ashecitism
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http://www.pcgamer.com/lawbreakers-isnt-trying-to-be-an-overwatch-killer/
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PC Gamer: How has LawBreakers changed since the closed alpha?
Cliff Bleszinski: Well, now we have far more variety in the classeswe 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 mapor warp, whatever you want to call itas 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 ninewe announced Wraith and Harrier at the panelI 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 forwardI'm pretty sure the new Quake has abilities for each character, toothat 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 iswhen 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 getseveryone 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 Overwatchwhich 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 Colabut 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.'
I like the analogy you made of Coke to Pepsi, or RC Cola. Do you think every new shooter has to try to be an 'Overwatch killer?'
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. And that's what happened in MOBAs. You know, you had League crushing it, Dota, Smite doing well, and then after that you had Vainglorythat's the mobile one, right? That did well because they found their niche on tablets, right? That's the other thing is, find a genre that hasn't been used, on a platform that hasnt done it, and step three, profit.
So thats the key, finding your niche?
Yeah, exactly. And I'm hoping we come out in a timeframe where Overwatch is great and established, but people maybe want to try something a little bit different.
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