10 Ridiculous Excuses For Failed Video Games

Now, you’d think that Cliff Bleszinski would know his way around a shooter. How to craft them, what makes them tick, all of the fundamentals. After all, he’s the man behind the critically acclaimed Gears of War series. Still, not everything Bleszinski touches turns to bullet-riddled gold, though, as we discovered with LawBreakers.

After leaving Epic Games, this team shooter was his first project. As with Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, this fact always puts an intense spotlight on a game, which leads to negative reactions in and of itself. Expectations are extra high in these cases, and it’s impossible to please everybody. In the case of LawBreakers, though, a lot of the negativity sprung from an unexpected source (according to Bleszinski): the game’s ‘wokeness.’

This title wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. It was a team-based shooter that pitted the Law against the Breakers, in modes based around the traditions of capture the flag, capturing points and so on. Ultimately, it was a victim of its time, launching during the early peak of Overwatch and Fortnite hype. As far as its creator was concerned, though, there was another factor.

“One big epiphany I had was that I pushed my own personal political beliefs in a world that was increasingly divided,” he wrote. “Instead of the story being ‘this game looks neat’ it became “this is the game with the ‘woke bro’ trying to push his hackey politics on us with gender neutral bathrooms.’ Instead of ‘who am I going to choose’ it became “white dude shoehorns diversity in his game and then smells his own smug farts in interviews’ instead of just letting the product … speak for itself.”