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.
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