GamesBeat: Some designers think you should change an annualized title as much as possible to keep the audience coming back. Call of Duty does that. This year’s game has to be bigger and more explosive than last year’s. But that doesn’t work in esports. In esports people have to relearn the game every year. The stars change. The top players come and go and don’t get traction. Counter-Strike turns out to be the better esport because it doesn’t change that drastically. It validates your point. Games that stick around can do better than games that start over totally reinvent themselves.
Mahoney: As of a quarter or two ago, Dungeon Fighter, as an example, had generated $8.7 billion in revenue, gross. The numbers are significantly higher since then. Compare that to $7.6 billion for the entire Star Wars movie franchise over 40 years. Dungeon Fighter is 10 years old. That’s an apples to apples comparison, box office versus gross revenue. That gives you a sense of scale. And if you look at the KPIs today, they’re getting stronger, not weaker. Retention is terrific.
What I find fascinating about this topic is, when you tell that to people who have this “game goes up, game goes down” model in their head, their only question is, “When does the game start going down?” That may not be the question at all. Imagine that. Maybe the model in their head is just wrong. It’s certainly wrong so far.
GamesBeat: It’s like asking when the NBA starts going down.
Mahoney: Exactly. Maybe the pattern recognition we’ve been taught over the years is part of a functionally different industry, almost. A game in the packaged-goods era, you’d make 90 percent of your money in the first two quarters after launch. Of course it goes up and down. Then we had Facebook games and early mobile games, with similar pattern matching. But there’s a whole class of games that just quietly get bigger as developers refine the game and focus on the quality of the live experience, making sure their users are highly engaged and keep coming back. That’s powered our business for all these years. We think that’s very powerful.
The problem with this, why a lot of people maybe don’t focus on it too much, is it’s actually really hard to do in practice. Not that many people can do it worldwide. It’s very foreign to traditional ways of game-making. Doing it well—I feel fortunate at Nexon, because we have a lot of people who are incredibly talented and dedicated to doing this, and it’s really hard to do. It’s hard to replicate. It’s also very hard to learn. It comes from a lot of trial and error. That’s a lot less sexy than making a new game with new graphics and a new technology basis. That’s probably a blocker to more people understanding this more broadly.
GamesBeat: We’re seeing more companies springing up like PlayFab that are trying to do live operations as a service, and other kinds of infrastructure. Maybe that helps the industry.
Mahoney: Not speaking for them directly, because we think that’s the right idea and we should be doing more of that in the industry—this type of thing comes from experience, direct experience on a game, and a deep understanding of what that game is all about. Where we’ve gotten it wrong in the past is to think that there are generalized lessons you learn that explain 100 percent of it. Maybe it can be true for 70 percent, but the remaining 30 percent, it’s really specific to the game. You have to be in the nitty-gritty to figure that out. It’s not so abstracted.
Above: Owen Mahoney, CEO of Nexon, at GamesBeat Summit 2017.
Image Credit: Michael O'Donnell/VentureBeat
GamesBeat: Why do we keep seeing a pattern in player revolts. At some point, a company changes the game economy in some way, or it introduces new kinds of fees, and players feel like now they’re being exploited. They’ve been happy and loyal players. They’ve done their job of coming back every day. But now they feel like the developer is just trying to get more money out of them. I suppose that’s a matter of properly managing the relationship with your fans. But it seems to happen over and over again across different companies. Scopely had one a few weeks ago. Kabam had them across multiple games.
Mahoney: We’ve made every mistake that there is to make in this area, because we’ve been doing it for more than 20 years. You’re going to make mistakes on this topic. I take responsibility for the mistakes we’ve made. But the question, fundamentally, is what are you trying to do? What’s your true intention as a game-maker, and therefore what kind of relationship do you want to have with your customers?
Fall is upon us, and we are gasping for breath under a deluge of games. That’s one of the reasons this week’s episode of the GamesBeat Decides podcast is extra long. We spend a ton of time talking about games before diving into some news, but the big topic this week is all about big games like Lawbreakers, Agents of Mayhem, and Battleborn crashing and burning immediately after launching.
Lawbreakers has only a couple hundred people playing at any one time, and Agents of Mayhem was the No. 16 best-selling game in the United States during its debut month of August, according to industry-tracking firm The NPD Group. Lawbreakers and Agents are the latest releases from Cliff Bleszinski and Saints Row team Volition, respectively. These are important creators who have made hits before, but their latest projects are commercial flops. What makes this even more fascinating is that neither game is critically reviled. Few people hate Agents of Mayhem or Lawbreakers — it’s just that no one is playing them.
You can get that discussion in the second half of our episode. In the first segment, we talk about everything else. Here’s the full list of discussed games:
Nexon and Boss Key are giving players a reason to return to LawBreakers, a low-gravity shooter from designer Cliff Bleszinski. Boss Key, the development studio responsible for the online multiplayer battler has launched a free map and mode for everyone who already owns LawBreakers. This is the first installment in a series of planned free updates for the shooter.
The new map is Namsan. It is an urban facility that acts as the ground-floor entrance to a space elevator. It is set in South Korea, and it overlooks Seoul and the famous Namsan Tower. Boss Key designed Namsan to encourage verticality, which takes advantage of the aerial gameplay that LawBreakers is known for.
But more important than the map, Boss Key is introducing team deathmatch into LawBreakers in the form of its Skirmish mode. When the shooter launched in last month, it only had objective modes. Bleszinski cited this as one possible reason that LawBreakers hasn’t clicked with a significant audience yet.
“[But] it’s a marathon; not a sprint,” Bleszinski told GameSpot. “We’re going to keep iterating and working on it. [For those] of you who have been kind enough to drop $30 on this; we’ve got your back and we’re sticking with it.”
