In an extensive new interview with Eurogamer, Boss Key co-founder Cliff Bleszinski offered some insight into LawBreakers‘ development, reflecting upon some of his decisions while discussing his plans to support the game.
Although LawBreakers has generally reviewed well, there are reports of it having a low concurrent player count – something Bleszinski doesn’t seem too concerned about. Likening the game to a “marathon and not a sprint,” he said:
I’d rather be the underhyped game that slowly ramps up into something that people adore than something that comes out with way too much hype that there’s a backlash for, which is why I think the Steam reviews are so positive. We’re going to continue to raise awareness, continue to support the product – if you look at the phenomenon that was League of Legends, it built off a Warcraft 3 mod then slowly but surely blossomed into this immense amazing thing, and I’d rather be the game that comes up and has that hockey stick ramp with a slow burn and builds up rather than the triple-A hype machine where you have a bazillion people playing it month one and it goes down exponentially then they follow up with an annual product.
Discussing LawBreakers‘ troubled PlayStation 4 launch, Bleszinski admitted that he was surprised by a “hungry” audience on the console, which he found encouraging especially since he envisioned the shooter as more of a “core PC game.” That said, he appreciates gamers being vocal and alerting him to the issues directly rather than “not saying anything at all.” One PS4 update has already gone live, which fixes the hitching issue.
Speaking of LawBreakers’ development, Bleszinski revealed that if he could go back and do something differently, he wouldn’t have allowed the game’s alpha test to be publicly streamed as it negatively affected perceptions.
If I could go back, I wouldn’t have allowed that to be publicly streamed because it deflated some of the expectations, and we have to work three times as hard to win people back based on that perception. The other thing was, when we announced it as free-to-play – you can read it on any forum reaction ‘sweet, Cliff’s back’, but then it’s ‘free-to-play? Nexon?’. The Nexon thing people can get over – a publisher who has traditionally done certain practices, and people are going to assume they’re going to do the same thing until they do something different.
Elsewhere in the interview, Bleszinski talked about his time at Epic Games and his retirement. Follow the link below for more.
[Source: Eurogamer]
