Cliff Bleszinski teases news about LawBreakers, the excellent arena shooter that died 5 years ago
Remember LawBreakers (opens in new tab), the ill-fated competitive FPS that closed down (opens in new tab) a few months after its developer went defunct? It might not be as dead as you thought. So says Cliff Bleszinski, the game’s director, who’s been teasing upcoming news about the game over on Twitter (opens in new tab).
“Just got a text from my lawyer about… LawBreakers,” Bleszkinski wrote, imploring curious onlookers to “Stay tuned” for news about the game’s future. Of course, the fact that LawBreakers has any future at all is a bit of a shock. It closed down five years ago alongside Radical Heights, Boss Key Productions’ battle royale, and took the developer with it.
It’s unclear just what is happening with LawBreakers from Bleszinski’s tweets, which are all we have to go on right now, so it’s uncertain if he’s teasing the game’s return, a sequel, a spiritual successor, or something far more minor and underwhelming, but it’d be a treat to see the game come to life again in some form.
Although it never accumulated the playerbase necessary to keep it running long-term—something Bleszinski eventually attributed to it being too “political,” (opens in new tab) which is almost assuredly not actually why it failed—it was a smartly-designed and enjoyable thing. In his LawBreakers review (opens in new tab), PCG’s Evan Lahti scored the game 84%, praising it as a “complex, physical, and deep competitive shooter”. A revival would give it another shot at securing the audience it failed to find back in 2017. Or perhaps Fortnite will eat its lunch much as Overwatch and PUBG did back then.
I think it would do better this time, though: Bleszinski’s tease has gained a fair bit of interest, something which seems to have perplexed the man himself. “It confuses the hell out of me how people were rooting for the game to fail,” he tweeted, “and when it did now there’s a ton of support for it”. “Gamers are weird, yo”.
Bleszinski’s final tweet in the thread addressed Boss Key’s closure: “the team worked their ASSES off on it,” he wrote, “I relocated many people from other parts of the world for it and the internet was like HAR HAR IT DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH PLAYERS. Meanwhile, studio craters and I have to deal with a year of crippling depression out of guilt”. Perhaps whatever news he has in store for the game will give him a chance to right some wrongs.
