Editor’s note: Gamers get their first hands-on experience with “LawBreakers,” the initial video game developed by former Epic Games creative guru Cliff Bleszinski and his Raleigh-based startup Boss Key Productions. John Gaudiosi offers a preview in a WRAL TechWire exclusive.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Cliff Bleszinski, founder and CEO of Boss Key Productions, held two full days of media gameplay sessions at his downtown Raleigh game studio last week. It’s the first hands-on with LawBreakers, which Nexon America will publish and gamers can buy exclusively through Steam on PC. No release date has been announced, but gamers attending PAX East April 22-24 in Boston will be able to play the Grand Canyon level called Grandview.

The new game is a 5 vs. 5 first-person shooter set in a distant future in which Law enforcement officials battle gangs (or “breakers”) in intense matches. The first game mode revealed, Overcharge, challenges each team to steal a battery from the other’s base and bring it to their side. It’s a variation of the popular “capture the flag” mode of many shooters, but with more strategy involved thanks to the colorful cast of characters available on both sides of the law.

Bleszinski, the creative genius who helped make Cary-based Epic Games an international powerhouse with multiple award-winning titles and game engine technology,  talks about the new game, his transition to a paid Steam PC product, and why he embraces diversity, in this exclusive interview.

How has the switch from the free-to-play to a paid business model impacted LawBreakers’ development?

We were considering with going free-to-play for a long time and when we were building the title we felt like the tail was wagging the dog in regards to monetization. We’re sitting there going, “Well, then we introduce hero rotation type stuff,” and it was like why not just let you have all of the main roles in the game and play as them and then let’s go with a medium type price like maybe $20, $30, $40-ish. And then let’s consider maybe a key crate system, something like a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has and keep all the micro-transactions cosmetic, which is the direction we’re going in.

There’s a lot of games that have come out recently that are $60 for a multiplayer game that’s similar to this and I think that price point is a little too steep. I think gamers can smell that a million miles away.

And micro-transactions still will be a part of the business model, but it won’t impact the gameplay experience.

Yeah, it’d be much more just visual like character skins, weapon skins, and things like that. If you want the flaming shotgun then that’s what you actually put your money towards.

What’s it like seeing media and YouTube influencers getting hands-on with LawBreakers?

The thing about LawBreakers is that we’ve made a game that’s inherently watchable — to the point where we have play tests in the lab and people just meander by who are going to the kitchen to get some coffee, and they’ll stop and just watch the entire match. The matches end with such drama that almost every day I hear people hooting and hollering. The press playing the game are all screaming and everything. I think our neighbors in our office here are going to be a little bit upset with the noise levels, but that’s the goal in a 2016-type of game to create something that yields animated GIFs or YouTube videos or Twitch Streams. Make something that’s infinitely watchable and hopefully you’ll profit.

The National Parks serve as the playground for many of this game’s maps, including the Grand Canyon level that’s playable at PAX East this weekend. You mentioned Mount Rushmore is also part of this game. What’s it been like exploring these parks?

Since in the game’s story there was this massive earthquake that destroyed everything, and everyone managed to rebuild and the national parks that were all sold off, it’s like these are locations that I refer to as the places your grandparents would go to in their RV that you’d be bored of as a kid. If I can take places like the Grand Canyon and make them exciting and sci-fi them up by having gravity anomalies and having people swinging and fighting each other in it, it’s a setting I haven’t seen a lot in games.

One thing that stood out from playing were lots of funny quips that the characters say. What role does humor play in this game?

You can’t be serious all the time, and although we are going to be an M-ish rated type of game considering you actually do gib people, there’s blood flying off and everything like that, it’s important to have a little bit of levity in the game. So one of my favorite lines from Kentaro? Is “What’s your net worth? Two grand?” Fun little lines like that are another way to learn about the fiction. The various cast of characters we have in this game all come from different backgrounds and have different attitudes depending on what’s going on in the game. That’s pretty important in a multiplayer shooter.

Speaking of different backgrounds, when I look around at your studio, it’s very young, but you have a diverse group of people making this game. How does that influence the characters you’re making?

I’m a big believer in diversity because I think it brings a lot of perspectives into the studio. We have Anthony at the studio. He come out of the south side of Chicago and he came as an intern and he just did so well that now he has a full-time job. It’s one of those things like if we’re depicting characters of all different backgrounds, people can be like “Hey you may not want to have the DEA guy too excited about shooting other people in the climate of 2016.” These are the things you have to think about now because people will use it against you, and you have to be really smart about it. At the end of the day, I want everybody to feel represented in this game. I want everybody to have a chance to spend money on this product and enjoy it along with everybody else.

What role do these public hands-on gameplay sessions at PAX East this weekend play as you continue to develop this game?

When you get hands-on with the press, it’s really important to see if they can actually pick up the game and learn it. We were concerned that we had a steep learning curve. It’s a decent learning curve, but once people get five to 10 minutes with each character, they pick up on like the nuances of what their abilities are, how they move, how they traverse throughout the environment. Bringing it to PAX East is a full-circle thing for me to actually see gamers for the first time ever hands-on on the show floor. It’s going to be a pretty amazing thing considering I’m originally from Boston.