Category: Gamespot

Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski has “a few ideas” for what he might do with virtual reality, but don’t expect his studio, Boss Key, to release a VR game anytime soon.

Speaking to GameSpot, Bleszinski said one of the problems with VR today is that the install base is not big enough. Additionally, the current versions of the headsets leave something to be desired, while developers are facing steep costs, he said.

“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,” he explained. “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.”

One example of a “real VR game,” Bleszinski said, is Epic’s Robo Recall, which was announced at the Game Developers Conference last month.

“Yeah, it’s a wave shooter but, goddamn it looks good,” Bleszinski said. “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.”

Will VR ever become mainstream? Bleszinski thinks it could happen, but not soon.

“I think there’s enough people in Silicon Valley and beyond that have deep enough pockets to ride this out the long haul,” he said. “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.”

“Sony’s got a great headset but still it’s kind of clunky” — Bleszinski

Another example of a great VR game is Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight, according to Bleszinski. It delivers on a dream many people have of flying–and this can be an affecting, emotional experience.

“The story I like to tell people is when I did Eagle Flight and my wife was in the other room and I was just gushing making these kid sounds like, ‘he-he-he-he-he-he,’ and I handed her headset, and she was like, ‘Why’s it all wet?’ I’m like, ‘Because it moved me to tears.’ It’s like I’ve had that dream since I was six years old, of actually flying like an eagle.”

Bleszinski participated in an early round of venture capital funding for Oculus VR and said he made a “very sizable chunk of money” when Facebook bought the company for $2 billion.

Bleszinski’s current project is the PC shooter LawBreakers, which enters closed beta this week. Keep checking back with GameSpot in the days ahead for more from our conversation with the developer.

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Gears of War 4 was the first brand-new entry in the series made internally at Microsoft after it acquired the series from Epic Games in 2014. It was the first game that creator Cliff Bleszinski did not work on (though Epic had its own ideas for a fourth Gears of War game). Now, Bleszinski has spoken out to say he has mixed feelings about Gears of War 4.

“What [Gears of War developer The Coalition boss Rod Fergusson] did was give the people what that want. He did the J.J. Abrams Episode VII,” he said, referencing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “I’ve watched Episode VII five times. I still get misty-eyed and get all excited but when I think objectively about it, I’m like, ‘There wasn’t a lot of risk there.’ So I’m hoping they take a little bit more risk in the future.”

Gears of War 4 received a generally positive critical response. GameSpot’s review scored the Xbox One and PC game a 7/10, with reviewer Mike Mahardy saying the game was “teetering on the edge of something greater…”

Microsoft has not announced any new Gears of War games, but that’s more a question of when not if. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has suggested that a non-shooter Gears of War game could happen.

“Definitely when we got the team together and talked about the future of Gears of War, I think there’s multiple ways that you can tell that story,” he said. “Multiple gameplay genres. I think it’s a really big IP and it’s an IP that could exist in linear form, in books–we’ve seen that; in different gaming genres.”

Bleszinski’s current project is the PC shooter LawBreakers, which enters closed beta this week. Asked if the game could come to console, Bleszinski reiterated that developer Boss Key is “talking to people,” but stopped short of confirming anything.

“I would love for nothing more than for that to happen but it’s business. We’ll see,” he said.

Also in our interview, which was conducted at PAX East in Boston, Bleszinski reflected on some of the franchises that he helped create.

“Standing in this great booth at Nexon … it was funny because Bulletstorm‘s right next to it, the remaster. Then over to my left there’s like a Gears of War 4 photo booth. I’m sitting here going like, ‘This is f***ing weird.’ It feels good. I like making new IP,” he said.

“In the back of my head I’m thinking about all the nasty comments I’ve ever read in my entire career and I’m like, ‘Haha, call me next time you’re on a show floor and there’s three IPs that you were instrumental in creating.”

Finally, Bleszinski offered a tease that LawBreakers may not be the last franchise he creates.

“I’m not done yet,” he said.

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Looking for something to do for the next 17 days? Twitch’s Power Rangers marathon, which will show all 831 episodes of the series in order, begins today, March 14, at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET.

As announced previously, every episode from the show’s 23 seasons is being broadcast back-to-back, until the event wraps up on March 30.

You can watch through Twitch’s TV marathon channel, twitch.tv/TwitchPresents. People who subscribe to the channel will get Power Rangers-themed emotes. Twitch is also allowing people to co-stream the event, adding their own commentary. You can learn more about the event on Twitch’s blog.

This Power Rangers marathon is being held in the lead-up to the new film from Lionsgate that opens on March 24.

It’s not the first time Twitch has broadcast a TV show for a marathon event, as the platform did the same for Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting and Julia Child’s The French Chef.

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It’s not just Paladins and Battleborn that get compared to Blizzard’s hero shooter Overwatch. Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski’s new shooter, LawBreakers, is also in that category. Now, the gaming veteran has responded to those comparisons and talked about how he doesn’t expect LawBreakers to overtake Overwatch in terms of popularity.

“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,” Bleszinski told PC Gamer. 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.”

Bleszinski also shared a story of a specific comparison that a fan made between Overwatch and LawBreakers–but Bleszinski doesn’t buy it.

“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,” he said. “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.”

Bleszinski went on to say that he’s happy to see Overwatch have so much success because it suggests that those types of games can be viable. He said if Overwatch is Coke, LawBreakers would be happy to be Pepsi or RC Cola, with the idea being a rising tide raises all ships.

“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,” he said. “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.”

People will understand LawBreakers better when they get to try it, Bleszinski said. A closed beta for the game is coming up soon, and Bleszinski said he believes it offers a more complete picture of what LawBreakers is when compared to the alpha from 2016.

“I think now we’ve really kind of turned the corner to really starting to become the robust game that I originally wanted to make,” he said.

You can read the full interview here at PC Gamer.

LawBreakers was announced as a free-to-play game, but later adopted a paid business model. It is currently set for a PC-only at some point in the future, but Bleszinski has said that it could come to consoles if they found a good partner to handle the port.

Free-to-play and mobile gaming giant Nexon is publishing LawBreakers on PC.

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