Cliff Bleszinski earned fame during his time at Epic on games including Unreal, Gears of War, and, let us never forget, Jazz Jackrabbit. After spending 20 years with the company, he left in 2012 but returned to making games in 2014 with the arena shooter LawBreakers. 

It was good, which unfortunately wasn't enough to make it a success, and after a last-ditch effort to catch the battle royale train in a game called Radical Heights sputtered out, Bleszinski closed his Boss Key Productions studio earlier this year. 

It's hard to keep a good man down, especially one as obviously invested in the games industry as Bleszinski, and I said in May that I had no doubt that he'd return to the business one day. Yesterday, however, Bleszinski proved me wrong.

The tweet came in response to a "fan" who is apparently unhappy about not getting a refund on LawBreakers. Unsurprisingly, the exchange led to more heat on Twitter, some of it fueled by a back-and-forth between Bleszinski and LawBreakers senior animator Zach Lowery that Bleszinski later described as just "ribbing."

I still suspect that Bleszinski could make another game someday, and he's not turning his back on the industry entirely, saying in another tweet that he "will never, ever stop being an advocate for developers." But it's clear that he's in no hurry to bounce back from Boss Key, and under the circumstances I'd say it's hard to blame him.

LawBreakers, the high-flying arena FPS created by Cliff Bleszinski's Boss Key Productions, is gone for good. The shutdown date had been set back in June, ending a brief flash of hope that it might have a future as a free-to-play game, and former senior environment artist Josh Rife (who is now filling the same role at Red Storm Entertainment) confirmed just ahead of the weekend that the curtain had fallen on schedule.  

Rife also shared concept art for an unreleased map called Valhalla, "the craziest shit we ever put together," he tweeted. "We basically said screw arbitrary limits to egregious vertical combat, and made the capture zones super vulnerable. Expert player map for sure."

"Valhalla was Bosskey's 10th and final map for LawBreakers. Set in an abandoned Valkyrie training facility in California's Sequoia Natl. Forest, Valhalla stands as a monument to dedication and perseverance," the Artstation description says.

"This massive arena hosts all ranges of combat encounter types, including our longest sightlines, and most lethal Capture-The-Battery layout ever. The map was created for a themed, seasonal content drop, internally code-named 'Bloody Christmas', but was unfortunately never released to the public."

LawBreakers has also been removed from Steam—the store page link now leads to the front page.

Despite glowing reviews, LawBreakers failed to sustain a playerbase. Its free-to-play Early Access follow-up Radical Heights was an unsuccessful roll of the dice—one which led Cliff Bleszinski to shutter Boss Key Productions entirely. Now, Bleszinski is writing a book which will address the studio's failures. 

Alongside chapters that explore the death of his father, his relationship with his wife, and the end of his first marriage, Bleszinski will talk about his time at the helm of Boss Key and working at Epic Games.

"I haven't done any interviews since Boss Key imploded because I needed to tell it in my own words, in my book," said Bleszinski via Twitter. "Did that today. Felt good, like that chapter in my life was finally closed."

When asked when the book will be released, Bleszinski replied to one Twitter user saying: "When. It's. Done."

As reported by Andy earlier this year, LawBreakers is closing on September 14 and is free-to-play till then. Despite this, Evan reckons it's one of the most underrated games on PC. 

Cheers, Gamespot. 

What's the most underrated game on PC? This is the subject of the PCG Q&A, where each Saturday (and sometimes on Wednesdays too), we ask the global PC Gamer team for their answers to a burning question. We then encourage you to drop your answers to the same question in the comments thread below.

There's no comprehensive answer to this one, obviously, and it's just a bit of fun. We've picked games that either sold badly, were ignored despite having something to offer, or got an unfair kicking at launch by critics or players. 

Evan Lahti: LawBreakers

OK, I'll jump on this grenade: it's LawBreakers. Corners of the gaming community were fixated on making it a punching bag for their amusement, and the "dead game" Reddit groupthink that ultimately suffocated LawBreakers had nothing to do with how good it actually is. Its character movement styles are inventive—the Wraith kick-slides along the ground to accelerate, jabbing the air with a knife to swim forward in low-grav. They can also triple jump and wall jump, a moveset that gives them Wraith a darting, alien locomotion that's enjoyable to master. Gunslingers teleport in short bursts like Tracer from Overwatch, but the first shots from either of their dual pistols are buffed immediately after you blink. If you fly backwards as the Harrier, you shoot lasers from your feet. 

This is the only FPS I can think of that lets me shoot behind myself, never mind turning it into a way to physically propel myself forward. LawBreakers could've taken a much easier route and simply given everyone jetpacks and focused on unique guns, but instead it got ambitious and built weird, unfamiliar styles of aerial fencing, gunslinging, grenading, and more. It also sported some of the best netcode in years, backed up by expert testing.

Jarred Walton: Epistory: Typing Chronicles

I don't know that it's underrated, but I recently stumbled upon Epistory: Typing Chronicles, and it's great—and it was also a game I totally missed when it was new. I can thank Steam's Spring Cleaning event for recommending it as a game I should try, and I enjoyed the relatively short story, lovely aesthetic, and the crazy vocabulary. Anyway, I write for a living, so something that puts my typing skills to good use is a welcome diversion, and now I've inflicted my children with the game so that they can hopefully learn to type. My 15-year-old thinks it's great and my 8-year-old hates it (because it's too hard and frustrating).

Phil Savage: Dragon Age 2 (oh snap!)

It reviewed pretty well, but it would be fair to say that public reaction to BioWare's sequel was... unfavourable. That's fair: a game with only one cave layout shouldn't have so many missions set in a cave. In fact, many criticisms of Dragon Age II are entirely justified, but to write it off because of them would be to miss out on one of the most interesting RPGs BioWare has made. 

Instead of sending you out on a grand journey, Dragon Age II is about a single city and the people within it. As Hawke, you travel to this city, survive in this city and fight to save this city over the course of around ten years. You get to feel like a member of the community in the way few RPGs, with their huge maps and sweeping stories, can support. And you get to hang out with Varric in a dingy pub. I'd love for a developer to revisit this style of role-playing, but, until that happens, I'll keep propping up the bar in the The Hanged Man.

Tom Senior: The Sims: Hot Date

Sims DLC often takes criticism for being little more than overpriced packs of digital items. Some of the DLC is like that, but the major expansions add loads of ways for Sims to interact and grow inside your carefully manicured fishbowl. Hot Date could have been a frivolous expansion that added a few new romance-themed behavioural patterns and some nice clothes, but it ended up adding a rich strata of nightlife that gave the Sims themselves a more rounded and believable existence. 

Before Hot Date they hoovered, pooped, cleaned up mess and vanished off to work for hours at a time. Hot Date opened up huge new downtown areas where they could meet other Sims and, with a bit of luck, find a partner. The downtown area also froze time back home, which meant your Sims could have a career and hang out with friends and loved ones in the same life—they enjoyed a pretty grim domestic existence before this expansion came along. Dating sims are more prevalent now, but Hot Date brought the idea into the mainstream, and did a great job of making downtown a bustling social hub. For some reason Hot Date never seemed to receive the credit it deserved for its novelty and ambition at the time.

Austin Wood: Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams 

There's no shortage of good 2D platformers on Steam. Most everyone is familiar with the big ones—the likes of Fez, Shovel Knight, Super Meat Boy, Celeste and Cave Story—but for some reason nobody ever talks about Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. It came out nearly six years ago, and it's still one of the best 2D platformers on PC—and the Rise of the Owlverlord level pack released in 2013 only made it better. (You can get the full package for under five bucks in the Steam Summer Sale, by the way.) 

The art has aged well and the difficulty curve is spot-on, but what I love most about Giana Sisters is the music. You can swap between the titular sisters at any time, and while the happy blonde sister gets bright fantasy levels and bubbly electronic tunes, playing as the punk pink-haired sister drenches levels in horror themes set to fantastic original rock songs. I like my Ori and the Blind Forest orchestral swells as much as the next gamer, but you just don't hear rock music like this in 2D platformers anymore. I absolutely love it, so I played as the punk sister whenever possible. The boss themes are especially great. Giana Sisters looks, plays and sounds great, so if you've played all the best-known 2D platformers, or even if you haven't, you have got to give it a try. 

Andy Chalk: The Long Journey Home

The Long Journey Home is a sort of Starflight/Star Control/Lunar Lander hybrid exploration-adventure about a small spaceship that's flung, Voyager-style, to the wrong side of the universe. It's weird, it's funny, it's occasionally frustrating as hell, and it's really good. It didn't catch fire, though, with critics or gamers: Our 68/100 review was actually one of the more positive takes, and it's still languishing under the weight of "mixed" user reviews on Steam.

A big reason for that was the game's utterly unforgiving nature at launch: it was quite happy to swat players down for the slightest transgression, to the extent that one bad landing, for instance, could signal the abrupt end of an otherwise very successful mission. A "Story Mode" option was added later that made survival (and thus the ability to actually get out there and explore) much easier, but by that point the damage of those initial review scores was done. But it's good! (I thought it was good right from the start, but the increased accessibility is definitely a plus.) And it deserves far better than it got. (If you're curious, it's half-price in the Steam Summer Sale.)

It's also not nearly as dramatic as the launch trailer above makes it out to be.

Samuel Roberts: Red Faction Guerrilla

Alright, this sold well enough to get a (bad) sequel and it was acclaimed by critics, so 'underrated' is a bit of a weird label. Thing is, though, why wasn't this the most influential game of its generation? Why did open world games become about ticking off icons, climbing boring towers and dull counter-based combat systems? Why didn't they become about knocking shit down and hitting NPCs with hammers? In that sense, I believe Red Faction Guerrilla is underrated. 

The games industry didn't see the opportunity here, and it ended up having no imitators. And yet, it so clearly demonstrated how much fun it was to see things topple over because you detonated remote charges in all the right places. Is it too late for someone to make a proper open world sequel?

I also agree with Phil that Dragon Age 2 is underrated. I wouldn't want every RPG to be set in one location, but it was a neat experiment despite a weaker third act and a thin combat system. In some ways, I guess I never really left that one cave.

Some other runners up for me that spring to mind: decent Sonic-like Freedom Planet, D4, Star Wars: Battle For Naboo, Everyday Shooter, Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure, Darkside Detective, The Flame in the Flood, Mad Max, The Magic Circle and...Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which is several mandatory, terrible combat sequences away from being a great game. I should mention Alpha Protocol too, right?

Let us know your suggestions below.

Update: Unfortunately, the free-to-play transition isn't a sign that Nexon is hoping to revive LawBreakers, but simply a way to soften the blow of its looming closure. "In light of the unfortunate news regarding Boss Key Productions shutting down, we regret to announce that we will be sunsetting our support of LawBreakers on September 14, 2018 as we are not able to operate the game," Nexon said in a statement.

"Our servers will remain open until then and the game will be made free-to-play on Steam for all players effective immediately. Please note that any and all new in-game purchases will also be disabled and we will not be able to accept any refund requests."

Original story:

With no fanfare, or even the slightest indication at all that it was going to happen, Boss Key Studio's arena FPS LawBreakers has gone free-to-play Steam.   

The change is unexpected in part because studio founder Cliff Bleszinski closed developer Boss Key Productions last month. But while that spelled the end of Radical Heights, LawBreakers, which is published by Nexon, can keep the lights on for as long as it likes. (Except, as now noted above, it's not going to.)

Nexon hasn't commented on the change as of yet but it wouldn't be unreasonable for it to try rebuilding LawBreakers as a free-to-play title. It's a complete game, after all, and let's not forget it was originally intended to be free-to-play in the first place. The changeover to premium pricing happened so long ago that it's not directly relevant to the current situation, but you can imagine the recriminations that will fly if Nexon is able to make this work. 

I've reached out to Nexon to ask about the change and will update if I receive a reply. In the meantime, if you've been waiting for a no-risk opportunity to try LawBreakers (especially now that there might be a few people playing it), here you go. 

Cliff Bleszinski pulled the plug on Boss Key Productions yesterday, after both LawBreakers and Radical Heights failed to achieve the critical mass required to keep the studio afloat. He said that he was going to "take some time off and reflect," but apparently that doesn't mean he'll be taking a break from Twitter, because today he began sharing some of the ideas he and other members of the studio had for future Boss Key games. 

DragonFlies is probably my favorite of the bunch: Ninjas on dragons launched from giant airships fighting hordes of zombies in a feudalpunk world of floating islands is a very specific niche, but also very much my niche. (Although to be honest I'm not perfectly clear on what "feudalpunk" is.) 

DogWalkers also looks cool, at least as far as a couple of pieces of concept art can carry such an impression. Faint echoes of the Battle of Hoth, but on Earth, and... bigger. 

Donuts, the "silly" one, might seem a little out of character for the designer of Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, but remember that before all that he did Jazz Jackrabbit, and there are a lot of people who wish he'd get back to that kind of thing.

"These were not purely my ideas, they were a collaboration between myself and BKP employees," Bleszinski wrote. "Tramell, Zach, Dan, etc.. all worked on them a lot."

Interestingly, he also touched on both the problem with publishers in the game industry, and why they're necessary. "You pitch something and the response is often 'too similar to something we have or out there so no' or ' this is too unique so we can't do a proper financial model for it.' I respect them but as a creative it's frustrating," he tweeted.

"Side note $40m budget. So not cheap."

LawBreakers was a very good game, and it really is a shame that Boss Key couldn't make a go of it. But when Bleszinski comes back—and I have no doubt that he will—I really hope he takes aim at something like one of these instead.   

Check out some more concept art (which includes female characters for both DragonFlies and Donuts) below.

With the failure of the arena shooter LawBreakers behind it and Radical Heights apparently unable to gain a sizable enough playerbase, Cliff Bleszinski has announced that Boss Key Productions is being closed.   

"Four years ago I set out to make a world-class videogame studio and I hired some of the best talent in the videogame industry. They worked tirelessly to produce quality products and, while we had our ups and downs, I'd like to think we had fun doing it," Bleszinski wrote. 

"LawBreakers was a great game that unfortunately failed to gain traction, and, in a last-ditch attempt we scrambled to do our take on the huge battle royale genre with Radical Heights which was well received, however, it was too little too late." 

Bleszinski said he hopes to make another new game someday, but for now he's going to "take some time off and reflect."

"To those of you who supported myself and the studio these last four years, thank you from the bottom of my heart," he wrote.   

The Radical Heights servers will remain online "for the near future." Bleszinski's full statement is below.

We liked arena FPS LawBreakers quite a bit, but Boss Key's airborne FPS failed to take off. It's been out for less than a year and its concurrent player count on Steam at this moment is precisely one. After months of languishing, Boss Key Productions has acknowledged in a new statement that the game is not sustainable in its current state. Fortunately that doesn't mean it's giving up on it, nor does it spell the end of the studio, which is now working on a new "passion project." 

"The fact is LawBreakers failed to find enough of an audience to generate the funds necessary to keep it sustained in the manner we had originally planned for and anticipated. And while a pivot to free-to-play may seem like easiest change to make, a change of this magnitude takes publishing planning and resources to do it," the studio said. 

"The team here has worked hard on this game over the past three and a half years and our studio is determined to give this game the second life it deserves. However, between now and then, we cannot sit idle. We will continue to support the game in its current state, but we also need to focus on other projects with fresh creative leaders. We have been working on something new and we can’t wait to share more about it! It’s a passion project that we’re in complete control of." 

It's an odd statement because LawBreakers itself can be seen as a "passion project"—Boss Key co-founder Cliff Bleszinski was obviously enthusiastic about it—and it already has a publisher, Nexon, meaning that the resources required for a free-to-play transition should be available if that's the direction they want to go. 

The remark about "fresh creative leaders" is also interesting: Bleszinski has very much been the face of the studio over the past several years, but his name isn't mentioned anywhere in the statement or its attribution. This studio update probably connects with a cryptic tweet we saw from Bleszinski last month:

Boss Key confirmed in an email that its new project is not associated with LawBreakers, and that Nexon isn't involved. We'll let you know when we hear more.  

Despite its positive critical response and handful of free-to-try weekends, Boss Key Productions' Lawbreakers has struggled commercially since launch last year. According to sales tracking site SteamSpy, the arena shooter's peak concurrent player count yesterday was just 50—and now publisher Nexon has discussed the game's shortcomings in its Q3 financial report. 

Within the transcript, Nexon says its overall revenues were up 36 percent year-over-year, however its earnings in North America fell short as a result of poor Lawbreakers sales. Nexon CFO Shiro Uemura says: "Our results in North America in the third quarter were below our outlook, mainly due to the sales from Lawbreakers being below our expectations. Lawbreakers is a unique FPS developed for core users." 

Uemura continues, suggesting that while the publisher had high hopes for the Cliff Bleszinski-led FPS pre-release, competition from Bluehole's battle royale megahit offset its own success. PUBG's meteoric rise has been remarkable, however it's perhaps worth noting that it launched into Steam's Early Access initiative in March, while Lawbreakers arrived several months later.

Nevertheless, Uemura adds: "We had very high expectations for its launch; however, the timing of its launch turned out to be unfortunate, specifically the blockbuster PC online game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds came out right about the same time, making the market environment very tough for first-person shooters in general and for Lawbreakers." 

Read Nexon's financial report transcript in full over here. 

Thanks, PCGamesN. 

Evan billed LawBreakers as "nimble, graceful and original" in his review back in August, but Boss Key Productions' debut has since struggled to maintain its playerbase and, most crucially, its sales. In a bid to get more folk onside, it's free-to-try on Steam this weekend and is subject to a limited-time 50 percent discount.     

Due to kick off tomorrow—November 9 at 10am PT/6pm GMT, through November 12 at 1pm PT/9pm GMT—the sci-fi arena shooter is hosting its second free Steam weekend in six weeks, which probably speaks to its faltering numbers. 

Lest that deter you from trying one of the the best multiplayer FPSes you probably aren't playing, though, because there's a lot of fun to be had here. I'll hand you over to Evan for more on its guns and movesets: 

The forms of movement have good relationships with LawBreakers' guns—big, imaginative energy and explosive weapons that are the children of Unreal Tournament. As Harrier, I have to mark a target with a debuffing dart, then grit my teeth as I paint an enemy with my Iron Man-like laser beam. The simplicity of the Battle Medic's grenade launcher is great: left click throws grenades that detonate on impact, and right click pops out ones that bounce. I like the moment-to-moment geometry I'm asked to do to decide which grenade will be more effective.

I also appreciate that the power level of ultimate abilities, which charge up on a flat timer, isn't so high that you're constantly anticipating them or playing around them, like I often do in Overwatch. They're flashy stalemate-breakers, but carving out a triple kill with Harrier's chest beam, or Titan's Palpatine-grade hand lightning, feels earned. 

As for LawBreakers' discount period, it's going for half price on Steam from November 8 at 10am PT/6pm GMT, through November 14 at 10am PT/6pm GMT. (Full price, at the time of writing, is £24.99/$29.99.)