LawBreakers And Overwatch Can Co-Exist, Designer Says

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 more.

"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 (via DualShockers). 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.

This story has been updated.