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[ashecitism]

Studio update vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjaJpDtT2g4

http://lawbreakers.nexon.net/en/news/article/21133/beta-and-pax-are-happening

Yes...Closed Beta is finally here! You’ve been waiting (mostly) patiently, but now it’s time to get hands-on with all new roles, new maps and updated gameplay.

Fans attending PAX East in Boston this weekend will get a preview of the Closed Beta, and of course some swag, at our booth.

The following weekend, the highly anticipated Beta phase begins, featuring new content and changes based on player feedback from the 2016 alpha, including the debut of highly-anticipated new roles that offer a greater variety of play-styles, improved game balance, new maps and much more.

So get ready to choose your play-style and be among the first to get behind the trigger with some seriously fun gravity-defying combat!

PAX EAST SHOW FLOOR

LawBreakers will be in the Boston Convention Center at booth #13055. We’ll have twenty stations running the Closed Beta build of the game for everyone to play. Stop by and play three brand new roles with new LAW and BREAKERS characters and an additional map: Mammoth.

Bring your best skills and compete in hourly shoutcasted matches throughout the show. Top players will get to compete in end-of-day show matches as we highlight the best of the best each day, giving them an opportunity to compete for special prizes and bragging rights.

Everyone who plays will get a new LawBreakers pinny and a limited edition t-shirt with one of three brand new designs (while supplies last, of course). We’ll have some swag for online LawBreakers fans too, so be sure to follow our social networks for info on how to win.

PAX EAST PANEL

Cliff Bleszinski and a panel of developers from Boss Key will share behind-the-scenes insights on the topic of “Action After Alpha: LawBreakers’ Road to Beta” at 9 p.m. EST, Friday, March 10 in the Bumblebee Theatre. If you’re at PAX, you won’t want to miss this insight into the development process.

CLOSED BETA

Don’t live in Boston and/or your mechanized flight suit is in the shop? Don't worry, you'll have a chance to play too. Closed Beta starts on Steam the Thursday after PAX ends and runs 24 hours a day through Sunday.

Closed Beta #1 Begins
Thursday March 16th
9am PT/ Noon ET / 4pm UTC

Closed Beta #1 Ends
Sunday March 19th
9pm PT / Midnight ET / 4am UTC

Don’t have a Beta key? Sign up on this page (look in the upper right corner for the subtle “Sign Up For Beta” button) and we’ll hook you up a couple days before the tests begin through email.

Already have a key from Alpha? You’re all set. Just wait for our email on when you can download the Closed Beta build in advance of the 16th so you can be ready to play when the servers open up.

 

[ashecitism]

They put up a FAQ

http://forums.lawbreakers.nexon.net/discussion/882/beta-and-more-faq

 

[Vanillalite]

Hope the beta can turn some heads cause judging by current GAF hype this has bomba written all over it.

 

[BiggNife]

I hope this is better than last year's alpha because honestly it was just not very good

There are some good ideas there, and I had some fun with it, but it just felt so janky compared to something like overwatch (or even paladins).

 

[Chris_Rivera]

Hope the beta can turn some heads cause judging by current GAF hype this has bomba written all over it.

"Highly anticipated"

 

[YuriLowell]

I completely forgot that this game existed.

Wasn't it in closed beta last year?

 

[ashecitism]

Hope the beta can turn some heads cause judging by current GAF hype this has bomba written all over it.

Like Mirage. This has more people talking about it though.

I completely forgot that this game existed.

Wasn't it in closed beta last year?

It had alpha tests.

 

[Icarus]

I thought it was in closed beta last year too... overhaul?

 

[ashecitism]

They did say after the alphas the they're going over feedback and thus will lay low for the time being. In the FAQ they say it was valuable:

What have you been doing this whole time?

A TON. The trailer released at The Game Awards 2016 just gives you a small taste of what’s to come. Our alpha was extremely valuable and helped us find and fix bugs, test the servers and learn more about what the community wants from our gameplay, characters and roles, and more. Now we’re preparing to launch our beta tests so players can get their hands on all of the updates and improvements from alpha as well as the new content we’ll be rolling out.

Also, I recall Cliff saying earlier how he isn't fussed about putting in typical classes like medics, snipers and engineers in the game, but the upcoming one will do some healing apparently

edit: Rewatched the vid, my bad, its not an upcoming char, I think, but probably their replacement for the healing stations? Looking at the silhouette (in the vid) drones that follow you?

that blue thing on the mid right

also first time seeing that Ultron dude lol

Edit2: the woman on the right is also new. The drone must be an ability.

 

[ashecitism]

They've been posting gameplay snippets, some include the 3 new roles

Juggernaut

https://twitter.com/lawbreakers/status/840586111164547073
https://twitter.com/lawbreakers/status/840226994205949954

Battle Medic

https://twitter.com/lawbreakers/status/840603919466287108
https://twitter.com/lawbreakers/status/840277059175878656

Gunslinger

https://twitter.com/lawbreakers/status/840249313322237953
https://twitter.com/lawbreakers/status/840218016113688576

https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/840446665861537792

Love Overwatch but the "you have a teleport character with two guns = Tracer" comments. Nightcrawler and Rise of the Triad much, friends.

lol

 

[CommandThrower]

I played this in the Closed Alpha, and the game was really, really solid for an Alpha build. I'll definitely be playing in this beta to see just how much has changed in the past 6 months or so.


Ahhh...next week will be great. Mass Effect: Andromeda on EA Access and LawBreakers closed beta~!

edit: Rewatched the vid, my bad, its not an upcoming char, I think, but probably their replacement for the healing stations? Looking at the silhouette (in the vid) drones that follow you?

Healing stations are still in, I think. But, there's reports of actual health packs on the maps now.

 

[Northeastmonk]

I didn't get to play all that much. I have it in my Steam library. It has a cool UT feeling to it, but with gravity and more features to the characters.

There's a lot of quality to it. I'll be anxious when this game finally launches. I was on board with the hype back when it was first announced, but haven't really been on board in about 6 or so months.

 

[ashecitism]

CliffyB interview

http://www.pcgamer.com/lawbreakers-isnt-trying-to-be-an-overwatch-killer/

PC Gamer: How has LawBreakers changed since the closed alpha?

Cliff Bleszinski: Well, now we have far more variety in the classes—we call them "roles." Finally having a CQC tank, you know we wanted the Chronos and Bombshell characters to be the tanks before, but they wound up kind of being the berserkers, get in there and shoot the rocket launchers at everyone. And to actually have the robots, Nash and Aegis, who literally can hit Q and armor up like that bad Lost in Space reboot with Matt LeBlanc, where the armor goes on. It looks really great and it was actually really tricky for the animators to pull off. Then, you know, just start blasting people with their shotgun and blade combo. It's incredibly powerful and tough to defeat, as well as actually doing a support role. For me it was one of those things, where I was like 'I'm not big on support,' and realizing that there are people out there who want to heal. And finding out what our original take on that was going to be, instead of trying to out-Mercy Mercy [from Overwatch] because you're not going to make a better Mercy.

And then also, what was our solution for sniping? I didn't want to make Battlefield where you run around on the field for five minutes and get picked off by somebody in a ghillie suit. We have a gunslinger who has two guns, Alpha and Omega. Alpha is the one where you can pepper people a little bit with shots, but Omega is the one where you kinda charge shot, go for the headshot from a distance, but it doesn't do that sniper zoom. And the character has an omni-directional Blink around the map—or warp, whatever you want to call it—as well as an intel blade so that they can see enemies behind walls. You throw the intel blade, see the person coming around, target their head and pop them.

When we were doing our alphas, I think we went live with too few characters. Yeah, there's eight characters, but you know, it's really only four because while the fiction is two sides, the roles play the exact same. By having the full run of seven, and the other two coming soon make it nine—we announced Wraith and Harrier at the panel—I think getting to that full robust section, it's at the point where the game feels like you can play it for hours and not get bored.

How do you think an arena, class-based shooter genre has changed since you started developing this? Three years ago, MOBAs were the hotness and nowadays there's a lot more class-based shooters, so how do you see LawBreakers shifting within that?

It started off as this nostalgia that people have for arena shooters. Your traditional arena shooter, you play and within thirty minutes you've seen everything. The variety comes from the maps. The characters all play the same and whatever weapon you pick up, that's your class. That was fine for 1998, but moving forward—I'm pretty sure the new Quake has abilities for each character, too—that depth comes not from the maps, but from the characters and the abilities and the counters between classes. So I think that layer of depth is really, really needed. From our end, one of the big differentiating things is going to be our art style. So many games have this very colorful, Pixar-y, Blizzard look to them, that was kind of borrowed from a lot of the popular mobile and MOBA games, and I want to make the character-based, first-person shooter for the Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield crowd. That's kind of what we're gunning for.

You said before that LawBreakers differentiates itself as being a more mature shooter, the one that swears. Do you think that will still be enough?

I think it'll be part of it. But I also think also, the fact that we really are really a shooter game for [shooter fans]. The hitboxes are legit and straightforward. The mouse sensitivity, the framerate, the way the movement is—when you land you can kind of jump skate a little bit, like strafe jumping. A lot of that stuff is in there that the core Counter-Strike and Quake players love. And we found that a lot of CS:GO players are gravitating towards this. They're not going to stop playing CS:GO ever, but when it comes to the character-based, ability-based first-person shooter, I'm thinking we'll be the one that the Counter-Strike players pick.

It's hard to find a conversation about the game online without somebody mentioning Overwatch at some point. You're comparing yourself to Counter-Strike and these much more hardcore first-person shooters. Do you think the Overwatch association is fair?

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, 'Oh, my god! 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.

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.

Which is funny because the Blizzard developers have said very openly that they borrowed a lot of their character ideas from other games, like Pharah from Quake.

Yeah, and I mean, that's the thing about our character having the warp or teleport, right, and the fact that, 'Oh, Nightcrawler had that, and it was actually in Dishonored, and it was in Dishonored because it was from code from a canceled IP that I worked on at Epic where a character could modify their density and kind of go through grates, and we called it the Bamf, and so Tracer has that and we have a character that does that, and so immediately, like, oh my God!' And then like, Overwatch gets—everyone gets all excited now they have jump pads, and I'm like, 'Uh, Quake 3 called.'

You're dealing with a generation of young gamers who don't know those old games, so what's old is new, and with the success of Overwatch—which I'm happy, because that means character-based first-person shooters are a viable thing, and if they're Coke I'll be happy to be Pepsi or RC Cola—but people are primed for this kind of game right now. So it's just a fascinating thing for me to watch, kind of like, that cycle of gamers assuming that because Overwatch did something they were the first to ever do it. And you're like, 'Eh, not necessarily, there's been other games with heal beams.'

more at the link

 

[CommandThrower]

CliffyB interview

http://www.pcgamer.com/lawbreakers-isnt-trying-to-be-an-overwatch-killer/

Very nice interview, I like his sentiment of LawBreakers being a good alternative to Overwatch, since that's exactly what I think it will end up being.