Borderlands

[highheatkingsb]

Re: Borderlands

Man, I watched this on youtube today. This looks absolutely incredible.

[bigfnjoe96]

Re: Borderlands

Video Interview with Game Play... Man this game is looking sweeeeeet

<div style="width: 480px;"><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" id="gtembed" width="480" height="392"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=51346"/><param name="quality" value="high" /> <embed src="http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=51346" swLiveConnect="true" name="gtembed" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="true" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="392"></embed> </object><div style="font-size: 10px; font-family: Verdana; text-align: center; width: 480px; padding-top: 2px; padding-bottom: 2px; background-color: black; height: 32px;"><div><a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com" title="GameTrailers.com">Video Games</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com/game/5366.html" title="Borderlands">Borderlands</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com/player/51346.html" title="E3 09: President Interview HD">E3 09: President Interview HD</a></div><div style="padding-top: 3px;"><a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com/platformlist/xb360/index.html" title="XBox 360">XBox 360</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com/platformlist/ps3/index.html" title="PS3">Playstation 3</a> | <a style="color:#FFFFFF;" href="http://www.gametrailers.com/platformlist/wii/index.html" title="Wii">Nintendo Wii</a></div></div></div>

[Beantown]

Re: Borderlands

This game looks pretty damn awesome.

[highheatkingsb]

Re: Borderlands

I've been following this for a couple years now. I'm so glad they changed the art style. I can't wait for this game.

[Flawless]

Re: Borderlands

Another interview that shows some more gameplay.

http://e3.gamespot.com/video/6212153/

...

[highheatkingsb]

Re: Borderlands

Game is going to be awesome. Can't wait to shoot down some Rakk hives.

[Flawless]

Re: Borderlands

Can't wait for this.


Borderlands: Mixing Genres

He continued with some perspective on the general timing of making public in-development titles. "If we started talking about Borderlands too early, we would have said things that are not correct because that was an original game and we had to explore and discover the actual game that we could succeed at…You start with a promise 'Hey, wouldn't it be great to blend Halo with the reward loops of Diablo, wouldn't that be awesome?' But there's so many details you have to work out to answer that question."

One of those details was the cooperative element of Borderlands, and how to go about setting up systems and rule that govern how players can interact in a multiplayer space. "It's a great pain, actually. When you think about the questing and the loot aspect of it and the growth aspect of it--obviously Diablo is a big reference there, and when we think about Diablo, you had your four players that were able to play co-op, but we also wanted to do better than that. I remember, my experience when I played Diablo, I got the game and I played single-player for a long time and then I said 'Let me try going online,' and [Blizzard] divided those two concepts. When I finally decided to go online I had to start over and I had to create a different character. So I said, wouldn't it be neat if your character was persistent and you owned that character, and if you wanted to play in single-player you could, and if you wanted to take that character online you could, and if you got anything there you could take that back into single-player. Or at any moment a multiplayer game could become a single-player game because everyone's dropped out, or at any moment your single-player game could become a multiplayer game because you're inviting your friends in or you're joining somebody else's game. Wouldn't that be amazing if the game was that flexible and your character was persistent? That was a goal from the beginning."

As people drop in and out of sessions, the game world will react. "Let's say I'm playing and I invite you to join my game. When you spawn in the world, we'll both get a message saying 'You've joined the world' and then it'll say 'The enemy has become tougher.' Then what happens is there'll be more enemies, the enemies that we find will become more challenging, and they're challenging not to make it frustrating but to balance the fact that we have more power and capability together. The rewards increase too, we'll now be able to share more experience from the enemies we take down and get better loot from them, more loot from them too."

Gearbox is working on allowing for as versatile an online setup as possible. Through split-screen co-op online isn't going to be implemented for console gamers at launch, Pitchford told us what to expect. "You can play on your system on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and you can join people online or you can have a friend play with you in a split-screen scenario, but right now we're not able to bring the split-screen online. Maybe we'll be able to find a way to do that later, but that's a technical limitation with the amount of data that's going on it just can't work. That would be something that we'd love to do, and I hope people love the game so that conceivably we could invest in that and find a way."

How would item drops and enemies adjust if you were starting the mission arc over with a more powerful character? Pitchford says that would depend on the difficulty level you set, since enemies and items in the game world don't auto-balance. "Oblivion kind of self-balanced, right? When you were level 1, the monster you were fighting kind of deals with you like you're level 1. But when you're level 10, that very same monster would be tougher. They kind of auto-balanced everything in the game for you. We don't have that approach at all. If you're a level 1 and you're in an area that's tuned for level 1, that might be an even challenge. Later if you come back when you're level 15 you're just going to own that place and that's cool, that feels really good, that proves to you the power you built."

Pitchford is confident Borderland will deliver on feel, as it's being built as a first-person shooter as much as it is a loot collection and character building game. "If you take Halo and how it feels to move your character around, and aim and pull the trigger and the way the gun feels in your hands and the way it fires, it's just like that. But now imagine when you've done that a little bit, wow I just leveled up and I've got more health and I've gotten skill points. Now I can choose to be a really good armsman and reload faster or I can choose to be a medic, depending on which character class I've chosen each of them has multiple builds, and I'll build my character out with the skills I develop throughout the course of the game." The game offers four character classes to toy around with, each with their own general strengths as well as multiple skill trees that allow for variability across players using the same class.

A gigantic arsenal of weapons will further allow players to customize their play experience to their liking. "When you play every first-person shooter you've ever played, there's the pistol. Maybe there's some games that have a few. Then the designers say 'well we're going to make this pistol the early weapon, so we'll make it kind of inaccurate. It's not going to do very much damage and it's going to have a lot of sway so it's hard to hone in on the enemy, and we're going to have it reload relatively slowly.' Halo did this thing where you can look down the sights with the pistol and it's very accurate, so there was a utility to the pistol even after you found more powerful weapons, and that was a pretty good innovation. In Borderlands, there are hundreds of thousands of pistols, and amongst them you will find something that functions effectively just like that Halo pistol, you'll also find something that's very powerful, you'll find something that functions more like the pistol from Doom 3 or from Quake 2 or from any of our games, and you'll find pistols that'll be more or less accurate, that will have faster reload times, or that have a larger magazine but have a different round in them that does more damage or a different kind of damage like an incendiary effect or maybe one that has an acid shell that'll melt their face off when it hits them. I've even found pistols with shotguns shells that has a scope on it. We didn't design each gun, we developed software and artificial intelligence to procedurally generate these things for us. So the artificial intelligence we did creates the guns for us. Each pistol doesn't just have unique stats, it also has a unique look. You'll be able to tell something about it, like this pistol has a really long barrel, I guess it probably fires more accurately…or look at the magazine coming out of the handle of that pistol, I bet that pistol can carry 50 shots before I have to reload."

Overall item quality will also be easily identifiable as Gearbox is utilizing a color coding scheme where a white item name bar indicates common quality, green is a step up, blue is higher quality, and purple is the highest tier, mirroring the system of World of Warcraft. Named bosses in the game world will have unique loot tables, which should work to encourage players to revisit dungeon areas to try and nab all the best items. Pitchford made the comment that because of the genre mixing it's been difficult for Gearbox to properly frame the game. "Some folks nominated us for best of show [at E3 2009] for shooter, other folks nominated us for best of show stuff for role-playing, and it's really kind of interesting. There are some other folks that have blended the genres in some ways like Mass Effect definitely came from a role-playing angle but they started to add action to it. Same with Fallout. Fallout started from a role-playing angle, these brilliant guys that made Oblivion, and they added shooter to it with the VATS system. We're coming from a shooter angle and blending in the role-playing genre. We're focusing on character growth, discovery, achievement, accomplishment, gear, equipment and skill. We're not focusing on dialogue trees. Like you're not going to spend 20 minutes having a conversation with another character. That's cool, there's something to be said about that, but this game's about action. It's a shooter."

Considering the setup in Borderlands, it seems like there is quite a bit of opportunity for post-release downloadable content. "We don't have anything to announce yet," said Pitchford, "but of course we've thought ahead."

Borderlands is currently scheduled to ship this October for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC platforms.

[jmood88]

Re: Borderlands

I'll be buying this game.

[LionsFanNJ]

Re: Borderlands

Man, this and God of War III are my two most anticipated must buys.

[Flawless]

Re: Borderlands

Borderlands lands Oct. 20

At last month's Electronic Entertainment Expo, Gearbox Software revealed that its eagerly anticipated "role-playing shooter" Borderlands would ship in October. Now, with retail lines being drawn in the holiday-quarter sand, 2K Games has locked down the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 title's exact launch date: October 20 in North America and October 23 in the UK, mainland Europe, Australia, and other territories.

In an interview with GameSpot, 2K Games president Christoph Hartmann said his company is unfazed by the prospect of launching an untested IP within weeks of high-profile sequels like Uncharted 2, due October 13.

"I don't think we have to be afraid of competition or shy of what's out there," said Hartmann, confidently. "I think this holiday season is a little bit lighter in triple-A games than last year. It's actually a good holiday to put something out. ... There's always risk and opportunity. The risk is you have a hard time standing out against established IP. The opportunity is you have a lot of traffic here and it can be a much bigger product at retail than it would be otherwise."

The finalization of Borderlands' release date marks the end of the vehicle-centric, sci-fi action-RPG's windy road to release. Announced in summer 2007 as "Mad Max meets Diablo," the game was touted as having the most unique weapons ever--more than 500,000 randomly generated guns scattered in caches in the game's open world. However, anticipation turned into frustration when its initial late-2008 release date slipped into 2009. Also, concerns were (initially) raised when the game's new visual style--viewable below--was introduced this spring.

[Flawless]

Re: Borderlands

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[MC Fatigue]

Re: Borderlands

I love the sound of this game - but damn, I HATE the art for it.

[mudtiger]

Re: Borderlands

I was excited about this game until I saw that. Looks like a run and gun shooter when I'm interested in a slower more tactical game. Hopefully I'm wrong.

[Flawless]

Re: Borderlands

Gameplay trailer

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/borderlands/video/6213965/borderlands-gameplay-trailer?hd=1

...

[Flawless]

Re: Borderlands

New hands-on previews:

Eurogamer
1UP
Gamespot
GamePro

New Screens