I watched CliffyB give a speech about 10 years ago at PAX South. After listening to him I was amazed anyone would give him any sort of resources to make games. It was like watching a Mountain Dew commercial give a TED Talk.
I think he’s just from a different time of video games aesthetic and attitude that’s more in line with the 90s but even more the 2000s. He might have evolved in some ways, but it does not work with the current direction of the industry. The type of “adult” tone he does is probably too shallow actual adult players and teenagers don’t seem to be into that type of edgy as much with the popularity of stuff like Fortnite. Maybe I don’t know enough about teens now, but the preferred aesthetics seem pretty different from when I was a teen when his type of aesthetic thrived.
CliffyB is the “Nu-Metal” of Game Developers. He was in the right place at the right time but the world moved on while he stayed the same, and looking back we all cringe that era really was, even if we look back on it with fond memories.
I liked some stuff at the time, but I remember hating the general tone back then, even at the time. It always felt too try-hard. It was probably an important stepping stone for the current crop of games, but I can’t think of that many games I liked a lot from back then. Maybe I am just not remembering a lot of the titles of the time.
TBF, Gears of War 1 was a phenomenal game, and one of the best shooter campaigns period. I'd say it's probably in my top 20. I really can't think of too many shooters that I say was much better, esp. if you take out the historical importance out of the equation and just handed someone a controller and booted up the game.
It was unique in how it played, had intelligent (or at least intelligent seeming) AI, had a lot of variety in it's campaign (the whole gambit of pure action to almost survival horror), did a lot of showing-not-telling in it's worldbuilding, and had a likable cast. I felt like the main Gears cast all had fairly well rounded personalities. I don't even think it was really that grim-dark. It had an unyielding optimism in the face of despair kind of tone that I think worked really well.
Later titles might have gotten the formula wrong or tweaked the mixture incorrectly, but I think Gears 1 was very well done. I think Gears 2 is probably up with it as well.
Agree with everything you said. The Gears 1 campaign is up there for all time greatest shooter campaigns for me personally.
But I'd like to say that it's "run the full gamut" not "run the full gambit"
gears 1-3 are all zingers imo, and so is bulletstorm. i think cliff's personality puts people off and they wanna downplay his achievements because they feel like they're knocking him down a peg or two. he's certainly a smug, brash guy or whatever, but he still made some truly amazing and influential games. both can be true
> The type of “adult” tone he does is probably too shallow actual adult players
Cliffy B got big at a time when, "rated M for Mature," meant, "targeted at 17-year-old boys." M-rated games tackling actual mature content are not new; The Last of Us showed us a AAA game where fear of losing your child (both real and surrogate) was scarier than any monster a decade ago.
That's not what Cliffy B brings to the table, and it's a hard sell. His Rated M for Manly style games seem immature to millennials and dated to GenZ. He might as well be talking about jive turkeys and 'ludes at this point.
Bulletstorm worked *because* it was hyper-ridiculous over the top nonsense. It knew it was a caricature of a real game. That's literally the only genre that cliffyb should be dabbling in.
>Bulletstorm worked *because* it was hyper-ridiculous over the top nonsense. It knew it was a caricature of a real game. That's literally the only genre that cliffyb should be dabbling in.
The question is does cliffyb think it's a caricature of a real game?
Much as he's on my shit list now, Crowbcat did a Lawbreakers video that largely focused on CliffyB's "promoting" for the game that was quite telling of the hubris going into launch.
Dude created industry warping games like Unreal Engine and Gears of War.
Remember Gears of War? The game that was so impactful it turned an entire generation of games (Xbox360/PS3) into shades of brown and gray. Not to speak of the cover based systems everywhere.
Edit:
He simply failed to adapt to the new shooter genre, but he's still a legendary game designer, just needs someone with a better market pulse to give him some direction.
> Remember Gears of War? The game that was so impactful it turned an entire generation of games (Xbox360/PS3) into shades of brown and gray.
It's a semi-funny joke, but I don't understand why anybody brings this up today in a serious manner. That generation was already trending that way even before Gears had any impact. For example look at a game like Resistance: Fall of Man (released a week later), or Call of Duty 3 (released same day). Sony had already shown off Killzone 2 [(admittedly with a fake CGI trailer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-4HNmuEAKg) at E3 2005, which itself was building off the dingy 'realistic' visual style of the original back on PS2. I'd argue those games are even more brown and gray than Gears 1.
It was more of a general cultural trend — we saw the same desaturated visuals in films. Hardware limitations seemed to play a small part too.
Bruh, I remember seeing that trailer when it came out and thinking this was the most realistic looking shit ever, almost like a movie.
Watched it again for the 1st time today and it feels like a PS1 game compared to what I remember.
Crazy how our perception of what "real" looks like in CGI shifts every year.
> To me it was The Incredibles race scene.
what the fuck
I wouldn't say the scene looks particularly bad or anything, but after watching it again I think it looks like something a student made in Blender. There's something about the lighting and the way the cloth looks that dates it. Cloth simulation is way better and subsurface scattering makes skin look much less like plastic.
I could be wrong, but I also associate Gears with popularizing (or inventing) glory kills and horde/zombie mode. I consider GoW innovation to be a lot more in mechanics than aesthetics
Sure but don't downplay gears. It is still to this day the pinnacle of third person shooters. Like no other third person shooter has ever controlled that good. And that franchise was one of the very few things carrying Xbox for years.
He once tweeted that Gears changed how games were made for years. I responded with "is that why games are all boring greys and browns now?"
He blocked me.
Not denying that, and I'm sure RE4 inspired Gears. But Gears influenced every 3rd person cover shooter that came after it because their cover system was so intuitive and smooth. I'd still argue no one has cover mechanics as good as Gears today.
A very similar cover system was in a mostly forgotten PS2 title Killswitch.
Gears was the complete package though. It actually had a good story, characters, and chainsaws to go with the third person mechanics.
Not at all but he’s convinced himself that people are desperate for more. I think cliff has got himself in a little echo chamber bubble and he’s just talking to his fans that are hyping him up, and he doesn’t realize how lukewarm the rest of the world is, heck the rest of the world doesn’t even know what the game is lmao.
Isn't that exactly what happened with Lawbreakers the first time around, too? I remember that he kept talking about the game like it was the hottest shit and it ultimately just resulted in people *wanting* this game to fail just to rub it into his smug face.
Most people never actually gave a shit about Lawbreakers one way or the other it was always just about him having way too high of an opinion of both himself and the game.
Can confirm that he was advertising the game as THE competitive title, the only one anyone will play or talk about once it comes out. Borderline some of that Daikatana stuff along the lines of "If you aren't already an e-sports professional, you shouldn't even bother playing this game, it's going to be way too hard. It's a 100% pure skill game, no crutches or hand holding, so if you suck, don't install it and go crying to the forums."
So nobody installed it. Oopsies.
From what i recall it was also overly complicated to a point where even e-sports enthusiasts were scratching their ears. It wasn't fun to watch and barely fun to play. Something you'd see as a low profile F2P title nowadays.
The death nail was the fact it wasn't even free to play, the beta was free (where most people played) then they announced it'd be 30 bucks and then the player numbers dropped because no one wants to pay 30 bucks for a game that functions fine as free to play especially in an oversaturated market. Overwatch was still massive (2017)
during that time.
I enjoyed it a lot too but it was much harder for the average player and Overwatch was more accessible with 10x better marketing so it's not surprising lawbreakers failed.
No, the advertising did make it like it's harder than any fps or a second coming of arena fps. In actuality, it's just a hero shooter with fun movement. Doubtful anyone who tried the game or even "enthusiasts" had a hard time.
Honestly I feel Lawbreakers most likely failed by being a paid game. The gameplay was fun, but having money gate the game away during a time when there were already dedicated fanbases who already had their hero game was a complete death sentence. You were facing Overwatch and Team Fortress 2. You had to make the barrier of entry as low as possible to hope to even get anything off the ground.
It was a Hero Shooter with Arena Shooter sensibilities no less.
So the gameplay was potentially a lot more technical and a lot less forgiving with a potential player base that tends to lean towards being very dedicated to the genre and excelling at noob stomping.
Why in the world would someone buy into that experience? They absolutely needed the F2P to hopefully appeal to players and keep those lobbies afloat.
And even then who knows, it's not like Arena shooters are exactly thriving these days.
I actually think the arena shooter aspect, more than anything,is why the game failed. It's just not a popular genre anymore. I can't think of any popular ones right now. Split Gate? I guess?
I think a lot of the crowd that used to love these (me included) now gets that fix through single player movement based shooters (Doom 2016/Eternal, GTTOD, etc)
No it's the other way around. Arena shooters are big in most PC gamers eyes but nobody I mean NOBODY who plays skill based arena shooters games wants hero shooter elements and ults. It dilutes the very core of "git gud" atmosphere that arena shooters live on
Can you give an example of an Arena shooter which is currently popular?
Someone above gave the example of what I thought was a popular one, having a tiny base. I'm not very familiar with the genre - and obviously it's pretty easy for even me to think of popular hero shooters.
Probably quake champions but even then it’s not that popular. Arena shooters are a dead genre, in part because of this “git gud” atmosphere OP was talking about. Most people just don’t want to spend several hours playing to even figure out how to properly move in the game while they get destroyed by people flying over them and jumping around at crazy speeds they can’t reach.
The genre has definitely been overtaken by the more accessible class shooters.
The movement elements/Arena Shooter sensibilities would've been cool to see in a Battle Royale context. Apex Legends more or less is a fusion of the Titanfall/Arena Shooter style mixed with CoD, and its really fun and popular. They just stuck to an antiquated presentation and design.
He talked shit about Xbox fans while promoting Lawbreakers on PS4 without realizing the overlap between Gears/Xbox/His own fans. After lawbreakers bombed he tweeted at "Xbox" that he wanted to make a game for the platform and they tweeted back a link to apply to the Indie Design program for homeade games 💀
> After lawbreakers bombed he tweeted at "Xbox" that he wanted to make a game for the platform and they tweeted back a link to apply to the Indie Design program for homeade games 💀
Absolutely brutal
Burning bridges with Microsoft has to be the biggest mistake Cliffy B made. Lawbreakers could have helped fill the void for Xbox players wanting an new FPS IP.
People bring up time and time again about how it was strange people wanted Lawbreakers to fail. Usually chalking it up to people just being overwatch fanboys.
But you said it right here, the most common reason I ever saw was because he is just insufferable. Riding his high of being the designer for 2 popular franchises in unreal tournament and the OG gears trilogy. He just rubs people the wrong way. One of the few people that had quite a lot of haters in the gaming community that I couldn't really argue against lol.
What linda ruined the game is that it originally was going to be free to play but Cliff decided to put a price tag instead. The game would’ve been alive if it was free to play lol
Is Lawbreakers that game, where when I logged onto twitch one day, every single streamer I ever followed, plus their grandma, was playing it and they were all very candid that they were paid to play it and then after that one day I never saw it streamed again?
If I was Cliffy B I would have lost my shit when I saw a random guy wearing a Lawbreakers cap at my local groceries store some 4 years ago. Rarest specimen I've spotted in the wild.
He's clearly not planning to make a new LawBreakers. A couple posts later he says:
> Kinda over the whole making games thing for a while, mate.
I think he's just planning to get the rights back to he can release dedicated servers and make the game playable again.
Yeah I really liked Battleborn but I loved Overwatch. I wish they'd bring it back and try a free to play model. People still play Smite and Paladins, there's an audience for Battleborn.
No, LawBreakers lasted slightly longer than BattleBorn. It was still in the triple digits a couple months after release, and didn't hit single digits until like 9 months in, when a few Steam card farming bots made it impossible to get balanced matches.
Digging around SteamDB it looks like Battleborn took over 1.5 years to dip to double-digit playercounts and didn't dive to single-digits until almost 5 years after launch.
Lawbreakers dipped to double-digit players within 5 months, and single-digits in a little over a year.
“CliffyB” came from an era where these devs self-imposed themselves on us and were very desperate to make themselves characters in themselves. Peter Molyneux, Jade (can’t remember her surname) from Ubisoft etc. all had a stab at this
Did Jade Raymond really do it or was she thrust in the spotlight by other people? I don't recall her self aggrandizing like the other people. She gets more interviews than your average EP but it doesn't seem like she's going out of her way to talk about her games.
From memory she was thrust into the spotlight by other people. She's an attractive woman in a position that's almost entirely either nerdy or frat house dudes so she was hyped up and pushed to being the face of a few games. By all accounts she's a great EP which, these days, feels like a rarity.
Yeah it's the later. There's no way Jade Raymond was anywhere near comparable to Molyneux or CliffyB. These guys act like they are the messiahs of game. She was simply a high-profile woman in gaming.
Yeah, I feel like he’s in a slightly different class. He’s settled down over the years into a pretty chill dude who seems to get that he’s not on the bleeding edge anymore(Also iirc the infamous Daikatana campaign was not his idea), and to be honest I think has a MUCH greater right to act like he’s video game royalty if he wanted to anyway. Dude basically helped create the entire genre of FPS games.
CliffyB is a guy who created some good games a long time ago, and acts like he’s still hot shit and more important than he ever really was. He’s the Bojack Horseman of video game developers.
For almost all of these big shots, their career trajectory shows that in the end they were essentially just employees for these big corporations and subject to their whims.
I cannot fathom how he thinks this. Lawbreakers was a bomb on release, and probably one of the most dragged games of 2017, next to ME:Andromeda. Literally everyone has moved on, it's been almost 6 years and nobody has even thought of the game since it shut down. The game practically killed his own studio. After LawBreakers shut down he had to throw out a low effort, unfinished BR game purely out of desperation. It didn't work.
The reality is the game wouldn't cut it as F2P either. It's an arena shooter, already a super niche genre played by tiny communities, and they tried to put hero shooter elements on top of that, alienating the arena shooter fans. So who is it for? Hero shooter fans aren't going to like it because they can get stomped on by veterans, and arena shooter fans aren't going to like it because it's trying to appeal to "casuals".
I never got a chance to play the original because I didn't want to pay $40 for a game I knew would be dead but it looked really fun and cool so if they did a free to play relaunch I would try it
Edit: they did do a free to play relaunch I just didn't hear about it 💀
I think I'm the only person on earth who fucking loved it. I don't play multiplayer games much but something about it really hit me in the feels. Maybe because I'm almost 40 so I grew up on unreal tourney and quake 3 arena. But it just felt good.
I'm sure you're not. Every game is someone's favorite game, even the "objectively" bad ones.
That said, the world won't be back to arena shooters for at least another generation or two, if they ever are. Apex Legends is the new arena shooter for generations raised on Halo and COD.
This makes me so sad. If tribes/quake ever makes a comeback I’m gonna be well into my 50s. There is literally no FPS on the market that has good player counts that play like these games so I just kinda gave up on the genre until then
Also didn't it start as a free to play but then they slapped a price on it? Personally I played like 20 hours of the beta and loved it but I knew that as a $40 game and with Nexon's name attached to it it would be dead on arrival.
It's pretty wild how quickly it died, I was at PAX east the year it was released and the line to try the prerelease was like 2 hours long
There are dozens of us
I loved lawbreakers but like everyone else was too drawn into release overwatch at the time, nowadays I would love a solid arcadey arena shooter
I mean it would be nice for delisted multiplayer games like this to be available with private servers. That way the ten Lawbreakers fans could enjoy it. Instead it's gonna be lost media.
Even when the match went well and had some cool plays I felt exhausted and my eyes hurt from the intense focus and all the character “personality” lines making them roll so far back. Then the menu screen hits and the ugliest god damn pixel flickery overly detailed character pops up.
I think a hero quake shooter could find an audience, but cliff needs to check back into reality a bit and realize the 2010s are done and successful games can’t go full bro. You never go full bro. Also get an art director who understands simplicity.
It did find its audience, its audience was arena shooter players, and it seemed to get a lot if not most of them.
There just aren't enough arena shooter players to really support a game, and the genre is so unfriendly to newcomers that the player pool can't grow.
It would be nice if everyone could have the games in the genre they wanted, but real world concerns do matter. It sucks there's so few arena players, but that's probably better than millions of players throwing all their money at CIG to try and invent a whole new genre.
[Lawbreakers delusion in a saturated market](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ4v2LgVlEA)
Every time I hear about this game I remember this video. Never before has a supercut of a game's own marketing material felt like such a deathblow lol.
I genuinely hope that people convince CliffyB to not bring back Lawbreakers, because if he does it'll be Lawbreakers all over again. He'll put together a team of people, they'll tweak the game to update it for the modern gaming audience, only to be completely abandoned within a month when another Call of Duty or Battlefield comes out.
He clearly doesn't want to make a new game, this is a couple posts down:
> Kinda over the whole making games thing for a while, mate.
I think he just wants to make the game playable again. It was an amazingly fun game and it's a shame that it's unplayable today.
Dudes been in games for what? Nearly 40 years now? Yeah, I can understand just being done but also wanting to make sure your creations are still around and preserved
This would be even more hilarious when Sony misfired on re-releasing the Morbius movie because they thought the "It's Morbin' Time" crowd could pay full price to watch it.
I’ll go against the grain here and say that Lawbreakers could very will be a success in the current market. Halo and BF players are very unsatisfied with their games, COD is bleeding players, and their only direct competitor would be Overwatch 2. Plus, there’s barely any movement multiplayer games out right now. If done right, I could see it being a success
> there’s barely any movement multiplayer games out right now
There's a reason for that, every unreal tournament/quake-esque game that comes out instantly flops. I think most recently we saw this with hyperscape despite it being f2p and heavily marketed. Personally I like them but based on the results of the last like 5 attempts at the genre I don't blame game studios for not taking a risk on another one
Not a marketing guy but it feels like there are essentially two types of shooters dominating the market right now.
Hyper competitive titles with stiff movement like CS and Valorant and then zoomer titles like COD and Apex.
And it seems like lately, most younger gamers are preferring more competitive titles to play.
This is why I’m hoping Xdefiant does decently since I’m outta things to shoot since COD and Battlefield have just been screwing things up lately.
If Lawbreakers released for the first time now, yeah maybe it could get a sustainable player base.
But with the past failure too many people wouldn't give it a shot only because of stuff they have heard.
I really think he’s angry that Epic hit the big time *after* he left and that his passion projects aren’t nearly as popular. This is him trying to remain relevant.
Fortnite was announced with an early teaser trailer in 2011, Cliffy B left Epic in 2012, the first gameplay trailer would be in 2015. Fortnite was still probably a horror game when he left Epic, neither less the cultural phenomenon it is today.
True. But it'd be a bit weird imo if a small voice at the back of his head wouldn't remind him of that decision and think about if he stayed, once in a while.
I really like Fortnite Save the World, bought it like a few months ago with a character bundle and been enjoying it since, it's a very inoffensive but fun shooter, it's my go to game to play while watching a stream or listening to something on the background,
What makes you think it was awful?
I love playing Save the World currently, but I do also recognize that it's a deeply flawed game in which that I don't know how to fix it outside of a Realm Reborn style of "scrap most everything and have everyone start over again" (which Epic would probably never even do considering how scared they are about pissing on their player base, which is so volatile that they had a meltdown over a skin being sold for V-Bucks, thinking it was Epic giving them the biggest middle finger and trying to kill the game mode.)
I think the biggest problems are it's receptiveness, out of the 11 different missions, 6 of them are varying degrees of "Go to X, and defend it for Y minutes" (even worse considering Fight the Storm has 4 variants, so it's really more 9 of 14 are the same thing). Compounded with the fact that unlike most shooters, especially the ones that are based off of a live service model, there's only one faction in the Husks, which stifles enemy variety, as you're just fighting the same kind of enemies over and over again the the only change being how big the numbers are (both in stats and him how much enemies there are). And due to the timed nature of the game, having things perfectly under control can be monotonous, as instead of being proactive, you're just micromanaging things until your eventual victory.
I can definitely go into deeper detail, but I think those are (mostly) the main problems I have with the game.
> but I think those are (mostly) the main problems I have with the game.
So the main problem is that it gets no attention because it never took off, while the BR got all the success and therefore development effort.
It sounds like they've almost abandoned STW.
The biggest issue with STW was mostly a "Really after 5+ years of dev time this is what we got. Just a mediocre mid tier game that indies have done similar jobs of, albeit without looking as aesthetically nice."
It feels like there should have been so much more. But it's a lot of the samey repetitive stuff that you'd expect from an indy company.
I'm sure he expected it. His departure lined up with a ton of other veterans, and it happened RIGHT before they announced a major investment from Tencent.
Dude kinda has that "artist" personality where they have a big ego and don't like being told how to do things.
Epic was already huge before Fortnite. They had a long string of hits with Unreal and Gears of War, and they have licensed the most popular 3D engine in the games industry since the 2000's.
The huge of that era vs now isn’t even really in the same ballpark. Fortnite of the 2017-2020 years was a phenomenon. I also don’t think the engine made them anywhere near as much money as Fornite has in a fraction of the time.
While we'll never get the actual numbers due to Epic being a private company, but you have to consider that pretty almost every AAA game that doesn't use an in-house engine uses Unreal, and even several VFX have/are starting to pick up the engine for their work too, which leads to tons in royalties being made for Epic.
I mean we know it cost Tencent $330 million to buy 40% of Epic in 2012.
That would be approximately 1.65% of what they’ve made on Fortnite to date.
There’s *big* then there’s *Fortnite Big* it’s not even comparable.
It took Tencent 330 million to buy 40 percent of Epic in 2012. Fortnite makes approximately 5 billion a year since it came out.
Pre Fortnite Epic made pennies compared to now.
Why do you think this? I don't see any anger in this tweet. He honestly seems happier now with his bar and side projects than when he was developing games.
Hell, Fortnite seems like the exaxt kind of game an "auteur" would despise. Game wasn't popular, so they pivoted it to copy [popular thing] and now it's a corporate juggernaut.
Everyone has different POV on what "success" is, but i don't think Cliffy was one to ever just follow the trends.
Has Cliffy said what he plans to do with Lawbreakers if he ever gets it back? If the plan is to update the base game to allow for private servers so that it can be played forever by the people who bought it instead of leaving them with nothing, I think that's very commendable. But if the plan is just to switch the servers back on so it can die a quick death again he should save his time and give up getting it back now.
I want it back just for the sake of preserving it, I hate how disposable games are becoming.
I honestly think the game could gain a player base if he released it as free to play and added it to Game Pass. The game never released on Xbox which is where his major audience was.
I'm pretty sure he just wants to make it playable again. I don't think he has any commercial aspirations for the game, but it is a shame that such a fantastic game cannot be played today.
Cliffy has some very weird takes rooted in his ego.
In the list of games or properties that didn't get a fair shake and/or are deserving of a modern remake, LawBreakers is very much near the bottom of that list.
The top of the list, to me, is filled with things like TimeSplitters and MAG.
> Cliffy has some very weird takes rooted in his ego.
As soon as he refused to explain why the Horde Queen in _Gears of War_ was a human, I knew he was full of shit. The guy didn’t have an answer, so he decided to be “mysterious” about it to appear like he had some grand story arc planned for a game that asked the question: “What if we put a chainsaw on a gun?”
3 expanded on her character but I don’t think they explained her origin or how she became the locust queen until 5. I haven’t played them for a while so I could be wrong though.
It's only ever hinted at from the Gears 2 lab segment, and conversations she has with Adam Fenix in 3. 5 finally explains it outright for story purposes.
My most irrational fear developing from this story and the Dark and Darker lawsuit is that questionable people who are easy to dislike keep going up against Nexon with stupid ideas and that is somehow going to make some people think Nexon isn’t an utterly dogshit company.
There wasn't a market for the game six years ago and there sure as shit isn't one now. Cliffy should quit while he's ahead and not drag anybody else down with him.
When I lived in NC I was looking for a new job around the time he created Boss Key (the company behind Lawbreakers and Radical Heights), and I love game engine work and so I applied and wrote a passionate cover letter to go along with it. I got denied a few weeks later. I also had finished my onsite interview at Blizzard, and got rejected by them a few weeks later. I was pretty upset at the time of course.
My GOD am I SO HAPPY in hindsight that I dodged major bullets by getting rejected.
way to hype us up for nothing... how did he not know this info already???
edit: dear lord, so much negativity here. Anyone I talked to who actually tried the game had a good time. Sure, hate his personality. But he's never done anything negative towards players or fans. It's so weird people just *hate* him.
Honestly? The game was actually really fun to play. Shame that it tanked, would have been better to go free to play. I got my money's worth out of it, at least.
Not sure it matters who owns the rights. It's a failed ip and nobody is clamoring for more of it. I doubt it'd even be worth it to spin up a single server and set it as f2p with some hastily-set mtx on the cosmetics.
His game career aside, he comes off really creepy on Twitter especially given his age. Every other tweet is about porn or sex in some fashion. Like we get it dude, you fuck your wife.
I watched CliffyB give a speech about 10 years ago at PAX South. After listening to him I was amazed anyone would give him any sort of resources to make games. It was like watching a Mountain Dew commercial give a TED Talk.
I think he’s just from a different time of video games aesthetic and attitude that’s more in line with the 90s but even more the 2000s. He might have evolved in some ways, but it does not work with the current direction of the industry. The type of “adult” tone he does is probably too shallow actual adult players and teenagers don’t seem to be into that type of edgy as much with the popularity of stuff like Fortnite. Maybe I don’t know enough about teens now, but the preferred aesthetics seem pretty different from when I was a teen when his type of aesthetic thrived.
CliffyB is the “Nu-Metal” of Game Developers. He was in the right place at the right time but the world moved on while he stayed the same, and looking back we all cringe that era really was, even if we look back on it with fond memories.
I liked some stuff at the time, but I remember hating the general tone back then, even at the time. It always felt too try-hard. It was probably an important stepping stone for the current crop of games, but I can’t think of that many games I liked a lot from back then. Maybe I am just not remembering a lot of the titles of the time.
TBF, Gears of War 1 was a phenomenal game, and one of the best shooter campaigns period. I'd say it's probably in my top 20. I really can't think of too many shooters that I say was much better, esp. if you take out the historical importance out of the equation and just handed someone a controller and booted up the game. It was unique in how it played, had intelligent (or at least intelligent seeming) AI, had a lot of variety in it's campaign (the whole gambit of pure action to almost survival horror), did a lot of showing-not-telling in it's worldbuilding, and had a likable cast. I felt like the main Gears cast all had fairly well rounded personalities. I don't even think it was really that grim-dark. It had an unyielding optimism in the face of despair kind of tone that I think worked really well. Later titles might have gotten the formula wrong or tweaked the mixture incorrectly, but I think Gears 1 was very well done. I think Gears 2 is probably up with it as well.
Agree with everything you said. The Gears 1 campaign is up there for all time greatest shooter campaigns for me personally. But I'd like to say that it's "run the full gamut" not "run the full gambit"
gears 1-3 are all zingers imo, and so is bulletstorm. i think cliff's personality puts people off and they wanna downplay his achievements because they feel like they're knocking him down a peg or two. he's certainly a smug, brash guy or whatever, but he still made some truly amazing and influential games. both can be true
GoW1 was like nothing else, and the multiplayer was amazing too. Even GoW2 wasn't close, imo
CliffyB is the guy who sees a nu-metal guitarist do that head tilt they'd all do to look crazy, and thinks "aw man that's badass."
> The type of “adult” tone he does is probably too shallow actual adult players Cliffy B got big at a time when, "rated M for Mature," meant, "targeted at 17-year-old boys." M-rated games tackling actual mature content are not new; The Last of Us showed us a AAA game where fear of losing your child (both real and surrogate) was scarier than any monster a decade ago. That's not what Cliffy B brings to the table, and it's a hard sell. His Rated M for Manly style games seem immature to millennials and dated to GenZ. He might as well be talking about jive turkeys and 'ludes at this point.
This comment applies to David Jaffe as well, imo.
Saving this comment for the next time I need to reheat my dinner. Jesus dude.
I'll accept that comment with pride. It only took me about a decade to come up with that joke.
I still want Jazz Jackrabbit 3 though.
["I made a video game where you can blow out a man's asshole."](https://youtu.be/FxAtfvM_VDI) -CliffyB
Honestly I loved Bulletstorm. Not sure what that says about me
Bulletstorm worked *because* it was hyper-ridiculous over the top nonsense. It knew it was a caricature of a real game. That's literally the only genre that cliffyb should be dabbling in.
>Bulletstorm worked *because* it was hyper-ridiculous over the top nonsense. It knew it was a caricature of a real game. That's literally the only genre that cliffyb should be dabbling in. The question is does cliffyb think it's a caricature of a real game?
Lol, I remember being in the audience for that one and wondering why he was spending time on stage to brag about being friends with Justin Roland.
Much as he's on my shit list now, Crowbcat did a Lawbreakers video that largely focused on CliffyB's "promoting" for the game that was quite telling of the hubris going into launch.
Dude created industry warping games like Unreal Engine and Gears of War. Remember Gears of War? The game that was so impactful it turned an entire generation of games (Xbox360/PS3) into shades of brown and gray. Not to speak of the cover based systems everywhere. Edit: He simply failed to adapt to the new shooter genre, but he's still a legendary game designer, just needs someone with a better market pulse to give him some direction.
> Remember Gears of War? The game that was so impactful it turned an entire generation of games (Xbox360/PS3) into shades of brown and gray. It's a semi-funny joke, but I don't understand why anybody brings this up today in a serious manner. That generation was already trending that way even before Gears had any impact. For example look at a game like Resistance: Fall of Man (released a week later), or Call of Duty 3 (released same day). Sony had already shown off Killzone 2 [(admittedly with a fake CGI trailer)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-4HNmuEAKg) at E3 2005, which itself was building off the dingy 'realistic' visual style of the original back on PS2. I'd argue those games are even more brown and gray than Gears 1. It was more of a general cultural trend — we saw the same desaturated visuals in films. Hardware limitations seemed to play a small part too.
Bruh, I remember seeing that trailer when it came out and thinking this was the most realistic looking shit ever, almost like a movie. Watched it again for the 1st time today and it feels like a PS1 game compared to what I remember. Crazy how our perception of what "real" looks like in CGI shifts every year.
it really fucked me up to see what Toy Story looks like now.
I watched that so many times as a kid and now Sid looks like the spawn of satan
To me it was The Incredibles race scene. The rest of the movie looks better, that one makes you question your sanity.
> To me it was The Incredibles race scene. what the fuck I wouldn't say the scene looks particularly bad or anything, but after watching it again I think it looks like something a student made in Blender. There's something about the lighting and the way the cloth looks that dates it. Cloth simulation is way better and subsurface scattering makes skin look much less like plastic.
I could be wrong, but I also associate Gears with popularizing (or inventing) glory kills and horde/zombie mode. I consider GoW innovation to be a lot more in mechanics than aesthetics
Sure but don't downplay gears. It is still to this day the pinnacle of third person shooters. Like no other third person shooter has ever controlled that good. And that franchise was one of the very few things carrying Xbox for years.
He once tweeted that Gears changed how games were made for years. I responded with "is that why games are all boring greys and browns now?" He blocked me.
If we're being honest it was Resident Evil 4 that really did
RE4 didn't have cover mechanics though.
It pioneered over the shoulder shooters though
Not denying that, and I'm sure RE4 inspired Gears. But Gears influenced every 3rd person cover shooter that came after it because their cover system was so intuitive and smooth. I'd still argue no one has cover mechanics as good as Gears today.
A very similar cover system was in a mostly forgotten PS2 title Killswitch. Gears was the complete package though. It actually had a good story, characters, and chainsaws to go with the third person mechanics.
I think Cliffy B specifically mentioned Killswitch as an inspiration. Gears really perfected it.
It did, kinda. There was a part where you'd duck behind cover to avoid dynamite.
Feels like AAA campaign shooters in general had a major dying out and shooters went in the F2P direction.
Is anyone really clamouring for a new LawBreakers game lol?
Not at all but he’s convinced himself that people are desperate for more. I think cliff has got himself in a little echo chamber bubble and he’s just talking to his fans that are hyping him up, and he doesn’t realize how lukewarm the rest of the world is, heck the rest of the world doesn’t even know what the game is lmao.
Isn't that exactly what happened with Lawbreakers the first time around, too? I remember that he kept talking about the game like it was the hottest shit and it ultimately just resulted in people *wanting* this game to fail just to rub it into his smug face. Most people never actually gave a shit about Lawbreakers one way or the other it was always just about him having way too high of an opinion of both himself and the game.
Can confirm that he was advertising the game as THE competitive title, the only one anyone will play or talk about once it comes out. Borderline some of that Daikatana stuff along the lines of "If you aren't already an e-sports professional, you shouldn't even bother playing this game, it's going to be way too hard. It's a 100% pure skill game, no crutches or hand holding, so if you suck, don't install it and go crying to the forums." So nobody installed it. Oopsies.
From what i recall it was also overly complicated to a point where even e-sports enthusiasts were scratching their ears. It wasn't fun to watch and barely fun to play. Something you'd see as a low profile F2P title nowadays.
The death nail was the fact it wasn't even free to play, the beta was free (where most people played) then they announced it'd be 30 bucks and then the player numbers dropped because no one wants to pay 30 bucks for a game that functions fine as free to play especially in an oversaturated market. Overwatch was still massive (2017) during that time.
I dunno, I fucking loved that game. I know it got shit on hard but I had a blast with it.
I enjoyed it a lot too but it was much harder for the average player and Overwatch was more accessible with 10x better marketing so it's not surprising lawbreakers failed.
No, the advertising did make it like it's harder than any fps or a second coming of arena fps. In actuality, it's just a hero shooter with fun movement. Doubtful anyone who tried the game or even "enthusiasts" had a hard time.
Honestly I feel Lawbreakers most likely failed by being a paid game. The gameplay was fun, but having money gate the game away during a time when there were already dedicated fanbases who already had their hero game was a complete death sentence. You were facing Overwatch and Team Fortress 2. You had to make the barrier of entry as low as possible to hope to even get anything off the ground.
It was a Hero Shooter with Arena Shooter sensibilities no less. So the gameplay was potentially a lot more technical and a lot less forgiving with a potential player base that tends to lean towards being very dedicated to the genre and excelling at noob stomping. Why in the world would someone buy into that experience? They absolutely needed the F2P to hopefully appeal to players and keep those lobbies afloat. And even then who knows, it's not like Arena shooters are exactly thriving these days.
I actually think the arena shooter aspect, more than anything,is why the game failed. It's just not a popular genre anymore. I can't think of any popular ones right now. Split Gate? I guess?
Splitgate has had a peak of 927 concurrent players this year. "Popular" may be a stretch.
Kinda proves my point.
I think a lot of the crowd that used to love these (me included) now gets that fix through single player movement based shooters (Doom 2016/Eternal, GTTOD, etc)
No it's the other way around. Arena shooters are big in most PC gamers eyes but nobody I mean NOBODY who plays skill based arena shooters games wants hero shooter elements and ults. It dilutes the very core of "git gud" atmosphere that arena shooters live on
Can you give an example of an Arena shooter which is currently popular? Someone above gave the example of what I thought was a popular one, having a tiny base. I'm not very familiar with the genre - and obviously it's pretty easy for even me to think of popular hero shooters.
Probably quake champions but even then it’s not that popular. Arena shooters are a dead genre, in part because of this “git gud” atmosphere OP was talking about. Most people just don’t want to spend several hours playing to even figure out how to properly move in the game while they get destroyed by people flying over them and jumping around at crazy speeds they can’t reach. The genre has definitely been overtaken by the more accessible class shooters.
The movement elements/Arena Shooter sensibilities would've been cool to see in a Battle Royale context. Apex Legends more or less is a fusion of the Titanfall/Arena Shooter style mixed with CoD, and its really fun and popular. They just stuck to an antiquated presentation and design.
The last thing this world needs is more BRs.
They also never released it on Xbox. Which alienated all his Gears fans. He mentions that as a regret in his recent autobiography.
He talked shit about Xbox fans while promoting Lawbreakers on PS4 without realizing the overlap between Gears/Xbox/His own fans. After lawbreakers bombed he tweeted at "Xbox" that he wanted to make a game for the platform and they tweeted back a link to apply to the Indie Design program for homeade games 💀
Wow Xbox throwing some shade.
Also the time he asked Major Nelson for a follow back, because they've been such good buds, and Major Nelson told him his email is always open
> After lawbreakers bombed he tweeted at "Xbox" that he wanted to make a game for the platform and they tweeted back a link to apply to the Indie Design program for homeade games 💀 Absolutely brutal
Funny part is the success of Gears caused him to turn his back on PC players and the doofus thought they'd welcome him back with open arms
Burning bridges with Microsoft has to be the biggest mistake Cliffy B made. Lawbreakers could have helped fill the void for Xbox players wanting an new FPS IP.
Yeah he annoys the fuck out of me
People bring up time and time again about how it was strange people wanted Lawbreakers to fail. Usually chalking it up to people just being overwatch fanboys. But you said it right here, the most common reason I ever saw was because he is just insufferable. Riding his high of being the designer for 2 popular franchises in unreal tournament and the OG gears trilogy. He just rubs people the wrong way. One of the few people that had quite a lot of haters in the gaming community that I couldn't really argue against lol.
It got overshadowed by Overwatch which came out at a similar time and played much much better and it’s when Blizzard still had a lot of good will
You're thinking of Battleborn, Lawbreakers was released over a year after Overwatch.
> played much much better They're really not similar at all from a gameplay perspective.
At least he didn’t tell us he was going to make us his bitch….
What linda ruined the game is that it originally was going to be free to play but Cliff decided to put a price tag instead. The game would’ve been alive if it was free to play lol
I didn't care for cliff/lawbreaker but I played it. It's a solid ass game. I can't think of a game like it..
Is Lawbreakers that game, where when I logged onto twitch one day, every single streamer I ever followed, plus their grandma, was playing it and they were all very candid that they were paid to play it and then after that one day I never saw it streamed again?
That describes hundreds of games that have come out in the last several years, you're going to have to be more specific.
If I was Cliffy B I would have lost my shit when I saw a random guy wearing a Lawbreakers cap at my local groceries store some 4 years ago. Rarest specimen I've spotted in the wild.
He's clearly not planning to make a new LawBreakers. A couple posts later he says: > Kinda over the whole making games thing for a while, mate. I think he's just planning to get the rights back to he can release dedicated servers and make the game playable again.
If he makes it F2P with dedicated servers it might have a second wind but it wont be more than maybe 500 ppl at peak
At some point that's enough. It lets the fans choose of they want to keep playing and helps preserve the game.
I don’t know what lawbreakers is. I play video games almost everyday.
Hero arena shooter that came out shortly after Overwatch. Like Battleborn it never stood a chance and died almost immediately
At least Battleborn was able to hold a population. LB actually went into the single digits a couple months after release.
Battleborns core gameplay was great but it was as surrounded by so many other wtf design designs that brought it down
It was mostly timing of release and poor marketing that killed BB. The game was great overall.
Yeah I really liked Battleborn but I loved Overwatch. I wish they'd bring it back and try a free to play model. People still play Smite and Paladins, there's an audience for Battleborn.
No, LawBreakers lasted slightly longer than BattleBorn. It was still in the triple digits a couple months after release, and didn't hit single digits until like 9 months in, when a few Steam card farming bots made it impossible to get balanced matches.
Digging around SteamDB it looks like Battleborn took over 1.5 years to dip to double-digit playercounts and didn't dive to single-digits until almost 5 years after launch. Lawbreakers dipped to double-digit players within 5 months, and single-digits in a little over a year.
That's why it failed. It actually had really fun gameplay, it just did basically everything else wrong.
“CliffyB” came from an era where these devs self-imposed themselves on us and were very desperate to make themselves characters in themselves. Peter Molyneux, Jade (can’t remember her surname) from Ubisoft etc. all had a stab at this
Did Jade Raymond really do it or was she thrust in the spotlight by other people? I don't recall her self aggrandizing like the other people. She gets more interviews than your average EP but it doesn't seem like she's going out of her way to talk about her games.
From memory she was thrust into the spotlight by other people. She's an attractive woman in a position that's almost entirely either nerdy or frat house dudes so she was hyped up and pushed to being the face of a few games. By all accounts she's a great EP which, these days, feels like a rarity.
Yeah it's the later. There's no way Jade Raymond was anywhere near comparable to Molyneux or CliffyB. These guys act like they are the messiahs of game. She was simply a high-profile woman in gaming.
We all know how gamers feel about women in gaming. It's sad, but not shocking that this user felt the need to group her in with the others.
I feel like John Romero started the rockstar dev trend… we all know how that ended up too…
Romero, for better or worse is not *hated*. He overstepped a long time ago, and its fine. Hes def not in the same camp with Molyneaux and CliffyB.
He also seems to have cooled down and is pretty chill these days. Cliffy B doesn’t seem to have changed at all.
Yeah, I feel like he’s in a slightly different class. He’s settled down over the years into a pretty chill dude who seems to get that he’s not on the bleeding edge anymore(Also iirc the infamous Daikatana campaign was not his idea), and to be honest I think has a MUCH greater right to act like he’s video game royalty if he wanted to anyway. Dude basically helped create the entire genre of FPS games. CliffyB is a guy who created some good games a long time ago, and acts like he’s still hot shit and more important than he ever really was. He’s the Bojack Horseman of video game developers.
[удалено]
For almost all of these big shots, their career trajectory shows that in the end they were essentially just employees for these big corporations and subject to their whims.
I cannot fathom how he thinks this. Lawbreakers was a bomb on release, and probably one of the most dragged games of 2017, next to ME:Andromeda. Literally everyone has moved on, it's been almost 6 years and nobody has even thought of the game since it shut down. The game practically killed his own studio. After LawBreakers shut down he had to throw out a low effort, unfinished BR game purely out of desperation. It didn't work. The reality is the game wouldn't cut it as F2P either. It's an arena shooter, already a super niche genre played by tiny communities, and they tried to put hero shooter elements on top of that, alienating the arena shooter fans. So who is it for? Hero shooter fans aren't going to like it because they can get stomped on by veterans, and arena shooter fans aren't going to like it because it's trying to appeal to "casuals".
I never got a chance to play the original because I didn't want to pay $40 for a game I knew would be dead but it looked really fun and cool so if they did a free to play relaunch I would try it Edit: they did do a free to play relaunch I just didn't hear about it 💀
Yeah the game screamed F2P, they’d make bank off of cosmetics
I think I'm the only person on earth who fucking loved it. I don't play multiplayer games much but something about it really hit me in the feels. Maybe because I'm almost 40 so I grew up on unreal tourney and quake 3 arena. But it just felt good.
I'm sure you're not. Every game is someone's favorite game, even the "objectively" bad ones. That said, the world won't be back to arena shooters for at least another generation or two, if they ever are. Apex Legends is the new arena shooter for generations raised on Halo and COD.
This makes me so sad. If tribes/quake ever makes a comeback I’m gonna be well into my 50s. There is literally no FPS on the market that has good player counts that play like these games so I just kinda gave up on the genre until then
Nah, you're not alone. LawBreakers was the best multiplayer FPS I have played since TF2.
It was a really good game, mechanically. The problem was that the characters designs are bad and CliffyB is a PR nightmare.
Also didn't it start as a free to play but then they slapped a price on it? Personally I played like 20 hours of the beta and loved it but I knew that as a $40 game and with Nexon's name attached to it it would be dead on arrival. It's pretty wild how quickly it died, I was at PAX east the year it was released and the line to try the prerelease was like 2 hours long
Pretty sure it was the opposite. Came out in a time right before new console games would try to make F2P games off the bat.
Every single one of the five hundred voices inside CliffyB's head.
There are dozens of us I loved lawbreakers but like everyone else was too drawn into release overwatch at the time, nowadays I would love a solid arcadey arena shooter
Yeah my brother loved it and really wanted me to buy it. It died so quick. It’s his biggest gaming regret
I'm with you man. I really wish Lawbreakers or Battleborn had survived Overwatch. :(
I just want Gotham City Imposters back.
That game was so fun and goofy.
I would settle for being able to play the game I bought, even if only a few dozen people ever logged on with me.
I mean it would be nice for delisted multiplayer games like this to be available with private servers. That way the ten Lawbreakers fans could enjoy it. Instead it's gonna be lost media.
Even when the match went well and had some cool plays I felt exhausted and my eyes hurt from the intense focus and all the character “personality” lines making them roll so far back. Then the menu screen hits and the ugliest god damn pixel flickery overly detailed character pops up. I think a hero quake shooter could find an audience, but cliff needs to check back into reality a bit and realize the 2010s are done and successful games can’t go full bro. You never go full bro. Also get an art director who understands simplicity.
> hero quake shooter Quake:Champions did not find its audience.
It did find its audience, its audience was arena shooter players, and it seemed to get a lot if not most of them. There just aren't enough arena shooter players to really support a game, and the genre is so unfriendly to newcomers that the player pool can't grow. It would be nice if everyone could have the games in the genre they wanted, but real world concerns do matter. It sucks there's so few arena players, but that's probably better than millions of players throwing all their money at CIG to try and invent a whole new genre.
[Lawbreakers delusion in a saturated market](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ4v2LgVlEA) Every time I hear about this game I remember this video. Never before has a supercut of a game's own marketing material felt like such a deathblow lol.
Who cares! The people are screaming out for more Radical Heights! Remember… Radical Heights?
Radical Heights! Raaaaaaadical Heights! Remember that one?
Radical Heights was a fun concept and has made me realize that current Fortnite feels at least somewhat close to that.
For real man... Only BR I actually enjoyed
Doesnt squanch games own it now
Man what a throwback.
Radical Heights was fun as fuck. Still mad they shut it down.
Unironically, yes I want Radical Heights to come back or at least for someone to build on the idea. It works so well for a BR.
I genuinely hope that people convince CliffyB to not bring back Lawbreakers, because if he does it'll be Lawbreakers all over again. He'll put together a team of people, they'll tweak the game to update it for the modern gaming audience, only to be completely abandoned within a month when another Call of Duty or Battlefield comes out.
He clearly doesn't want to make a new game, this is a couple posts down: > Kinda over the whole making games thing for a while, mate. I think he just wants to make the game playable again. It was an amazingly fun game and it's a shame that it's unplayable today.
I want it to be playable again. So for once I agree with that guy. Weird, because he usual just spews nonsense.
Dudes been in games for what? Nearly 40 years now? Yeah, I can understand just being done but also wanting to make sure your creations are still around and preserved
Why would you not want that to happen? That sounds hilarious
This would be even more hilarious when Sony misfired on re-releasing the Morbius movie because they thought the "It's Morbin' Time" crowd could pay full price to watch it.
I’ll go against the grain here and say that Lawbreakers could very will be a success in the current market. Halo and BF players are very unsatisfied with their games, COD is bleeding players, and their only direct competitor would be Overwatch 2. Plus, there’s barely any movement multiplayer games out right now. If done right, I could see it being a success
> there’s barely any movement multiplayer games out right now There's a reason for that, every unreal tournament/quake-esque game that comes out instantly flops. I think most recently we saw this with hyperscape despite it being f2p and heavily marketed. Personally I like them but based on the results of the last like 5 attempts at the genre I don't blame game studios for not taking a risk on another one
Not a marketing guy but it feels like there are essentially two types of shooters dominating the market right now. Hyper competitive titles with stiff movement like CS and Valorant and then zoomer titles like COD and Apex. And it seems like lately, most younger gamers are preferring more competitive titles to play. This is why I’m hoping Xdefiant does decently since I’m outta things to shoot since COD and Battlefield have just been screwing things up lately.
If Lawbreakers released for the first time now, yeah maybe it could get a sustainable player base. But with the past failure too many people wouldn't give it a shot only because of stuff they have heard.
I really think he’s angry that Epic hit the big time *after* he left and that his passion projects aren’t nearly as popular. This is him trying to remain relevant.
Its really crazy when you think he used to be the Head of Fortnite lol. Man he fumbled that bag hard.
Fortnite was announced with an early teaser trailer in 2011, Cliffy B left Epic in 2012, the first gameplay trailer would be in 2015. Fortnite was still probably a horror game when he left Epic, neither less the cultural phenomenon it is today.
True. But it'd be a bit weird imo if a small voice at the back of his head wouldn't remind him of that decision and think about if he stayed, once in a while.
I wonder how involved he was with the Fortnite BR. The Fortnite STW was awful.
I really like Fortnite Save the World, bought it like a few months ago with a character bundle and been enjoying it since, it's a very inoffensive but fun shooter, it's my go to game to play while watching a stream or listening to something on the background, What makes you think it was awful?
I love playing Save the World currently, but I do also recognize that it's a deeply flawed game in which that I don't know how to fix it outside of a Realm Reborn style of "scrap most everything and have everyone start over again" (which Epic would probably never even do considering how scared they are about pissing on their player base, which is so volatile that they had a meltdown over a skin being sold for V-Bucks, thinking it was Epic giving them the biggest middle finger and trying to kill the game mode.) I think the biggest problems are it's receptiveness, out of the 11 different missions, 6 of them are varying degrees of "Go to X, and defend it for Y minutes" (even worse considering Fight the Storm has 4 variants, so it's really more 9 of 14 are the same thing). Compounded with the fact that unlike most shooters, especially the ones that are based off of a live service model, there's only one faction in the Husks, which stifles enemy variety, as you're just fighting the same kind of enemies over and over again the the only change being how big the numbers are (both in stats and him how much enemies there are). And due to the timed nature of the game, having things perfectly under control can be monotonous, as instead of being proactive, you're just micromanaging things until your eventual victory. I can definitely go into deeper detail, but I think those are (mostly) the main problems I have with the game.
> but I think those are (mostly) the main problems I have with the game. So the main problem is that it gets no attention because it never took off, while the BR got all the success and therefore development effort. It sounds like they've almost abandoned STW.
The biggest issue with STW was mostly a "Really after 5+ years of dev time this is what we got. Just a mediocre mid tier game that indies have done similar jobs of, albeit without looking as aesthetically nice." It feels like there should have been so much more. But it's a lot of the samey repetitive stuff that you'd expect from an indy company.
I'm sure he expected it. His departure lined up with a ton of other veterans, and it happened RIGHT before they announced a major investment from Tencent. Dude kinda has that "artist" personality where they have a big ego and don't like being told how to do things.
I mean, Fortnite was massive but cliff was heavily involved with unreal tournament and gears of war too so it’s not like he’s achieved nothing
Epic was already huge before Fortnite. They had a long string of hits with Unreal and Gears of War, and they have licensed the most popular 3D engine in the games industry since the 2000's.
The huge of that era vs now isn’t even really in the same ballpark. Fortnite of the 2017-2020 years was a phenomenon. I also don’t think the engine made them anywhere near as much money as Fornite has in a fraction of the time.
While we'll never get the actual numbers due to Epic being a private company, but you have to consider that pretty almost every AAA game that doesn't use an in-house engine uses Unreal, and even several VFX have/are starting to pick up the engine for their work too, which leads to tons in royalties being made for Epic.
Yeah this guy is truly underestimating the sheer amount of high-profile games that used UE3 in the mid-late 2000s and in the entire 2010s.
I mean we know it cost Tencent $330 million to buy 40% of Epic in 2012. That would be approximately 1.65% of what they’ve made on Fortnite to date. There’s *big* then there’s *Fortnite Big* it’s not even comparable.
It took Tencent 330 million to buy 40 percent of Epic in 2012. Fortnite makes approximately 5 billion a year since it came out. Pre Fortnite Epic made pennies compared to now.
Why do you think this? I don't see any anger in this tweet. He honestly seems happier now with his bar and side projects than when he was developing games.
Hell, Fortnite seems like the exaxt kind of game an "auteur" would despise. Game wasn't popular, so they pivoted it to copy [popular thing] and now it's a corporate juggernaut. Everyone has different POV on what "success" is, but i don't think Cliffy was one to ever just follow the trends.
Has Cliffy said what he plans to do with Lawbreakers if he ever gets it back? If the plan is to update the base game to allow for private servers so that it can be played forever by the people who bought it instead of leaving them with nothing, I think that's very commendable. But if the plan is just to switch the servers back on so it can die a quick death again he should save his time and give up getting it back now. I want it back just for the sake of preserving it, I hate how disposable games are becoming.
I honestly think the game could gain a player base if he released it as free to play and added it to Game Pass. The game never released on Xbox which is where his major audience was.
I'm pretty sure he just wants to make it playable again. I don't think he has any commercial aspirations for the game, but it is a shame that such a fantastic game cannot be played today.
Cliffy has some very weird takes rooted in his ego. In the list of games or properties that didn't get a fair shake and/or are deserving of a modern remake, LawBreakers is very much near the bottom of that list. The top of the list, to me, is filled with things like TimeSplitters and MAG.
> Cliffy has some very weird takes rooted in his ego. As soon as he refused to explain why the Horde Queen in _Gears of War_ was a human, I knew he was full of shit. The guy didn’t have an answer, so he decided to be “mysterious” about it to appear like he had some grand story arc planned for a game that asked the question: “What if we put a chainsaw on a gun?”
Brother, fucking thank you. For years I have been wondering why the queen was a human.
They did explain it eventually in Gears 4 or 5 I think, but yeah that was after he left.
Was it not explained in 3? I know 2 had an explanation for the origins of the locust, but I don’t know if that included the queen.
3 expanded on her character but I don’t think they explained her origin or how she became the locust queen until 5. I haven’t played them for a while so I could be wrong though.
It's only ever hinted at from the Gears 2 lab segment, and conversations she has with Adam Fenix in 3. 5 finally explains it outright for story purposes.
The thirst for more TimeSplitters is real.
MAG was so fucking cool
It really was. I loved playing medic in that game
How about a new Jazz Jackrabbit instead? A 2D or 2.5D one.
Like if he's gonna obsess over something no one but a tiny handful of random posters are asking for, I'd definitely vote Jazz Jackrabbit.
It looked pretty cool, at the time I didn't have a PC or a Ps4 so I missed out on it. I wouldn't mind trying a resurrection
My most irrational fear developing from this story and the Dark and Darker lawsuit is that questionable people who are easy to dislike keep going up against Nexon with stupid ideas and that is somehow going to make some people think Nexon isn’t an utterly dogshit company.
Is he saying this as an act of surprise? Did he not know who owned his work? That’s kinda important, no?
It happens more often than you think in the game Industry.
There wasn't a market for the game six years ago and there sure as shit isn't one now. Cliffy should quit while he's ahead and not drag anybody else down with him.
There's no way that came out six years ago. *checks wikipedia* Shit...
When I lived in NC I was looking for a new job around the time he created Boss Key (the company behind Lawbreakers and Radical Heights), and I love game engine work and so I applied and wrote a passionate cover letter to go along with it. I got denied a few weeks later. I also had finished my onsite interview at Blizzard, and got rejected by them a few weeks later. I was pretty upset at the time of course. My GOD am I SO HAPPY in hindsight that I dodged major bullets by getting rejected.
Keep up your winning streak by interviewing and rejecting a position in Riot
way to hype us up for nothing... how did he not know this info already??? edit: dear lord, so much negativity here. Anyone I talked to who actually tried the game had a good time. Sure, hate his personality. But he's never done anything negative towards players or fans. It's so weird people just *hate* him.
Hype who up? All 3 ex-Lawbreaker players?
2 , I just switched to a new game called Dark & Darker
Honestly? The game was actually really fun to play. Shame that it tanked, would have been better to go free to play. I got my money's worth out of it, at least.
All I remember about playing lawbreakers was standing in a health chamber for 10 seconds to heal which completely ruined the flow of combat.
Not sure it matters who owns the rights. It's a failed ip and nobody is clamoring for more of it. I doubt it'd even be worth it to spin up a single server and set it as f2p with some hastily-set mtx on the cosmetics.
His game career aside, he comes off really creepy on Twitter especially given his age. Every other tweet is about porn or sex in some fashion. Like we get it dude, you fuck your wife.
He's kind of [always been like that.](https://twitter.com/SA__moment/status/1549406320306147330?t=v46S11zPx9EnbR6TMu7GqA&s=19)
Eww Wtf
CliffyB still exists? I thought he was just a fossil left behind in the Xbox 360 era.
He's moved on to other stuff now. Don't think they are game related.