Epic Games' former Lead Designer Cliff Bleszinski revealed the first footage of Project Bluestreak, and it looks quite gorgeous.

Cliff B. previously mentioned that his studio, Boss Key Productions, would be working with Nexon America to create Bluestreak as a free-to-play sci-fi arena shooter for PC. This past weekend, he finally unveiled footage of the project during a panel at PAX East (courtesy of PC Gamer). Bleszinski is known for putting over two decades of development at Epic Games and for the brilliant work he put into making its various incarnations of the Unreal Engine and being the Lead Designer of Gears of War 1-3. 

Bleszinski previously said that he was pretty much done with disc-based gaming, and that he didn't want to just be remembered for just the Unreal Engine or Gears of War — he wanted to contributed more to the art form than just those two major projects. Cliff B. cites Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman, Swarm by B.V. Larson and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries as major influences into the concepts being put into Bluestreak. He mentioned that the double jumping and wall-running of Titanfall showcased some out-of-the-box approaches to first-person shooters that he liked, but also hinted that there's still much more to the first-person shooter genre than forcing players to stare down iron sights all the time.

"There are still so many things that people either haven’t done recently in a first-person shooter or haven’t done at all. They date back to mechanics in Genesis and Super Nintendo games, relating to weaponry and player movement and things like that," Bleszinski said. "They’d make for an absolutely fascinating take on a first-person shooter."

As for the gameplay footage revealed at the panel, there really wasn't much featured besides a few gorgeous backgrounds. In all honesty, the quality of the video made it hard to tell if what we saw was in-game footage or a pre-rendered cutscene. The video showed a futuristic, mechanized interior of some kind of lab or military compound, until the camera pulled to the exterior of the building and showed a rustic, yet beautiful, Japanese garden with samurai armor and cherry blossoms included. As expected, Project Bluestreak will run on Unreal Engine 4. Stay tuned as we'll provide more coverage on this mysterious title once more information is available.

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