In a bit of a shocker, Gearbox Software’s first person shooter Borderlands has taken the top stop in this week’s list of the top 10 best selling PC games (based on revenue) on Steam. Left 4 Dead 2, Valve’s own zombie shooter sequel, goes down to the number two position after spending the last few weeks in the number one slot.BioWare’s fantasy RPG Dragon Age Origins takes on the third spot this week (for the digital deluxe edition) as well as the fourth spot (for the regular edition). Despite tons of controversy surrounding the PC version in the past week, Modern Warfare 2 managed to debut on the list this week in the number five spot.

1. Borderlands – Gearbox Software/2K Games
2. Left 4 Dead 2 – Valve
3. Dragon Age Origins Digital Deluxe Edition – BioWare/EA
4. Dragon Age Origins – BioWare/EA
5. Modern Warfare 2 – Infinity Ward/Activision
6. ArmA II – Bohemia Interactive
7. Aion – NCsoft
8. Tropico 3 – Kalypso Media
9. Assassin’s Creed – Ubisoft
10. Killing Floor – Tripwire Interactive

Borderlands tops Left 4 Dead 2 in latest Steam top 10 sales list originally appeared on Big Download Blog on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST.

First off, I’d like to make this clear up front before going into detail. If you’re reading this review to help decide if you really want to dish out some money for this game, do it. Unless you hate FPS or RPG games with a passion, you’ll enjoy it. Although, truthfully, if you don’t have anyone to play it with you’ll likely be a bit turned off as the real fun is from co-op.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the first thing I loved about the game. The opening introduction. I watched it and the first words out of my mouth were “This game is awesome.” Keep in mind I had yet to play the game while sounding confident in saying this.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t pay too much attention to the story, or what little bit it had. The story wasn’t gripping, basically saying “You are here, looking for a treasure that comes out every so often. You need people to trust you so you help them out.” While that doesn’t sound too interesting, the journals; which were essentially just audio logs, caught my attention a bit and added more to the story I had already known. That and the woman who talks to you from time to time to update you on where you stand on finding the treasure of which you seek.

Difficulty wise, the game wasn’t that hard. At least, on the first playthrough. While the game had it’s tough points, unless you did a quest that was levels above you, it wasn’t that hard. However, the real challenge is the second play through. Basically, the first playthrough is just you learning the game. The second playthrough is much tougher. On a side note, every now and then I found a gun that seemed a bit overpowered and it became kind of easy. Again, that as only on the first playthrough. Also heard about a third playthrough that has all level 49-51 enemies, all equipment being 48 to use. I myself didn’t beat the second playthrough yet and can’t confirm this, but I don’t see why it would be a lie.

For the most part, the guns felt different. A concern of mine, and many other people’s was that all the guns would be the same and wouldn’t add much to it. However, that wasn’t the case, many of the guns had different feels to them and I was using them differently in certain scenarios. While some classes handle certain guns better, you’re not restrained to use a certain type of weapon by the class you choose.

Boss battles certainly added more to it, the first boss being tough for many; including myself. It was basically the game’s way of telling you “Alright, now that you learned the basics, good luck with this.” It wasn’t extremely difficult, but it did make you think differently about the game.

Missions ranged in difficulty, a lot of the time you would be doing side missions levels below you and you could get through them without too much hassle. Still, every now and then you came across some that were more difficult. There are also different kinds of side missions, ranging from finding items, to collected the journals mentioned earlier; even killing enemies and just getting to new places or talking to new people.

Co-op is where the real fun came from. You weren’t restrained to staying right near people; although you couldn’t go to a new map completely without teleporting the entire party. I was using the Hunter during the first playthrough, and we had 2 soldiers and another hunter joined who we began playing with. So, I switched over to the Siren. Gotta say, kind of glad I did, on those tough parts I could phasewalk and flank a group of enemies while they turned my party could get closer. Hell, at times I was facing groups by my self because of this and getting checkpoints further ahead.

The only disappointing thing about this is the final boss. To put it simply, it was way too easy. I managed to beat it alone without dying once just by hiding behind some boxes and jumping up to shoot at it. Getting there was harder than the actual boss, lots of beefed up enemies to fight along the way.

Another cool thing about the game was that different groups of enemies would fight each other, and every now and then you’d run into a group of bandits fighting some skags.

I didn’t really run into many glitches, and the achievements were pretty simple with the exception of a couple that were time consuming or needed certain requirements to be met. Specifically, “My Brother Is An Italian Plumber” is one of the more difficult ones unless you get it earlier in the game. Even then, it can be a pain as you’re weaker, so I recommend going back later in the game to the first area you fought skags.

All in all, this game is loads of fun and something that took me away from L4D for a couple of days, I’ll be playing this regularly until L4D2 and even after. Plus, with that DLC being about zombies, maybe it will be out around Halloween time. A man can dream.

The PC version scores 85%, while the Xbox 360 is at 84.70% and the PS3 gets 83.50%

Borderlands is a first-person shooter/role-playing game set on the desolate world of Pandora. The player and a number of other factions are searching for the Vault, a stockpile of powerful alien technology hidden somewhere on the planet. They could all work together to find the Vault but where's the fun in that? The game features single-player and multiplayer modes, including four-player online co-op.

North American PS3/360 gamers get Borderlands on October 20th. PC users will have to wait until October 26th. In Europe, it arrives on consoles on October 23rd and on the PC on the 30th.

source

Gearbox sent out a punchy update today assuring us that Borderlands is "pretty damn huge" and all that we've seen so far are "the noobie areas of the game. You haven't even met the real bad guys yet."

OK, enlighten us. Well, first, Gearbox touts a 60-plus hour experience "in just the first play through," and that they've been trying, like a swoony prom date, to deny us their best charms until we deserve it. *Foot tapping.* Yeah, off with it already.

"Remember all of those movie trailers you've seen that give away all the best stuff and the whole damn story before you're even at the theater?" said Gearbox's Randy Pitchford in an email. "Yeah, we think that sucks too. … [W]e want to assure gamers there is way more to Borderlands. A lot more. So to get that point across here is just a tiny little tease. Meet the Crimson Lance."

Apparently this is one of the baddie factions you'll encounter – past level 15, Pitchford implies – when Borderlands arrives in a few weeks. My, Crimson Lance looks like some heavily armed, robust persons with an antisocial disposition. I'm sure we'll figure out a way to put them in their place.

source

Once upon a time, there was a teaser trailer for a game called Borderlands. It was brown, gray, and featured a mysterious woman saying ominous things to the camera. Did it look good? Sure; the concept of a free-roaming shooter was appealing – but the new direction the game has taken will really make Borderlands stand out. The visual style is something Quentin Tarantino would come up with after watching too much anime. The opening music is Cage The Elephant, and the characters are introduced in a wacky revenge-film manner. The east-meets-west grindhouse movie aesthetic blew me away as I watched the opening cutscene.

Of course, the style would be fairly moot without meaty gameplay to back it up. Borderlands plays like a cross between Fallout 3 and Call of Duty – the controls are simple, tight, and clearly oriented to standard first person shooter fare. However, the underlying mechanics are far deeper. Borderlands lets you choose from four starting classes, each represented by a unique character model that can be tweaked slightly at a “New-You” machine. (these also serve as respawn points) The slick controls ease the player into the experience; however, enemies have RPG-style health bars above their heads, guns all have their own statistics, and missions are handled with a quest-list that is strikingly similar to something that would be found in an MMO.

The graphics are coming together nicely, matching the schizophrenic editing style. Thick, inky lines cover the murky browns and deep reds, turning the otherwise muted color palette into an eye-popping affair. The game had a few anti-aliasing problems; however, with these early demo builds, finishing touches like that are usually present – let’s just hope the jaggies are smoothed out before release. People keen on playing splitscreen needn’t worry, either – Borderlands appeared to look just as attractive and ran just as well as the single-player game, at least on the Xbox 360 build I was testing.

Given that the rest of the gameplay mechanics are so dolled up – the classes, the respawn, the number-crunching – the blunt quest messages are a little jarring. However, the characters providing the quests are so lively that it’s easy to forgive the “read paragraph, go here, do X” mission structure. It’s even easier to forgive when the game is playable as co-op with a friend splitscreen, or four people total over LAN or Xbox Live. The zany action is only better with teammates, and kudos need to be given to Gearbox for remembering splitscreen. Some of us have at least one friend, you know.

I left Borderlands feeling pleasantly surprised. While the recent trailer had clued me into the game’s irreverent style, playing the game sold me on the whole title. It’s especially impressive that the experience is multiplayer – after all, the game has more in common with Oblivion than Halo. As long as the version I played wasn’t hiding any crippling flaws, consider Borderlands a success in the making.

Source

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford is excited. Standing in front of a small room packed with journalists in the 2K Games booth in the GamesCom business section, he literally bounces with energy, despite the fact it's 4pm in the afternoon and everyone else in the room wants to be out of there, drinking ice-cold German beer like, yesterday. Even though he's probably been doing the same presentation for two days straight, he literally cannot wait to tell you how awesome Borderlands is.

His attitude is infectious. While many of the other presentations have been interesting, it's clear that Randy has a deep, scary, emotional involvement with this game. It's refreshing to see the passion as he talks about the development of Borderlands, and the contrast to many of the usual marketroid spiels one is subjected to at events like this couldn't be more obvious.

Borderlands is a first-person shooter. It's also a role-playing game, but first and foremost, it's an FPS, making it one of the first RPG games that has a significant solely skill-based component to the action side of the gameplay. While it has all the RPG elements you'd expect – levelling, earning XP, grabbing loot – features like iron sight targeting really hammer in the fact that you're supposed to play this game in a distinctly different way.

Randy had four comrades from Gearbox demonstrating the game in co-operative mode (all playing on the Xbox 360), and we got a good run-through of a chunk of one of the levels from the game. We saw the drop-in co-op in action; players can join a game that is in progress quickly and easily. There's also split-screen co-op as well, offering even more incentive to get into the game with mates around a single TV.

Borderlands is set in your increasingly-common post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like most RPGs, the game has an over-arching storyline with various individual quests and you have a massive map to explore and adventure your way through. There are specific dungeon-style instances you can do as well. Quests are offered and accepted – all fairly standard stuff.

While the actual shooting part of the game is most definitely skill-based, the damage, equipment and weapons system is your typical RPG system. We didn't get a detailed look at all the various stats and other under-the-hood stuff that makes the system tick, but it's all there. There's no dice rolling to determine if you hit your target- that's all up to how good you are at shooting things – but if you do hit them, the RPG mechanics kick in and you'll see differing amounts of pain inflicted based on all the various conditions. The same is true of critical hits – these aren't just random chance, if you're good enough you'll hit more of these and do more damage.

One of those various conditions is what weapon you're using, and this is where the word 'various' is a bit of an understatement. One of the neat things Gearbox have done in Borderlands is create a software system that is capable of generating weapons procedurally. In a nutshell, this means that there are literally millions of weapons available, all of them spawned by a crazy pseudo-artificial intelligence system that is bunging weapon parts together in creative ways to offer you, the gamer, the chance to kill virtual creatures in ever more entertaining and splashy ways. For those compulsive item collectors, there are a host of special items, including precious purples for you to collect (and, of course, to show off in your multiplayer games when you drop in with mates).

Combat ranges between fast and furious, with some engagements being over in a matter of seconds, to more lengthy affairs. We witnessed a sort of boss battle between the four players and a huge beast called Scagzilla which lasted a few minutes. As you whale away on beasties like this, you see the damage you're doing to it popping off over their bodies; this seemed a little weird to me but then I realised it was because I'd already completely forgotten that this was an RPG and this is the sort of crazy-ass attention to detail people like to see.

As you level up, you'll get upgrade points that can be spent on various parts of a skill tree, allowing you to hone particular talents or generalise if that's how you'd rather play. Again, didn't see a lot of the detail in the skill tree but it seems likely there'll be a lot of cool stuff to play with in there.

One little feature that was demonstrated was the duelling system – if you're in the middle of a game and someone pinches some loot you wanted or is just generally being a tool, you can challenge them to a mini-duel. A force field zaps down around the pair of you and you just have a battle outside the scope of the rest of the game. This will hopefully allow people to take out rage in more constructive ways than hurling abuse at the other person.

One of the other big features is the fact that your characters are persistent not just within the single player universe, but also across multiplayer sessions. This means that you can spend a lot of time tricking out your character and then when you drop into a game with friends (or strangers), you can bring everything along with you – meaning you don't have to start with a blank slate when other people are already levelled up . I'm curious to see how and if this affects balance (for example, what happens if you have a really highly levelled character that joins a new game full of newbs – will the creatures automatically scale up in badness to match, or will your character be able to dominate with ease?).

Borderlands was definitely the game of the show for me at GamesCom this year. I have a heavy FPS bias as a general rule, but this looks like an interesting and refreshing take on the genre, opening up new doors for it with the addition of RPG elements that look carefully integrated to add depth to the game without impacting the focus on action. The drop-in co-operative play is hugely attractive, especially if it works as seamlessly on PCs as it looks like it does on the console version.

Borderlands looks like it will have a lot of appeal to a wide variety of gamers. Stay tuned for this one.

Source

This interview is rated purple for 'epic'. In this in-depth interview, Pitchford not only reflects on the development and transitions Borderlands underwent, but also about the current trend towards RPG-shooters, how marketing affects game sales and even lays his cards on the table in the ("irrelevant") games as art debate. Enjoy.

IGN AU: Hey Randy, good to speak with you. First of all, Borderlands looks great – and for the third day of a three-day media tour, the team demoing the game is happy – they're happy and laughing and having a great time. It's a little bit Twilight Zone-esque in there.

Randy Pitchford: [laughs] Well, it's because the game's pretty much done now; we're shipping in October, so we didn't make a demo to show – we just brought the game! But yeah, they're totally going off-script; Steve [Gibson] and I trade off and we're just having fun.

IGN AU: It's a good sign though, when demoing the game after three full days is not a labour.

Randy Pitchford: I'll tell you, of all the games we've made at Gearbox over the years, it's only happened maybe two or three times. Usually when we finish a game and we're at the end, we're sick of it. We want to put it in the box and be done with it. But with Borderlands, it's actually become a productivity sink at Gearbox, because we're just having fun. And it's because the game's so dynamic and unpredictable; there are so many things that are different each time you play it. And I used to ask myself –well, have you played World of Warcraft?

IGN AU: Me? Yeah, of course. Does it show that badly?

Randy Pitchford: Well, I used to wonder if the Blizzard guys get hooked on this the same way we do. And you know what? We kind of found out. Even though we know all the stuff, we still want to get the gear and level up our character – and it's the loot that does it.

IGN AU: It's a perfect segue because I think there is this type of gamer out there. Too Human didn't get a whole lot right, but it really nailed the loot drops system. What is it about gamers' minds that attracts them to 'loot'-oriented games?

Randy Pitchford: Ha, I don't know – we like to own stuff, maybe? But I do know this: I know that I played about 300 or 400 hours of Diablo, and I know that Diablo fundamentally has no skill to it! [laughs] No seriously, the skill I use to play the game is the exact same skill I use to launch the application! I put a cursor on an icon and I click on it.

The compulsion of 'oh – I'm gonna go up one more level' or 'dude, this sword is awesome – but I gotta go up two levels before I can use it', there's so much compulsion to the looting and the equipment and the levelling up.

IGN AU: It's addictive. It's a little bit like gambling in that way.

Randy Pitchford: Yeah, but in shooters it's the exact opposite, right? The Master Chief and Gordon Freeman are exactly the same at the end of the game as they are at the beginning of the game – but it doesn't matter. In a shooter, it's the moment-to-moment fun; it feels good to move and to shoot a guy's leg off – and I don't know, maybe it's because we all have this hunter/gatherer thing in us and we can't do that anymore. So instead we get that in the game!

IGN AU: Well, the crazy thing that I kept coming back to during the Borderlands demo was the game, after being reskinned, has shot into the spotlight. I mean, the game itself hasn't changed.

Randy Pitchford: The design itself is identical, isn't it? Isn't that interesting?

IGN AU: Yeah, completely. What does that say about gamers, their tastes or fickle natures?

Randy Pitchford: I think it says a couple things, because it happened to me too. I didn't make the decision – some artists had an insurgency at our company, I'm not kidding. I mean, they really did. In 2008, the role-playing-shooting stuff was working, but we made the decision to push the game out to make it bigger. We added a character class, instead of having a linear mission structure, we added 100 side-missions and made the world really big so we could just explore, have discovery, choice and growth.

That decision was expensive, so to do this we had to push the game out to the end of 2009. But we made the decision and the artists were like, "well, what are we going to do?" So a few of them went back and looked at their concept art and kinda said "well, we're not going to compromise either, then. We're going to try to build the game the way we wanted it to look."

I didn't know they were doing this, and I caught wind that they were up to something. I made a deal with one of the owners [and Art Director] of Gearbox, Brian Martel, who was kind of leading this insurgency, and I said "dude, what are you doing? We're in production! Can I even see it?"

IGN AU: So you were getting protective.

Randy Pitchford: I was getting protective of the fact that I don't want to go outta business! [laughs] Well, it's very expensive, what we do. You spend tens of millions of dollars to develop this stuff and it's a big risk. So we're in production, and I'm saying "well, can I see it, at least? You're changing all of the art in the game!

IGN AU: You'd think just maybe, as President, you might be entitled to that. Maybe.

Randy Pitchford: Right. And Martel said, "look, we're not ready yet; we're not doing anything invasive – we've got a small group of guys who are trying something out." And we made a deal – I gave him three weeks to deliver a prototype before I made a decision. So he spent three weeks and they built the prototype – a little vignette that could show off whatever he was doing and what it would look like.

And I remember he set up a meeting to show me in a conference room –and Brian left town! …Maybe he was afraid of me or something, I don't know. [laughs] And I show up to this meeting and I'm thinking "okay, if I agree to what he's showing me, I'm going to need to redo all of the art in the game. So I'm shutting this down. I'm shutting this the hell down and I don't know what it is, but these guys are crazy and it shouldn't have gone on this long, but if I stopped them earlier I'd crush their souls… but now they're more invested, so now I'm going to have to crush their souls even more!

It was bad.

And then I saw it. And I was like, 'holy shit! I've never seen anything like it!'

IGN AU: But wasn't it unusual for them to not show you this earlier? Or discuss it with you? Or was it a case of just putting faith in their abilities?

Randy Pitchford: Look, we have a lot of creative people; I'm not a dictator –we are a team of awesome, creative people and there's all kinds of crazy guys who do their thing. We get a vision and we move that vision together. But here's the thing – what they did was the concept art.

They had built the concept. But what had happened was – well, you know when automobile makers are making concept cars, and the concept cars are so cool and awesome – and then we never get to drive them! They never build them! We were doing the same thing! We had all this awesome concept art with style and attitude, but all the game's looked alike. So these artists weren't going to stand for it. So they had their insurgency and they won.

IGN AU: I think there are a few little takeaways in there for other developers, really. …Assuming Borderlands is successful, I guess.

Randy Pitchford: Yeah – we haven't been measured yet, have we?

IGN AU: Well, that's it – but is that how you measure the success of a game? Whether you stay in business or not? Or is it about accomplishing personal goals and satisfying players?

Randy Pitchford: Well, the way I measure it is through two components: how many people did you reach? And how much did you gratify them? So that's the measure of an entertainer. You're entertaining – so it's how many you entertained and how much you entertained. That's it.

But yeah, it's relative to your goals too.

IGN AU: That's it. And especially in first-person shooters, sometimes it feels like the goal posts keep moving. Somebody says "this is the future." And someone else turns around and says, "well, actually, this is the way forward."

Randy Pitchford: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] The reality is, it's entertainment. There are a lot of futures. I read a little while ago about Cliff Bleszinkski's answer to this question and Cliff said the future of shooters is RPGs. And I'm like, wow, we're there.

IGN AU: On that, Borderlands isn't afraid to disguise its RPG backbone. Things like the damage points actually popping up on-screen when you're shooting someone, for instance.

Randy Pitchford: I think there's some value to that. They're subtle; they fade away. But when you need them, you can tell. You can see your critical there, or when you're doing 16 points of damage – let me try this other gun; oh wait – now I'm doing 18 points; that's even better. And you can see, when you throw a grenade and it lights someone on fire and they're running and screaming, you can see all the red numbers popping up -5,5,5,5…

IGN AU: Do you think many developers are scared of showing that kind of framework?

Randy Pitchford: We were, so definitely.

IGN AU: Why?

Randy Pitchford: I dunno.

IGN AU: Is it because developers talk down to players a lot of the time?

Randy Pitchford: I dunno! It's hard to say. I mean, does it break immersion?

IGN AU: But does it matter in a game like Borderlands?

Randy Pitchford: Well, it does – but we haven't broken it. We get sucked into it and we love our game. The thing is, look – you're not going to trick anyone. You're playing a video game. You are actually playing a video game and you're not actually there. Video games are supposed to be fun, and there's a system there and you kinda got to know how it works. But at the same time, the way we did that [the damage numbers] shows how you can expose some of that stuff without necessarily taking you out of that experience.

If you've never seen that before, your first impression might be "whoa, that's interesting – they're showing the numbers." But then you play the game for ten minutes and it's totally natural.

Another thing that's interesting is that a lot of RPGs – the first thing you do before you even get into things – is that you make decisions about what skills you're gonna have and what your character's going to be like – and you don't even know what you're going to be tested on yet. So Borderlands does the opposite. It begins with simple choices, and as you play we build that out. The world opens up, the choices open up and it's a big connected world where you can choose your path. And you can also just follow the path too – because we know there's the shooer guy out there who's used to the linear experience. If you want to, you can just follow the waypoint from mission to mission. You don't even need to read the mission text.

IGN AU: But they'd be missing out, of course, because the game is hugely funny.

Randy Pitchford: It's good stuff. There's good content in there.

IGN AU: On that, do you think that a lot of shooters and action games simply lack that sense of humour? Does the genre take itself too seriously?

Randy Pitchford: Yeah, I think if we take ourselves too seriously, you're denying some of the fun in the game. But it depends on what you're pitching. And we also make the Brothers in Arms series – and we do that that extremely seriously, because that's based in reality; stuff that actually happened. But I really think it depends on what your goals are.

They are video games, so at some level, video games have to be fun! [laughs]

IGN AU: So if you're genuinely being entertained and it works, that's one thing. But how do you feel about when you're constantly being 'shown' to by games, bombarded by these titles that really want you to think that the story is the next-big-thing and the script is Oscar-worthy?

Randy Pitchford: Sometimes we do derive some entertainment when we 'appreciate' something, and sometime we feel something when we're moved. So a lot of game makers want challenge themselves with "can I move someone?" or "can I get them to respect me as an artist?" And a lot of developers have this complex; they struggle with 'are games art?' – and it's an irrelevant debate. It doesn't matter. I mean, of course there's art in video games – duh. But why are you insecure?

IGN AU: Does that bother you? The pretension out there?

Randy Pitchford: Umm, no – but if you're not careful, you can be injured by it. There are times when you can take yourself seriously and there are times when you can cut loose. It really depends on your goals and it depends on what you're promising the customer. If you're promising customers a heavy experience and you throw in a bunch of one-liners, it doesn't work.

Taking ourselves out of the gaming industry, if I watch a drama and it has a bunch if Arnold Schwarzenegger one-liners in there, it can really ruin it! On the other hand, if I'm watching a big-ass action film with if Arnold Schwarzenegger and it doesn't have the one-liners in there, then where's the fun?

IGN AU: Unrelated to any of that, I'm just curious about what you think about the state of 'games journalism'. Is it something you pay much mind to outside of a scenario like this?

Randy Pitchford: We're getting better; we're growing up! I mean, there's new people entering it all the time, but just like game makers are getting better and better at it, so are other folks. In the information age, anyone can have a website – so that's interesting –and everybody has an opinion and can type stuff and publish it.

Increasingly, I notice that games journalists are being held accountable when they're not doing a good job, too. That's really neat. It's just a world full of people; people shout off opinions and if other people want to, they listen. If not, they flush it.

IGN AU: And does work like this shape morale in the team? Do you take the feedback seriously?

Randy Pitchford: Oh absolutely. It's the sum of our offering that creates the result. There are games with very few features that are just so elegant and beautiful and wonderful – we applaud them. So we don't win by just stuffing features in our game. But we win by entertaining our customer – and usually, when we entertain our customer, the critics are also entertained and have a good time.

There are a couple of things that can happen that are anomalous. Sometimes, a game can be reviewed well and then not sell well –and that's because the promise isn't something that can reach a mass-market, but the quality of what they offer is really there. That's troubling.

IGN AU: Is that a failing of marketing?

Randy Pitchford: No… well, sometimes.

IGN AU: Are they marketing Borderlands the right way for you?

Randy Pitchford:  I hope so. And I think the promise is strong and simple. You can consume it easily. The things that tend to be hard there are things where the promise isn't easy to consume.

One of my favourite out there – I mean, I love Tim Schafer and Psychonauts – and I was horrified by how badly it sold. But it made sense to me because, well, what the hell's a 'Psychonaut'? And what's the genre? And I bought it because I know who Tim Schafer is and I believe that if I get this, I'm going to have a good time. But we're not at a point yet when we can sell games based on the creator.

The creator is part of the promise, but only to the folks who are really plugged in. So the promise is really about the story, style and design. So if the customer went to bed one night and thought, "man, I really hope somebody makes 'X' game," then you can sell it to them. And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that, we as gamers, have wanted [Borderlands]. And you asked me, in the case of Borderlands, whether it's going to work out; well, there's good evidence –and I know that a lot of us have wanted to make and play a game like this for a long time and I can see other people too.

It's really interesting, right – Bethesda, id, Gearbox – all touching this kind of look and feel, and we have this very distinct look and feel to it. And we didn't copy each other – we all started these projects at about the same time. And someone asked me what I thought about Avatar [and its similarities to Borderlands]; I mean James Cameron named his planet Pandora and corporations went there to mine the place… that's like what we did! And that's awesome! Can you believe that? James Cameron had some of the same ideas we had? Hells yeah! I'm gonna feel good about that!

IGN AU: Awesome! Thanks for your time, Randy.

Randy Pitchford: No problem!

Source