After successive commercial failures following his departure from Epic Games, the Gears of War creator thinks about returning to the video game industry.
After a time away from video games to dedicate himself to musical numbers, the co-creator of one of Xbox’s flagship franchises aims to return to the industry, despite his latest hits in the market. 14 years ago, together with Rod Fergusson – now at Blizzard and in charge of Diablo – he got down to work to devise one of the most recognizable sagas of the last 20 years, forming a fantastic trilogy that would last for five years and remain finally – and currently – in the hands of The Coalition. We are talking about, obviously, Gears of War, the great legacy of a Cliff Bleszinski who since leaving a triumphant Epic Games thanks to Fortnite has not savored the honeys of success, rather the opposite.
After practically two decades at Epic Games, Cliffy B. would leave the studio to found his own, Boss Key Productions, and get to work in the genre in which he would begin his career, that is, the first person shooter. Bleszinski was part of the team that developed numerous installments of one of the most iconic multiplayer shooter of the first decade of the 21st century, Unreal Tournament, and tried to implement everything he learned in his first game away from what had been his home for so long. : Lawbreakers.
Life after Gears of War
However, and by way of curiosity, it is not exactly his first job in a video game after leaving Epic Games, and it is that although it is a fact that went unnoticed, Cliff bue one of the backers of the successful Superhot on Kickstarter, contributing no less than 2,000 dollars and being the only one who would reach such an amount. This contribution would give him the right to co-design one of the levels of the game, and it is that from the first moment he was captivated by the proposal of this indie by a small Polish studio. “I thought it was brilliant and wrote to them on Twitter to get the game before the next Call of Duty stole their idea,” he said at the time on Polygon. “It’s the most innovative idea in a shooter since Bullet Time.”
But after this little more than anecdotal participation, let’s go back to Lawbreakers. With this game, Cliff wanted to combine some aspects of the more classic multiplayer shooters with more modern ones, such as the use of gravity or the selection of characters with different abilities. Also far from the massive games that proliferate in today’s multiplayer, Lawbreakers was limited to ten participants in two teams of 5, in confrontations in modes that, although they had different names such as War for Territory or Overload, did not stop be mainly the modes equivalent to Dominion or Capture the Flag, in addition to the essential Team Deathmatch, or All against all by teams.
The launch of Lawbreakers would take place in August – a bad time for a launch in itself – of 2017, receiving more than worthy criticism from the specialized press and having an average score of 76 in Metacritic. In this house specifically we talk more about its virtues than its defects, and the former were numerous: a good balance between classes, a successful combination of classic and modern elements, great online performance. So … what went wrong?
Surely it was simply a matter of the market trend, already far from a formula in which only Call of Duty survives and that then clearly tended to the subgenre that continues to triumph for the most part three years later, such as battle royale. The year 2017 is the year of the great explosion of PUBG, a game that really popularized this formula, to which we must add, a few months before the launch of Lawbreakers, that of none other than Fortnite, by the hand precisely of Epic Games, and which would soon become one of the great phenomena of the last decade in the industry. Of course, it would still be difficult for him to reach that status, since he would arrive with the unpopular Save the World mode, stumbling until launching his own free battle royale that would later make history on numerous occasions.
Lawbreakers’ failure would make it clear that self-criticism was not common at Cliff. Our protagonist blamed the poor reception of the game among the community on everyone except himself and his team: the players themselves, who did not understand the game; to the press for not giving it the recognition it deserved, to Destiny 2 for taking away players or even launching the game on PS4 and not on Xbox, when it had been the Microsoft platform where it had gotten the name with which it still counted. The change to the free to play model in June 2018 would not serve to breathe some oxygen into Lawbreakers, which would close its servers permanently in September of the same year.
Cliff sees the opportunity, but …
Probably seeing coming that there was no way to give Lawbreakers a boost enough, Cliff and his team worked simultaneously on Radical Heights. In Boss Key Productions they wanted to try their luck in the genre that had buried their first game and not miss the opportunity, but obviously they had to go over the aforementioned PUBG and Fortnite before, something that as we have been seeing successively, is very difficult, for not to say impossible. Others have tried it, like Paladins or H1Z1, but both remain strong among the most played, especially the Epic Games title. Cliff would apply “if you can’t beat your enemy, join him”, but it wouldn’t be enough.
Radical Heights would hit the market in the spring of 2018, and it would do so from the beginning being free to play -only on PC-, something that served to bring together thousands of players at the beginning, curious about a new proposal within the fashion genre. . But we already know how compatible trends work, and even if players try a new title out of curiosity, if it doesn’t convince them, they won’t give them more opportunities to return to what they know to be a safe value, and in this way Radical Heights would not take two weeks to lose more than 80% of its player base. Obviously, it would be canceled shortly after.
But we are in the middle of the year 2020, and among all the events that are happening and are making it a “different” year, anything is credible. He already warned a few months ago: Cliff has an idea for a new game and “it’s not a fucking battle royale”, once again denying a genre that has been making headlines and covers for a long time. What will one of the loudest creators of the last 20 years surprise us with?
