So this is a total bummer.

Cliff Bleszinski has announced that Boss Key Productions, his gaming studio that he created four years ago, and which is best known for Lawbreakers and then, more recently, the battle royale game Radical Heights, which was launched in Early Access, is no more. The studio is effectively being shut down starting now.

In a sense, this news does not come as a surprise- Lawbreakers was, unfortunately, a rather dismal failure, and Radical Heights does not seem to have done better. It does come as a complete bummer, because Bleszinski is a passionate man, and the games seemed to be passion driven projects. Unfortunately, this also means that everyone who worked at Boss Key- 65 people- are now without jobs. I really hope they are able to get back on their feet again, and quickly.

Bleszinski did confirm that for now, servers for Radical Heights will stay up, for fans of that game, and thanked all the staff at Boss Key, as well as his fans, for their support.

Let’s hope he is able to rally from this setback, and come back stronger than ever. The creator of Jazz Jackrabbit and Gears of War deserves better.

https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/996092708971274245

Lots of games are now trying to follow the trend of the Battle Royale genre, and Radical Heights is one such game that entered Early Access last week. As with all games during such an early phase, the game is faced with its share of technical problems. The most glaring issue however is one where players have found themselves stuck in an Infinite Loading Screen of Death.

Boss Key’s technical director Romain Dura has now tried explaining to the community exactly what the problem is. Initially, the problem was identified to be caused by a matchmaking error. However, it seems that this problem is quite a persistent one as it has continued plaguing the game even after the developers tried to fix the issue. You can read Dura’s full explanation of the problems below.

“Matchmaking

The matchmaking server is in charge of grouping players together and telling the game client which game server to connect to start a match. After leaving a match, players could get stuck when they queued again. The first issue discovered was that the game client was sometimes sending a message to matchmaking indicating a network disconnection instead of an event to deliberately leave a match from the Pause menu. Matchmaking was configured to preserve player slots in games, in case they crashed or got briefly disconnected and tried to rejoin. Upon finding a match again, the matchmaking server responded to clients to connect to the same game server that they were just connected to, as if they were trying to rejoin after a disconnect. The game server was then kicking players because they had already died in that match, and the game became stuck on the loading screen instead of returning to the main menu.

To avoid this behavior without having to patch the game with around 8000 concurrent live players on the second day, we attempted to disable the functionality to preserve disconnected player slots in matches, by toggling a live configuration switch. Unfortunately, this configuration hadn’t been widely tested under load, and caused all ending matches to never reset properly, leading to a starvation of the game servers, and thousands of players stuck in matchmaking queue for about 30 minutes (starting at A on the chart).

We reverted the switch change, but that did not release all stuck game servers. At this point we had to fully reset the matchmaking server and all game servers. This led to the loss of the Play button in the menu for a few minutes, and things returned to normal after that (B on the chart).

The next attempt was to force matchmaking to treat all match disconnection events as deliberate, via a code change. We deployed the matchmaking server update, which was successful in avoiding the bug where players were sent again to their previous match server.

Matchmaking, again

Unfortunately, there were still reports from players being stuck on the loading screen. Deep sigh.

Despite the previous fix, there was still an issue where players wouldn’t be removed from their match on the matchmaking server if they appeared to still be connected to their game server. This too, could make the matchmaking server force clients to reconnect to their previous server. The source of the problem was a race condition where the network message indicating that the player had disconnected from the game server came after the event to deliberately leave the match, instead of before. This happened because of a misconfiguration of a built-in delay to handle this specific case. We corrected the live delay configuration, and this problem was resolved.

Game servers

UNFORTUNATELY, later during the day we were made aware of more reports from players stuck on the loading screen. DEEP sigh.

It was then discovered that some clients were assigned a correct server, but did not appear to connected to it. This particular server was one of the new game servers that we added to meet the increasing number of concurrent players. We found that one of the new game servers had been setup with a firewall configuration rule that blocked all network traffic, instead of allowing specific game ports. This prevented players from actually connecting to the assigned game server, and loading into the match, staying permanently stuck on the loading screen. This has affected thousands of players in the afternoon of Thursday April 12th.

We corrected the firewall configuration rule at 6:10pm EST, and players could load into the game.

Steam, The Next To Last loading bug

We received more reports of players stuck on the loading screen, AND some players were unable to login into the game at all. There are no words.

We quickly discovered the source of the issue was a wide scale Steam maintenance affecting many of their services including authentication for clients and game servers. The Steam services came back online within several minutes.

MOAR issues, omg

After all this, we still receive reports of players stuck on the loading screen. Dark times.

We identified that some servers in the OCE (Sydney) and SEA (Singapore) regions, were stuck awaiting for map travel, an operation that happens at the end of a match to reset the game state. This was due to a combination of factors. Some game servers seem to be frequently disconnected from the matchmaking server while reloading the map at the end of a match, and on top of that, the matchmaking server had an incorrect configuration where it waited for a confirmation that the map reload was complete, in order to let clients join it. This happened specifically when a match ended with 8 connected players (players in games and spectators). We corrected the configuration to always force a full reset of the match state on the matchmaking server.”

We’ll have to wait and see if the issue has finally been resolved for all players or whether players will still find themselves stuck on the loading screen.

Cliff Bleszinski’s LawBreakers might not be doing all that well on the market (it recently dropped to just 10 concurrent users on Steam), but it looks like the developers and publishers remain committed to supporting the game. Today, they released the All-Star update for the game, which represents the biggest content update it has had since its launch.

The major feature is the long-awaited competitive ranked mode, Boss Leagues, which is a ladder-styled competitive ranked mode. Boss Leagues will kick off with Beta Season 0, and the developers Boss Key will be soliciting feedback for the game very intently, inviting all players to share what they have to say.

That apart, it sounds like the mode will be really full featured- solo and dual queueing is available, as well as multi-region queueing, there will be six total tiers, two new maps, improved tutorials, profile icons and skin decals, and over 120 new items. Plus, if you want to see this all in action, at TwitchCon 2017, LawBreakers will host an exciting live show match at the Esports Stage on Friday, Oct. 20, 3:30-4:30 p.m. PT.

LawBreakers is available on PS4 and PC.

Lawbreakers is the newest game by Cliff Bleszinski, the designer who earned his fame for the superlative Gears of War 1 and 2 on the Xbox 360, which he headed. Considering his strong association with the Xbox brand, and its fans, it was actually surprising that Lawbreakers was not announced for the Xbox One at all- instead, for now, a PS4 and PC version were all that were confirmed.

In an interview with GameSpot, Bleszinski discussed his reasoning for focusing on the PS4 at first, also expressing worries that Microsoft might feel offended that he chose to skip their console in favor of Sony’s for now.

“And in regards to considering doing an Xbox version. I’d love to, but there’s still other discussions that need to be had”, he said. “And I think, you look at Xbox … from my prior work, and I think they felt miffed and kind of rejected, that we chose PlayStation, but for us it was just a matter of install based for PlayStation at the time, and then considering we’d see for Xbox down the line.”

Whereas some people within the Xbox team might have felt surprised at the decision for sure, on the whole, businesses operate outside of the realm of personal feelings and relationships- if there is money to be made in Lawbreakers coming to the Xbox One, Microsoft will have no problem with it. Now, it’s on Bleszinski and Boss Key to actually bring the game over.

LawBreakers is heading to PS4 and PC later this year- but what about the Xbox One and the Nintendo Switch? Surely the game can make its way over to those two systems as well, right? That’s what GamingBolt decided to ask Lead Designer Dan Nanni when we had the chance to chat with him- could a Switch version of the game exist?

According to Nani, the big hurdle would be the Switch’s ‘lack of buttons’. “There’s a possibility for everything and anything in this world”, he said. “I think the hardest part with the Switch is the controls. Look at the game that we have right now, and we just literally by the skin of our teeth put the entire game and the control pad that the PlayStation has. That means that we could probably make it work for the Xbox One in someway, right? But if you’re looking at the Switch the base controller that’s on the unit, it doesn’t have as many buttons.”

I would have been sympathetic to this plight, but… the Nintendo Switch controller, even the default controller, has as many buttons and inputs as the PS4 does. It has two triggers, two bumpers, four face buttons, a D-Pad, two analog sticks, and then system buttons. In fact, if you split the Joycon, you get four more buttons as well. So I must be honest, I don’t quite know what they meant here- maybe they were referring to one Joycon individually? Of course, they don’t have to support it, but maybe they want to.

If you want to play LawBreakers, for now, your choice is PS4 or PC, when it launches on those two systems on August 8.

Cliff Bleszinski may once have been known for games like Gears of War, but before even that, he was famous in PC gaming circles for his work on Unreal Tournament, the holy grail of arena multiplayer shooters for the longest time. And now, he is leading the comeback of arena shooters on PC again, with his upcoming game LawBreakers, developed in conjunction with Boss Key.

With the game being available to play right now, Boss Key have been releasing videos introducing each of the playable classes in the game. Today’s video happens to introduce us to the Titan Class. Boss Key talk about why they love playing the Titan and share some great tips on how to maneuver and support your team if you are playing it, too.

Check out the video below, and let us know what you thin in the comments section. LawBreakers is available to play on PC now in alpha.