Boss Key Productions’ LawBreakers will be having a closed beta soon, thus offering more insight into the game it’s become since last year’s alpha. However, Cliff Bleszinski’s first new game in what seems like forever has some rather strong comparisons to face. We’re talking about Blizzard’s Overwatch, the so-called leading hero shooter.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Bleszinski addressed the comparisons, stating that, “It’s humanity, dude! I’ve been dealing with this my entire career. The human mind loves to pattern-match. It’s a survival technique. It’s like, ‘Oh, see that big bear over there? It ate my friend.’ And then you meet a new bear and you’re like, ‘This bear is going to eat me because it ate my friend.’ People just like to put things into tidy little buckets, and to the point where they will stretch it so far.”
He further noted an incident where players compared LawBreakers characters with gatling guns to D.Va, who’s mech has two rotating automatic cannons on her mech. “Some kid was trolling my Instagram one day on a random photo I posted of my dog. If you’ve seen our characters Maverick and Tosska who have the Gatling guns. They’ve got their jetpacks, they can create zero-G pockets, and everything.
“And he was like, ‘Oh, you guys have a girl with a minigun, so you’re cloning D.Va,’ and like, ‘You’re dealing with a tiny Korean girl in a big pink mech who can launch her mech and explode.’ So girl and a minigun means copying Overwatch? Right. OK. You’re reaching there, buddy.”
At this point, Bleszinski is happy about the success of Overwatch since it gives more viability to similar kinds of games. “The second you say the number one game in a genre, that you’re going to be a killer of it, you’re admitting that game’s never going to be killed. Remember all the ‘Halo killers’ that were coming out? Halo still hasn’t been killed. So again, it’s not a killer thing, it’s coexist. You know, I play Battlefield and Call of Duty. Back in the day I’d play Tekken and Street Fighter. There’s room for two or three games at the top of a given genre, and after that it’s fighting for the scraps.”
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