Cliff Blezinski's new game. Early Access: 80's inspired Battle Royale game

God forbid those people try to remain employed, right? That little jab aside, I agree with most of that second line you wrote. This does feel like an act of desperation, but why on earth is that contemptible, or deserving in the scorn people readily throw at it? I guess I just don't see how this is anything other than unfortunate. They failed in a big way with their flagship game, and are now just following the current craze to keep the lights on (presumably).

As far as your first line, I'm just going to call bullshit. When Fortnite began to pivot to it's BR mode, that thing got so much shit from the BR community. Radical Heights was lambasted from practically the second it was revealed, and that's the thing I'm talking about. This current craze just seems to be way more hostile than the two I mentioned in my previous post were. Games like Warhammer Online during the MMO craze or Dawngate during the DotA craze didn't have nearly the same level of hostility directed at them right out of the gate. It isn't about any game in particular; anything that seems to enter this space just gets viewed with such...suspicion. It's just so fucking bizarre, even for gaming communities.

Finally was able to get into a match tonight. I see a lot of potential in this game. I hope they do right.

Also i won my first game first try, i should probably quit while im ahead, lol.

@relkin: You're right that it wasn't so hostile when a new MMO came along but that's mostly because whenever a new MMO came along to try and "be the next WoW-killer", people who played WoW just looked down their nose and laughed. And it got funnier and funnier as more and more games got announced, made the claim and then ultimately died very quickly after.

I played WoW since shortly after TBC was released and saw many friends get excited at new mmos in properties they loved and listened to them tell me the same story every time - "This is going to kill WoW. Just you wait. You should buy this game because in a months time nobody is playing WoW." And then after their free month sub ran out they all came back to WoW and usually within a year their game was dead.

So it wasn't hostile, but I think it wasn't hostile because it quickly became a proven that WoW was never going to be killed by another MMO.

Similarly for LOL/DOTA and mobas - nobody who played LOL or DOTA looked at other mobas - which all came along way, way too late to begin with as serious contenders.

What's different now is that PUBG has been out for just about a year and thanks to technology and development tools it's simple enough to churn a clone/copy/like out than it was for an MMO or a MOBA.

@jesus_phish: Yeah, I think you might be dead-on with this. A lot more patronizing/condescension from communities, if not outright dismissal. Definitely crappy in it's own way.

I don't think that last line of yours (concerning development time) should matter, but I guess that's probably at the heart of why people get so suspicious of these newcomers. I personally think it's a good thing that people can make these so quickly. If a BR game took years to make, PUBG would still be the undisputed leader of this type of game, like WoW was and continues to be. Having serious competition will probably lead to all the major players of this space making a better game, or at least I would hope.

Thanks for the response.

After playing a few matches, this game doesn't feel bad. The shooting is alright, and the roll opens up some pretty cool mobility options. It's very early, but this thing feels like it has potential to be interesting.

It looks awful, the trailer seems like bad Dead Rising or Far Cry humor. More games copying and trying to out do PUBG is fine... if the game is competent and unique. This looks even worse than Fortnite.

@deathstriker: have you played it though? Its not terrible.

@relkin: My point about development time is just that it's so easy to "knock" one of these games out. By the time the WoW killers started coming about, they'd been in development for years and WoW already had an install base of about 8 million if not more. So it took longer for someone to announce an MMO, develop the MMO and then start the "We're going to the top" train than it does with these games.

In the QL they mention that all three of these games - PUBG, Fortnite and Radical Heights are Unreal engine games. This game has been in development for just 5 months and already looks in a pretty good state considering how we hear game development can take years before a viable product is ready.

So while PUBG was happily sitting at the top of the pile and people who championed it (just like people champion consoles and graphics card manufacturers) where happy, along came competition very, very rapidly and started drawing people away - leading to fighting between communities.

You're right though that this level of competition can only be good for improving the games. Some of those WoW clones had great ideas but the biggest problem they had was getting people to care about them and getting people to play them, considering the people they wanted already are heavily, heavily invested in WoW. And it wasn't until those games went away that WoW started to incorporate some of those ideas.

This sort of direct, rapid development driven competition should result in better games.

I was just talking about the trailer and gameplay that they put out. I'm not looking for another game like this. I think this gen is kinda lame because of the (over) focus of sandbox and multiplayer, so I'm not looking for another BR game unless it's one that just blows PUBG out of the water and that doesn't exist yet. I'm looking forward to God of War next week, not another multiplayer game.

I'm sorry to say it, but objectively, this game is far too unpolished to be more than alpha testing for small group of hired people for this very purpose.

Unless they wanted to invent Early Early Access games on steam. I find it quite offensive to game developers to release something like this, especially when they really invented a nice twist on the genre with the 80's style. They honestly had a chance to create very good and unique battle royal game, but it ended up as a disappointment. Even if they improve the game a lot, I doubt anyone will look back and lay again.

@relkin: It's probably gotten worse as social media continues to be more accessible and mainstream than it was a decade ago, but yeah, people absolutely crapped on non-WoW MMOs. It wasn't just on gaming forums and the like. If you played a new MMO in those days, you were pretty much guaranteed to see a conversation in the game's general chat about how this new game was just a WoW clone, WoW was better, etc. I always found it strange. I mean, these people paid $60 to get an MMO at launch, and just used it to talk about how the new game was like WoW.

To a lesser extent (although it's probably more pronounced on forums that focus on this sort of thing) you can absolutely find people complaining about games trying to take a piece of the MOBA pie from LoL.

@mems1224: LMAO, f'n nailed it.

Yeah. After watching the Unfinished video, this game looks like it really shouldn't be available to the public at large yet. The gameplay looks relatively OK, but the UI is very rough and the environment has a lot of placeholder untextured buildings.

I really hate to speculate about the financial state of Boss Key, but given how poorly LawBreakers seemed to do, cranking this game out in five months looks like a big desperation move where they were hoping to strike Battle Royale gold just to keep the company solvent.

I might give this game a shot when they're further along with development since its free to play. It may end up being a decent alternative to Pubg and Fortnite depending on what kind of stuff they add later on.

So now because no battle royal games can be without drama, Cliff B has accused Epic of trying to poach his staff from Boss Key for themselves.

To which William McCarroll, a former Boss Key developer who now works at Epic responded with

I can't say I'd blame anyone "jumping" or leaving Boss Key to go work for Epic. Epic seem to have way more job security right now.