Death Stranding Trailer Baffles Everyone – TGA 2017

It’s not like Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding was anything new at the time. However, we had only seen brief glimpses of what Hideo Kojima’s twisted mind was capable of delivering. At The Game Awards 2017, over 8 minutes of new footage was showcased and it arguably trumped everything before it. Shadowy figures, supernatural happenings – it was weird, to say the least.

Cliff Bleszinski, the creator of Gears of War, known most recently for the failed hero shooter Lawbreakers, has apparently posted in a very emphatic statement on Twitter in response to a fan that he will not be making any more games going forward. Bleszinski has always been an outspoken personality, and it looks like he is not holding back in this case.

Speaking in response to a fan complaining about never receiving a refund for Lawbreakers, a game that was taken offline in a little over a year, followed shortly by the closure of Boss Key Productions, Bleszinski noted how he spent money out of pocket to ensure his employees didn’t get a raw deal from the closing down of the company, and that the toxicity of the gaming community is the reason he will “NEVER” make another game again.

When informed by GamesIndustry that he was responding to what was likely a troll tweet (the account that tweeted at Bleszinski has so far made only this one tweet, and is likely a throwaway created expressly for this exchange), and asked how serious he was, he simply replied “I’m done”.

Bleszinski, for all his faults—he is abrasive and obnoxious—is at least a talented game designer, and if this is the note he will leave on, it is a shame. With that said, hopefully, this is nothing more than a minor outburst on social media on a bad day.

https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/1063145769321013249

Boss Key Productions’ LawBreakers had a fair amount of hype surrounding it due to former Epic designer and Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski coming out of retirement to develop it. However, the real-world situation is less flattering as LawBreakers hardly has any players on PC. The concurrent player count over the last 24 hours was 181 on Steam.

PS4 numbers are unknown at this point and while Bleszinski noted that the PS4 version was performing well, GameSpot’s Australian reporter noted that it wasn’t possible to find a match on PS4 in the past two weeks. Matchmaking times went over 45 minutes in those cases and still no match was found.

Nevertheless, Bleszinski is looking to support the game even if that means changing his own online image. “You know, I have to keep this game alive, first and foremost. I can be very cocky and very brash on social media. And realizing that, you know, we have a fledgling player base. It’s been very humbling for me. I’m going to continue to iterate on this game, continue to add to it.”

Bleszinski also noted that not having team deathmatch was a “mistake”. Updates will be coming to LawBreakers in the coming months with a new map, Boss Leagues – the game’s version of Ranked Play – and much more coming this month. Whether it leads to the game’s player base growing or not remains to be seen.

Boss Key Productions’ LawBreakers will be out in less than two months, bringing Cliff Bleszinski’s brand of arena-based, hero-shooting to PC and PS4. However, despite the man himself not ruling out an Xbox One version, there’s a reason the studio went with PS4 off the bat.

GamingBolt spoke to lead designer Dan Nanni at E3 2017 and asked why the PS4 version would be coming first. We also asked Nanni about the experience of working with Sony, especially since Bleszinski has dealt with Microsoft on Gears of War for years.

“You know, it’s Microsoft and Gears of War for Cliff Bleszinski, but it’s Sony and Killzone for Arjan Brussee [co-founder of Boss Key who also co-founded Guerrilla Games]. So all of us have different experiences, different groups that we worked with. We basically had to make a financial decision more than anything.

“PlayStation had a larger user base. We knew we could only support one platform right now. Being a small studio we had to make a decision that was the most financial, and economic sense for us to prosper. I would definitely not write off Xbox One for the future. But right now if we put Xbox into our plans we wouldn’t be launching the game in August.”

So there you go: An Xbox One version along with PS4 and PC would mean a delay. And honestly, it’s not the worst idea to go with the console that has the highest number of owners.

LawBreakers releases on August 8th for PS4 and PC with an open beta apparently coming by June end.

Though Boss Key Productions’ LawBreakers is coming to the PS4 and not the Xbox One (at least, at this time), Cliff Bleszinski offers some praise for Microsoft’s upcoming Project Scorpio.

In a recent AMA for LawBreakers, Bleszinski was asked about Scorpio and said that, “MS is getting their sh** together. They’re putting it in a backpack or in a shit museum and getting it alllll together. Scorpio is promising. MS bet on Kinect too hard last round. Don’t rule out an Xbox version [of LawBreakers], btw.”

So there you go – an Xbox One version hasn’t been ruled out. Until then, it’s currently slated for the PC and PS4. There will also be PS4 Pro support added.

LawBreakers will arrive later this year and though it runs at 60 FPS on PS4, it won’t have cross-platform play with the PC version. Bleszinski himself regarded the idea as “dumb” on Twitter, likely due to the imbalance it could cause.

Cliff Bleszinski, the guy who brought us Gears of War, is currently woking on his free to play arena shooters LawBreakers. It was, until now, announced only for PC, but it has since been confirmed that the game will also be launching on the PS4 right alongside the PC version.

The PS4 version of the game will run at a steady 60fps, will support PS4 Pro enhancements of some kind (presumably resolution, since the game is already hitting 60 frames on the base PS4), and will not feature any cross platform play with the PC version of the game- in fact, Cliff Bleszinski went as far as to call cross play ‘dumb’ on Twitter, when a fan asked him about it.

Presumably he thinks so because of the massive advantage that keyboard-mouse toting PC players playing at unlocked framerates would have over PS4 players, playing with analog controllers, and with a capped framerate.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage and information on the game.

Boss Key Productions’ LawBreakers will have its next closed beta coming up soon and there’s quite a lot to expect. In a a new Studio Update video, the development team announced that there would be a new character named Wraith, a new map Reactor and a new game mode that seems to take inspiration from Blitz Ball. Check out the video below.

The second closed beta will begin on May 18th and finish on May 21st. Along with the new content, LawBreakers will see some changes and tweaks to its overall systems. If you want to try and get into the closed beta, simply sign up here.

LawBreakers is currently slated to release in 2017 for PC. It comes from Gears of War and Unreal creator Cliff Bleszinski, offering arena-based competitive multiplayer with various characters. What are your thoughts on it thus far based on the last closed beta? Let us know in the comments below.

The AAA gaming market has seen some uncertainty over the last few years- the volume of releases has gone down, studios have downsized or gone bankrupt, costs have spiralled out of control, more and more cynical profit maximization business practices, such as DLC, season passes, microtransactions, and even rushed games, have become the norm, and games have become largely homogenized as well.

According to Cliff Bleszinski, the creator of Gears of War – arguably the prototypical modern AAA game – AAA games are in a weird spot right now, with lots of customers feeling burned by them as a result. Speaking at Dubrovnik’s Reboot Develop 2017, Bleszinski pointed out that AAA games cost far too much to develop, and their business model is basically ‘unsustainable’. Customers themselves can only afford to pay $60 for a limited number of games every year, especially with considerations such as Season Passes and DLC thrown in- but practices like microtransactions and buggy and rushed launches are making them wary of spending even that money on games, which in turn is causing more pressure, and therefore more of a trend towards these abusive practices, in the AAA industry.

The solution may be something like ‘AA’ games. AA games is essentially new parlance for mid tier games- these used to exist until the transition tot he HD era, when, unable to keep up with costs, the bottom fell out of that market. Recently, they have started to make a comeback, with games like Rocket League, or publisher Focus Home interactive’s lineup, being some notable instances in this category. Bleszinski says that these games, by focusing on comparatively limited scope, cheaper budgets as a result, and cheaper prices (thanks to largely digital only releases), have done exceedingly well- and this may counteract the disillusionment with AAA gaming.

On the whole, this is not something I can disagree with, and it is something I have spoken of myself a lot in the past. I think that the resurgence of Japanese gaming – most of which can hardly be called AAA, let’s be honest – is also proof that people are getting tired of AAA games, and are now looking elsewhere. I welcome this- the more variety in the gaming market, the better.

[via WCCFTech]

Boss Key Productions co-founder Cliff Bleszinski is busy these days with his next game LawBreakers but he did speak to GameSpot about the current state of virtual reality gaming. He noted that there are still obstacles to VR really taking off including high costs and the present hardware available.

“VR is very near and dear to me. I have a few ideas I’d love to play with, but again the friction point is getting VR installed. Sony’s got a great headset but still it’s kind of clunky, the price point, there’s a lot of shovelware on VR right now. A lot of crappy Unity games where it’s like, ‘Oh look I’m throwing a can.’ Yeah, big deal right? No actual real games, and part of that is this catch 22 of a lot of the proper platform-holders of VR finding funding. You can’t make a really deep, great game arguably in VR for like a million bucks. So you’ve gotta really pony it up.”

Bleszinski noted that a “real VR game” would be something like Robo Recall from Epic Games, which was announced at this year’s GDC. “Yeah, it’s a wave shooter but, damn it looks good. The controls are perfect and they really knocked it out of the park. That’s the kind of stuff that needs to happen, as opposed to more friggin’ roller coasters and things like that. There’s also jump scare games that YouTubers want to do. So there’s a lot more to it, but there’s like six things right now that are really preventing VR from really exploding in a good way.”

VR could eventually hit the mainstream but it’s going to take a while. “I think there’s enough people in Silicon Valley and beyond that have deep enough pockets to ride this out the long haul. I think [Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg] saw the potential in Oculus in realizing like the first time I did touch demo and [Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey] was standing across from me as a VR ghost, even though he’s in the other room. That’s when it gets magical. If I could play catch with my niece in California, that’s pretty magical … but we’ve gotta start pushing through and working through it all.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments.

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.”

What are your thoughts on all this? Let us know in the comments.