It’s been nearly a decade since Gears of War launched.

A lot has changed in 10 years: The Xbox 360 has given way to the Xbox One, Gears went on to be a blockbuster franchise for Microsoft, and developer Epic Games lost its Design Director, Cliff Bleszinski, who then went by the nickname “CliffyB.”

Bleszinski, a man who seemed permanently tied to Epic and Gears of War, left the company in 2012, settling in for a retirement that turned out to be short-lived. Now his new company, Boss Key, is on the verge of launching its first game: a gravity-defying PC shooter called Lawbreakers.

“It’s one of the most gratifying things imaginable,” Bleszinski told Mashable of the response to Lawbreakers at the recent PAX East show. The booth had a consistently long line of attendees hoping to get a taste of Lawbreakers’ multiplayer, with the wait stretching to four and a half hours at times.

“Yeah, I make shooty-shooty games where people blow up, but it’s still new to see the characters, see the world realized, and see people playing it and enjoying it.”

There’s quite a bit to enjoy about Lawbreakers, if the PAX demo is any indication. A far cry from the serious, brown palette of Gears of War, Boss Key’s first game is vibrant, with characters in colorful armor zipping around each stage, often floating through low-gravity scenarios.

Manipulating gravity is a key feature of Lawbreakers, and an idea that came to Bleszinski over a period of years, with several points of inspiration.

“I had this recurring nightmare as a child where I would be out on my front lawn playing with Optimus Prime and gravity would flip,” he said. “I’d be hanging onto the grass as the grass was slowly pulling out and I’d be sucked into the atmosphere."

"I was a weird kid.”

Childhood nightmares aside, a real-life zero-G experience on a specially designed airplane — the "vomit comet," as it's called — also had something to do with Bleszinski’s interest in defying gravity.

"The plane goes up at 45-degree angles… and then it goes down at 45-degree angles for 45 seconds, and so you actually experience true weightlessness like an astronaut," he said. "It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing."

Weightlessness has its perks — you’re a lot harder to shoot when you’re flitting around in midair.

The idea continued gestating as Bleszinski read sci-fi stories like Ender’s Game and Leviathan Wakes, which raised questions about low-gravity environments — and made him think about how to use them.

“So working our way outward from that, having a character-based shooter made a lot of sense.”

The lack of gravity is one of the more memorable elements from my short time with Lawbreakers. It’s not everywhere — in plenty of places, gravity works perfectly fine. In others, you’ll find yourself jumping higher, or floating from one ledge to another.

Weightlessness has its perks — you’re a lot harder to shoot when you’re flitting around in midair. On the other hand, firing a weapon in low-grav makes it easy to lose control. It’s going to take some getting used to — more than the short session I played — but it’s also one of the coolest things about Lawbreakers.

Another thing I liked was the art design; I tend to gravitate towards bright colors and a wide palette, which Lawbreakers delivers. Characters’ get-ups are highlighted with shades of yellow, orange, blue, or pink, and the arena I played had blue skies overhead, making everything seem just a little brighter.

“When I did Gears of War 10 years ago… it’s like ‘War is Hell’ took over. Brown rubble everywhere. Zack Snyder 300-style is what I call it. And I think the rubber band swung back the other way, where everything has this kind of League of Legends/World of Warcraft look to it," Bleszinski said.

Lawbreakers is entering a field blossoming with similar games, and Bleszinski knows that. He sang Overwatch's praises (“Tracer is my jam!”), but he has a different vision in mind for Lawbreakers.

“As [Gearbox Software’s] Randy Pitchford himself told me… ‘You’re like the M-rated version of these games. Own that.’”

It may not be brown rubble and chainsaw guns, but Lawbreakers is still a violent shooter—which is highlighted in strange ways thanks to the zero-gravity environments.

“As you see the bodies tumble through low gravity and you see the blood globules kind of go flying as well… You know it is gore, but it’s not super hardcore gore, I don’t want to see somebody’s lovingly rendered spleen in front of my face anytime soon," he said.

Bleszinski has been making games since he was a child, coding adventure games in Visual Basic before making “cool little platform game” Jazz Jackrabbit with Epic in the early 1990s. Now 41 years old, his approach to game design can be narrowed down to verbs. “What can I do in this game? What tangible actions can this character do? Can I double in size, can I shoot lightning from my hands, can I dodge, can I jump, can I jetpack, can I kick?”

To hear Bleszinski talk so passionately about video games (and not just his own; he had plenty of praise for Gone Home, Cibele and Overwatch) it’s strange to think he almost walked away from the industry forever.

“I really thought I was done,” he told me. He was burned out at Epic after Gears of War 3, and stated the company had “so many jaded developers” at the time. After getting tired of “pitching against a wall,” Bleszinski was “happy to drink craft beers and get a dad bod by my pool.”

‘You’re like the M-rated version of these games. Own that.’

After six months, he got bored, but more importantly, he came out of retirement after seeing how passionate fans were about his previous games.

“People come up to me and they’re like, we met online in your game, we’re getting married. They message me like your game helped me get through PTSD, it helped me get through depression," he said.

“I talk a lot of shit online, I know that, but at the end of the day I love what I do and I really am appreciative of the people who actually support us."

Bleszinski is hoping to see an enthusiastic response that includes Twitch streams, YouTube videos, animated GIFs and maybe esports, though it’s not an immediate priority.

“We’re making a dramatic game that’s very watchable, maybe it’ll be an esport one day, but you gotta walk before you can run… You can’t force it.”

Lawbreakers is set to come to PC later this year.

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