Cliff Bleszinski talks Lawbreakers_ retirement_ Xbox's failings_ and what he hates about Overwatch - Part 1

such as a first class party, I don't mean someone has to take your word for it, but yes ladies and gentlemen what happens, my name is calab. I'm in Los Angeles right now we're watching a game called Lawbreakers and I'm here with the man himself the ledger mr. cliff abhi if you don't know who this man is then something is wrong with you because he's one of the great luminaries of gaming things like unreal and years of war and now law breakers and he's sitting here with me to talk about it talking about how the story of this game is, how it's in the alpha and beta and the upcoming releases and all of that stuff so first of all thanks a lot absolute pleasure a great scene a bit early so I'd really like some hearing about your story in relation to how you decided to come out of retirement. Yeah obviously it could be you do some amazing groundbreaking work in the industry and then just sort of sorted out and torn back, so what was the story of why you decided to come back? Ego because I didn't want to fade int o Into the good night so neither did I want my legacy to be just the trilogy of awesome years which to be honest was a great great time in my life. Microsoft has been very good to us and that has been great to me but I felt the need to start something new and otherwise I'd be drinking myself to death at my pool huh it's going to build on that time that thing natural day is as you know my wife and I love our home dearly our dogs live with her but I got cabin fever and that's the point where we're like we're sitting at dinner at the end of the day and she would say how was your day and i'm like you've been there all day lets let's do some new stuff happen together yeah that's kind of an origin story of everything yeah so i guess what's in the music scene you use a lot, yes, I really am, I mean, the thing is to be the chief creative and the chairman

and to be in charge of this company and at least 65 or so people, a lot of them have families, it's how heavy the whole thing, the head wears the crown, everything's going well, yeah, that'll be good to convince them that you know the games are going to be great people can really want it and you can hear them screaming the background doesn't get that very loud so that's good for you I think it's funny I only have a few of these but they were pretty quiet when we started today, but the noise level has increased as people get more used to the mechanics. Well we open the bar well too, that helped too, that's right, I've had a whiskey before and am enjoying it well, but um, but I'm really interested, as you know, so you can make that decision, off Coming into retirement wasn't it because you said I have to do law breakers or because you need it I said I have to do another video I was pretty much a law breaker because at the time I was the serious I've read widely, talked for quite a while about what happens when you're in zero-G and you fire a gun and I couldn't get the idea out of my head of gun-firing things like that in a microgravity environment. I was lucky enough to actually do the zero G flight about ten years ago in a plane where they have thirty seats in the back, but the whole front is all padded and the plane does parabolas where it's in the 45- degree angle goes up and then everybody's on the mats and it pulls to G and then it goes down 45 degrees and everybody's literally in zero G and that's the feeling of being unlike anything what i can explain There isn't a person on this flight who didn't smile in fairness. There were 30 people but three got stuck because they tell you not to get pounded the night before and then go to the doctor I got an anti-nausea pill which I did. I haven't been drinking much. I got my anti dodger pill and I was fine and I had the time of my life It was like it was then it was amazing I can't recommend it timely enough as you know because it's obvious

They talked about that story there, yes, but how does that experience translate to I'm taking a little break I know, I'm not really sure how it all came together. I knew I wanted to make a shooter, I originally thought I wanted to make some sort of classic arena shooter, but as more of the team I hired and brought on board started discussing it, Morgan realized that you couldn't just can be that avatar running around picking up the rocket launchers and running around on maps like that It's fun to a degree but it gets old fast as the Unreal Tournament and Quake games have been maintained by their communities on the blogs and the new maps that want to play have been released. There weren't really any classes that really came out of it, and so my couple of gameplay designers and gameplay programmers of mine have been big mobile fans and they're like, 'Hey, we need to develop skills in this game and that's where the cue comes from "e" adding depth, and hopefully if the game will continue w With new characters and getting that depth out of the characters, not necessarily just the donna maps, yeah that's really the mention that the whole hero shooter -Genre wasn't a team a few years ago, yeah, now it's definitely a thing, yeah, I'm not the only one capable of making a character-based 5v5 or 66 multiplayer shooter . Yeah it's something so why do you think why do you think the industry suddenly woke up and realized what was the moment you were in? The thought led to hey, we gotta make this a first-person thing. Well first of all I missed the first person perspective after working with coworkers for so long because I could see where a third person going into the third person was going to the point where and unexplored was great on this way. I might add that Naughty Dog is great, but you controlled that fancy puppet and I had this epiphany about the third-person perspective. It's like dying in a twitch multiplayer shooter because my character has to finish their animation which I go to when viewing the game the designer not myself and good game design is when players blame themselves for their mistakes and whatnot, so I just start iterating

with the team and finally we start to think of characters. I was sitting in the pub with one of my programmers on a Thursday when the trailer for Overwatch was released. You know Blizzard can do almost nothing wrong, but at the end of the day we know what not to do, so we knew that we didn't want to make the same archetypes as them, we didn't want to make the character with the bow that we have. I didn't want to know that we build towers and make our own versions of our own new classes and show our own archetypes and have an art style , which looks very different, so that's an interesting point to bring up, because you know that, how you frame it, is that you know there are some clear similarities, but we have to do our own different things, so my question is whether Lawbreakers is a fundamentally different game than Overwatch or whether it has the same type of structure but with its own very unique good taste it's there a si milar structure you know we remember they roll euros what you want to call them there are skills but after that our game types are completely different like what the characters do and their abilities are completely different, and Overwatch is again a great game, but Overwatch feels like a game with characters and abilities that randomly shoot where a shooter then has character abilities, so we really want the core shooter audience achieve that really loves your counter strike games and want to bring them into the genre somehow because the way Greg is as an overwatch there is a lot of stuff in it that sure drives me crazy okay so what is an example of something that drives you crazy, um, may I talk about that, that does too, actually it's an FPS rule you never freeze a player like there's nothing slowing down keyboard or controller anymore

Induce than just freeze the player in place and I'll let someone else go PPP is so awesome she does the thing and she puts it up when you get high and that's where you just kill me. I'd rather wait for your reply the digit linked that road hog Road hogs Hook drives me crazy legs like I'm rolling on someone. It's the loss of control in a game like this A little bit down we have the grappling hook but that's as you know the coming or hallion coming at you instead of pulling you for things and things like that so it is one of those things as you know the collision boxes on some of the guns are a little bit as you know Hans owes both that's like the setup log yeah yeah oh and so it's very important to us that our projectiles are very very small , are very trace like and our dampening and decrease in weapon damage is very very r doable and you know we're more of a bit of a course shooter ok yeah cool so we talked about there obviously being a lot of similarities between this game and that we talked about how obviously there are some big differences as well. I've played it, I've been really impressed with how much it changes over the course of its development has, yeah, because I've played the Outlast, yeah, and I and I was really like, okay, I'm not sure about this one yet, right, and then the mirror I started that now, I'm like okay , here's something I almost like that the team has been working on yes so tell me what has been that journey for you and what has been the guiding star of that development path you know iterate and make changes what you're looking at have, there has to be more of you, just more in general. Okay if I could go back in time I wouldn't have made the alpha public in terms of people being able to do videos and whatnot because it was eight characters but really only four roles for playability, what a Was fun for a while but didn't really have the depth that we have now

Now that we're full age and shipping with nine by 18 characters and so on some of these are revealing very soon and for me the alpha was a bit razor thin you know we didn't have some of the XP stuff going that we had no stock drops which contained all that stuff that keeps the game kinda sticky outside of the 30 minute loop and now the second closed beta in this amazing moment of me sitting in the house with my wife and her computer across from my sister in law our VR pc below we were partying and then I invited my brother in law from Louisiana to our party and the four of us joined a random person and went online and just played and had fun and so I feel like the game now with eight and then nine different reels is sturdy enough that what i play as you know kansui and i use the grappling hook i miss playing as juggernaut n and level up I use the instigator shotgun like I always miss another role what kind of keeps me in the game and somehow I will even try to construct that level up that leads to that depth then the game makes after three Still having fun for years and the team is still screaming when we only play 10 test slots in the studio when we play it in the afternoon people are still storming up or down the stairs disappointed they can't get into a session being able to, that's always the stuff you can't fake, you're hoping for. I've seen studios where they have to force people to play their own game because it's not fun, could be pretty crappy. Yes they are long and hopefully ship it without whose bugs were as few as possible so as I was playing Law Breaker the thing that really stuck caught my eye, this is an Overwatch right it feels a lot more how unreal at, you know it really felt like the sequel to unreal that we've been waiting for so long, so I'm really interested in how much of this game's kind of DNA you brought in and how influential you feel , as if you are unreal or Alex you develop