A little while back, I spent a few hours playing Gearbox Software’s upcoming, toon-styled, free-roaming FPS-RPG. I was horribly, desperately hungover at the time, and was almost sick on Randy Pitchford while he was cheerily explaining the thinking behind Borderlands to me. I am the most professional of all the games journalists.
But that doesn’t matter. Only the game matters. Here’s how it is.
(Click on the pics for bigguns, by the way).
It was mutiny. Gearbox head Randy Pitchford didn’t want it – he just wanted to finish and ship the damned game. His artists, though, were bored and frustrated. Mutiny. In secret, they returned to work.
They created an art style that totally reinvigorated Borderlands, one so impressive that Pitchford immediately abandoned his plans to shut down this little troupe of breakaways. He also claims that it was enough of shock to also dramatically shake-up Gearbox’s whole approach to development. (I’ll be bunging up an interview with him on such matters in the next couple of days, incidentally).
Here and now though, what matters isn’t so much whether the happy accident of the comicbook character outlines and semi-cell-shading should or shouldn’t have happened, but whether it suits the game. Or, whether the game suits it.
The answer to that is an even more important question: how does Borderlands play? We’ve heard about the thousands of weapon combinations, that there’ll be free-roaming of a sort, a post-apocalyptic wasteland and Mad Maxian vehicles, but what we don’t know is, well, what happens when you sit in front of your PC and fire up this game.
It’s like Fallout 3. No, wait, it’s like Hellgate. No, wait, it’s like Doom.
Well… it has some of the core values of all of those, but a very different implementation. It’s an RPG-FPS, fundamentally. But unlike Fallout 3 and Mass Effect and Hellgate, this isn’t an FPS-like targeting reticule built awkwardly on top of dice-rolls and statistics. It’s statistics and dice-rolls built on top of a first-person shooter. That simple inversion is key to why Borderlands works – this is an action game first and foremost. You won’t find yourself lost eight phrases deep in a dialogue tree. You won’t find a precisely-targeted headshot failing to hit because of some invisible maths, and you won’t find that aiming somewhere within a 20-foot radius of someone automagically punches a bullet through their chest. You will find that hiding behind a rock or running away stops you from getting shot. As does shooting first, and accurately.
The RPG stuff comes as a result of playing the FPS stuff well – you take out the various homicidal men, mutants and mutant-men efficiently, you earn yer XP and your loot drops. It sounds phenomenally simple, and it is. It’s just that no-one’s done it right before. Well, there’s Deus Ex and System Shock 2, but this is scarcely attempting to be those. No moral deliberation, philosophical pondering or literary references here. This is about the joy of meatheadery.
It’s very fast and very silly – more TimeSplitters than Half-Life. You battle Mutant Midget Psychos and are guided around by blind drunkards and crying robots. You wield triple rocket launchers and quad-barrelled shotguns. You respawn instantly into a New-U clone body upon death. You score critical hits on rad-addled dog-things by shooting them in the open mouth. It’s openly ridiculous, and the hyper-stylised look only boosts the glee of that. Pitchford describes it as “the polar opposite of Brothers in Arms”, and he’s not wrong. This is a game geared utterly towards instant, out of the box fun. There are 30 core story missions and 120 side-missions; after a spot of being shepherded through some introductory stuff, you’re free to go fairly off-piste. Alternatively, you can go straight to the co-op mode.
Procedural weapon generation based on combining a raft of randomly-selected elements – e.g. x base gun template + x barrels + x type of ammunition + x barrel-length – means there are more guns in the game than Gearbox can count. It’s somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, they think. If you pick up something incredible (the now traditional white, green, blue, purple loot colour system denotes something’s degree of awesomeness), you’d better watch your back. When you die [yikes - my useless memory managed to conflate dying with a system crash that did cost me all my stuff] sell or discard a gun, that massive, massive degree of randomness means you’ll probably never see the same one ever again. If you find something spectacular, you can consider it nigh-on unique. Sadly the vehicles weren’t on show at this demo, which also meant I didn’t get a clear sense of how freely you can roam, but if it’s based upon similarly unbound, randomatic principles, I’m expecting only good things.
It’s the thrill of high-speed violence paired with the compulsion of loot collection. That’s a dangerous combination, and in the wrong hands an incredibly cynical one. Given that Pitchford repeatedly trots out variants of “fuck it, let’s just have fun”, it’s pretty clear that cynicism doesn’t play much part in Borderland’s DNA.
It isn’t a tactical shooter, and it isn’t a talky RPG. It steps back to the base level of both genres and then piles style and energy on top. It’s the opposite of feature creep – returning to why people wanted to shoot monsters in the face and collect shiny things in the first place. From what I played, it wouldn’t be wrong to call it shallow. It would be wrong to call that shallowness a bad thing. Pitchford again: “we’re dancing around innovation more than we’ve ever done before.” In the land of the endless cover systems, unbound carnage is king.
That said, I’m a little worried about the intense-yet-aimless nature of the co-op mode. I’ll need to play it for much longer to get a real sense of it, I suspect, but in the half hour or so I had there wasn’t much teamwork beyond panicked heals (a one-button task) of fallen comrades and occasionally all shooting the same monster. It was fun, and intuitive, and fast enough to scratch a testosteronal itch almost instantly, but it felt perhaps a bit too vague and messy to yield the sense of satisfaction you get from, say, finishing a Left 4 Dead co-op campaign. Then again, I was playing a slim, out-of-context slice. I certainly got a bit more of a kick out of the roaming, questing and levelling up of the singleplayer, though.
What else? XP unlocks new abilities, but your own FPS prowess is absolutely vital. Pitchford talks about a level 4 player taking down level 10 mobs, simply due to his expert way with a targeting reticule.
Oh, and there’s a bunch of different classes to play as – a straight-up Soldier, the sniper prowess and vicious winged pet of the Hunter, the mystical steathing of the Siren and, my personal favourite, the meaty melee of the Berserker. Hand-to-hand combat for everyone else is largely just a panicked stab at an enemy who’s got too close, but the Berserker can enter a frenzy mode (expandable by spending level-earned skill points – eventually, I was gaining health every time I killed someone in rage mode) that maps a barrel-sized fist to each mouse-button. THUMP THUMP THUMP. Yeah, he’s kinda like the Heavy. The Heavy, though, doesn’t get to punch 20-foot-tall mutant insects to death. I’m definitely playing Berserker.
So does Borderlands live up to its art-style? Totally. Of course, the real proof of this death-pudding is in whether it can remain this spectacular and compulsive for a couple of dozen sustained hours. We’ll find that out for sure this October.
Related Stories:
@Jad; you’re not the only one, I still haven’t finished Bioshock for pretty much this very reason, the gunplay doesn’t feel right.
This article has definitely made the game catch my attention, so I’ll keep an eye on it now.
Hey Alec, did you have any chance to interact with any vehicles? I believe I read somewhere that vehicle-based battles were a featured part of the gameplay.
Thanks!
(I am still playing Hellgate. Though I have completely flip-flopped and prefer Evokers to Engineers now.)
This is exactly what Fallout 3 should have looked like. Such a great change in art style!
Borderlands just looked like another dull shooter before they ditched it and there wasn’t anything that set it apart from other shooters except for all the hoopla over the weapon customizing.
That alone just seemed like a gimicky thing and in many respects it still does. Who really needs a bazillion variants of guns? Great that you can tweak and customize and everything but I suspect a lot of gamers will revert to building the kind of weapons they are already familliar with from other games. A more focused approach that forced people down various branches of different styles of guns might be more fun. I’m happy to be proved wrong. I just hope it offers more that just selection of guns skins, bang-bang! sounds, reload times and reticules. If it informs the gameplay in a discernable way then I will be happy.
This is certainly good news.
I’m almost afraid to imagine how many hours I will probably dump into this. I already know it will be a hit amongst my friends, and being able to play through it with them over and over again will undoubtedly kill any free time I had and will end up making for it.
In addition to that, I imagine this game will get more then enough of singleplayer time from me as well. I have the type of personality that thrives on repetition for increased reward (think, loot grinding in mmos, etc), so the chance to just grind away looking to find all the neat little goodies that the randomization can produce appeals to me to no end.
I’ll get my story and tactics from Diablo III. Borderlands is all about feeding my addictions.
sounds 99% hellgate. its ok
gnerated levels are boring though
Mm cellshadedness.
I’m all for devs trying new things.
Did you get a feel for the quality of the PC version, by any chance? With so many promises specifically around co-op and other multiplayer, I don’t have the highest confidence the PC version will end up all that great.
Yeah, really not excited about that “lose your gun when you die” bit. We’ll see how it plays out in practice, though.
I’m confused: What is the purpose of having such a vast array of potential guns if you don’t get to keep them? Let’s face it, in this type of game you are going to be dying a lot, right, so thought of losing your jammily found/carefully designed weapon each and every time you do sounds like anathema to a game that is being compared to Diablo.
What am I missing here?
There’s something slightly off about the art style
It’s like it’s pasted ontop of something else
“the polar opposite of Brothers in Arms” in that case I guess I won’t have to listen to Smelly, Ginger or Whiney go on about their pictures of their wives between missions making me want to kill them myself.
Interested.
I really can’t wait for this one – looks like so much fun :)
Sold on Mr Meer’s enthusiasm alone.
You know I quite liked the new art style at first but I’m not sure about some of them screenies though. Either way: INTERESTED.
@ Jad. I’m absolutely with you on the ‘feel’ thing. Some games get it and some games don’t, but it’s such a vague, nebulous concept that it’s very hard to put down in words exactly what you mean. It’s very much in the subtleties of how the character reacts to movement commands and the ’snappiness’ of the mouse looking. I think games like Bioshock suffer from that ’syrupy’ feeling as they’re designed to be played with a little thumb stick rather than a mouse so overall responsiveness seems dulled. I think it stems from the fact that you need a ‘linear’ response to turning with the stick, so no matter how hard you flick the stick over, the turn rate is the same. With a mouse, you can make very rapid twitch movements with a flick of the wrist.
I’d love to hear a developer talk about this, actually.
Anyway, Borderlands. Still pretty excited for it. If it has enough interesting stuff to progress through, rather than falling into the re-iteration trap it’s in danger of, then I can see myself playing the shit out of this game.
you lost me at “It isn’t a tactical shooter”
120 side-missions, you say? That’s a lot. I just hope that not all of them are meaningless mumorpeger chores like “collect 10 wolf pelts”, or whatever.
“They created an art style that totally reinvigorated Borderlands, one so impressive that Pitchford immediately abandoned his plans to shut down this little troupe of breakaways”
I initially read that as “Pitchfork”, and wondered why the snooty music site had launched a vendetta against the developers.
Oops- thinking more carefully about it, I in fact lost my uber-excellent gun because of a crash, not a death. Will double-check on Friday.
Hahahaha, would you like to go for a heavy drink on Thursday night?
Ginger Yellow: I did the exact same reading mistake throughout the entire article.
Re: those asking about vehicles. Please read the piece.
So you can’t do the whole campaign-worldy thing in Coop? because that sounded like one of the best features it may have.
Still very interested, still slightly nervous with Gearbox behind this.
@Heliocentric – OpFor was good in many respects, however I can never quite forgive it for not understanding even for a moment what made Half-Life so great.
Oh, quick random question thing that won’t affect my already-made decision on buying the game but which I’d find interesting to know: are all the guns on the bullets/shells/rockets angle of things or are there any more exotic things available as well?
“The Heavy, though, doesn’t get to punch 20-foot-tall mutant insects to death.”
Ok, maybe not 20 feet, but tall nonetheless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjRj82qhkZY&feature=related
Good news on the correction re. dying/weapons. That was giving me major pause.
Alec: Be nice if you could clear up that point about whether or not you keep your gun when you die because I’m seeing that one point being quoted in forums like it’s a for sure kind of thing.
Personally I think it’d kind of suck if that were really the case because then I’d be keeping all the cool loot back at the stash and never using it much for fear of accidentally dying and then losing it forever.
Also I liked the piece but I have a question because I keep seeing it being mentioned: Are you able to actually customize your guns using found materials/whatever or are you just at the mercy of the drop algorithms like in Diablo?
Either way I’m really looking forward to this. October can’t get here soon enough.
Have double-checked gun/death thing with 2K: “you don’t lose any guns when you die. You have ‘em until you throw them away or sell them at a vending machine.”. Apologies for the confusion – my hungover notes written on the day were a tad scattier than I’d like.
I didn’t see any weapon customisation. There really wasn’t any need to when something else silly/awesome will be along any minute.
Oh you already cleared up my question in the article. Guess I should have checked that first.
CMaster: Pretty sure you can do the campaign in co-op so no worries there.
Flint: There’s alien tech that goes into the weapon/gear generating algorithms so I’d say the chances of there being some really strange permutations is pretty high. Just something to consider, but considering the sheer number of possible weapon permutations (mtv multiplayer blog said it was over 3.5 million) I’m thinking out of all the pre-release media we’ve only seen a fraction of a percent of what’s in there.
Now, 3.5 million is a stupidly huge number and I’m pretty sure a big chunk of that’s going to be basically vendor trash to sell so you can save up for better gear. But a great big part of the fun of games like Diablo and the like is the chance of something really special dropping that just blows you away and makes all that time gathering and trading crap gear totally worth it.
“Torgen says:
Borderlands = Auto Assault done right?”
@Torgen: Auto Assault was done right, it was the best MMO which just didn’t get enough love and died a horrible death and now I miss it so <:(
From the gamespy preview, the story actually sounds fairly decent: “The story revolves around a group of loot raiders who traverse a Mad Maxian landscape in search of coveted alien technology, fragments of which had previously fallen to earth where they were utilized to great power by the humans. At the heart of it all is the Atlus Corporation, a giant conglomerate that reverse-engineered the alien tech to build their empire, possibly leading to the creation of the wasteland. It’s in the mythical vaults where the motherlode of abandoned alien science allegedly remains.”
Alien technology creating a wasteland? All sounds a bit like Stalker there, but judging from this preview I’m guessing that is where the comparison ends.
Looks really promising at the moment. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to find out that you don’t lose some weapons when you die (judging by the comments, I seem to be the only one.) The New-U clone body all sounds a bit Bioshock, which made for a very easy game. Some real punishment for death would have been nice and losing an awesome weapon would have worked quite well. Perhaps a drop in experience points is going to be used.
If the story and setting manages a decent amount of Tank Girl-ish whackiness it might just do for me (some time next year when I finish playing last year’s games).
Note that being about half as whacky as Tank Girl is whackier than just about anything. (but still only two thirds as whacky as Aeon Flux)
Doubleplusgood for not losing weapons on death. I could accept it due to the total random nature of drops, but this makes it so much better… Fantastic.
I’ve been playing a fair bit of Fallout 3 lately, even to the point of having written some mods myself. It’s certainly not the best game around, and was possibly a bit overrated by the gaming press, but I’m not sure I really follow the complaints that it isn’t an FPS.
If I aim my rifle at a baddie’s head in FO3, chances are I’m going to shoot him in the head, and it will certainly score me some of that extra damage you expect from a headshot in an FPS — even if it’s not immediately fatal like in real life. (But then, people taking absurd amounts of damage in unlikely-to-survive places aren’t exactly new to FPSes.)
Sure, my small guns / energy weapons / whatever skill might reduce my accuracy if low. And sure, the (in)accuracy is implemeted as “point gun, bullet goes elsewhere” rather than the gun (and crosshair) bobbing around. And yeah, even damage is affected by skill — since we all know bullets check their user’s skill before they decide how much to hurt, obviously.
But ultimately, one could still play Fallout 3 like an FPS, in exactly the same way as Deus Ex. DX augmented your accuracy, damage, and reload time based on your skill in a given weapon category, just like FO3, and aiming for the head might not have the desired effect if your skill is too low, just like FO3. Yet somehow, DX gets branded as an FPS with RPG mechanics, but FO3 gets branded as “FPS-like targeting reticule built awkwardly on top of dice-rolls and statistics”. Huh?
Obviously, this refers to non-VATS combat. But even VATS was subject to some FPS mechanics. My bullet has to actually make it to the target, for one. VATS sometimes indicates (via reduced hit percentages) when you’re likely to hit an obstacle rather than the target, often going so far as to say you’ve got no chance to hit. But sometimes it doesn’t notice at all, and just gives you a high percentage, like the cap of 95% to hit (close range / high skill) — yet if you actually try to fire, you discover your chances were more like 0%, since every shot just hits the wall you’re hiding behind.
Yeah, it’s a problem with VATS, but it also demonstrates that it’s not just saying “obstacle reduces chance to hit” and then letting you get a good roll and make a technically impossible shot, it’s saying “chance to hit is calculated based on obstacles” and then letting you watch your bullet actually hit an obstacle, whether it noticed that obstacle and factored it into the percentage or not.
If anything, the FPS aspects of FO3 detract from the RPG side, rather than vice versa. I can watch my character expend an entire bar of action points firing into a wall because the RPG and FPS sides had differing opinions about whether said wall was in the way — yet despite my supposed lack of points for performing actions, I can just revert to FPS mode and shoot everything anyway. Sure, VATS makes FO3 somewhat easy, but plain old FPS mode makes it even easier (for FPS gamers), since you can ignore the game’s attempts at budgeting your shots and just fire as much as you want.
Anyway, I applaud and look forward to an attempt to add RPG mechanics to a more traditional style of FPS, especially since that particular mixture has become somewhat more rare these days. I just think that the concept is hardly new, and that existing attempts have been closer than they appear, or are given credit for.
@Wisq – I always found trying to play FO3 like an FPS frustrating. THere’s an arbitarty limit (less than the draw distance) on how far away you can shoot people from that constantly blew my stealth without getting the kill. There’s countless times I found mysyself trying to fight, but getting bogged down in dodgy movement or more frequently, finding my bullets inexplicably not actually reaching the enemies.
Note that I still had a lot of fun, and smashing through hordes of feral ghouls with a shotgun was still satisfying enough – but whenver combat mattered and was up close, I found myself using VATS as I didn’t trust the game to give me a fighting chance as a normal FPS.
The other problem with playing FO3 in FPS mode is that VATS is far more effective at the same skill level, even if you have good FPS skills. There are a few apparent factors in this, not least the fact that enemy attacks do a tiny percentage of full damage to you when VATS is activated. It’s basically a big cheat-mode, which is sad because I otherwise found it implemented pretty well.
Yes, I know you can fix some of this with mods.
I’ve followed Borderlands for over a year, maybe a lot longer, but I was feeling pretty iffy about it. This preview has seriously increased my interest level. It does seem odd that loot collection is so clunky in a game that’s (almost) all about loot collection, but I imagine I’d get used to that and I hope Gearbox will fix it anyway.
Yeah, the vehicles question was for future reference, when you’re rubbing elbows with the dev hobnobs at some posh RPS shindig or some such. Because you know, you have those a lot.
I actually wouldn’t have minded losing a gun due to death. Makes it a bit more rogue-like, giving you a bit of a pause before you charge blindly in to an unknown situation. Ah well.
Is there ANY penalty for dying?
Re: limited fire distance… yeah, I noticed that too, but only with the sniper rifle. Actually, the sniper rifle probably wins the “most sought-after weapon for least actual usefulness” prize, since it’s nerfed in FPS mode by the shooting distance limit, and the VATS accuracy doesn’t take the scope into account. Ultimately, I found that by the time I had a reliable stash of .308 ammo for it, I was just using the hunting rifle / Ol’ Painless / Lincoln’s Repeater for all my long-distance shots anyway, and using the Sneak skill to shorten my definition of “long distance”.
And yeah, VATS mode is pretty cheap as-is, and the damage reduction just makes it worse. I’ve actually heard of people using the MIRV with fewer than the requisite eight ammo, just because it sits there going “click, click, click” and not using any AP, but still makes you near-invincible for the duration.
Had they removed the bullet distance limit and removed VATS altogether, then you would’ve had an FPS with RPG stuff. Had they removed the ability to fire in FPS mode and left it all to VATS, you’d have had an RPG with an FP perspective. Having both does make the game somewhat easy, but it also offers more choice to players as to whether they want slower RPG gameplay, faster FPS gameplay, or a mixture of both. I don’t really see it as taking an RPG and slapping a crosshair on it, though.
Nice.
There’s no talking.
There’s no morality
There’s not even reason to think and ponder.
Then can’t i just stare at TV?
Regarding Fallout 3 and the FPS/RPG divide, there’s a great all-in-one mod called Fallout: Wanderer’s Edition (aka FWE) that basically reworks all the gameplay to make it feel more like STALKER with a few extra RPG elements. VATS is still there, but it’s no longer overpowered (it’s great for making called shots, but don’t do it while under heavy fire or you WILL die), and it’s just one of several uses of your Action Points, including sprinting, tackling and bullet time.
Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It also includes all the weapons from Fallouts 1/2 as well, seeded into loot lists, about fifty kinds of new drugs (some with spectacular side-effects) and way more, but that’s for you to find out.
Weirdly, it makes it feel both more like an FPS and an RPG at the same time.
A repetitive open world shooter again. The bastard child of Far Cry 2 and Fuel. Mark my words. It’ll still get scores in the 90’s because all highly hyped games from major publisher’s get 90’s both Far Cry 2 and Fuel got some90’s scores. But both games had a big open worlds that we practically empty meaning repetitive gameplay. I see nothing in the above preview that dissuades me from my beliefs. If the game had had the procedural quests as well as weapons as was originally planned, it might have worked. But as is, it’s a game for the consoler’s – cel shaded, shallow and mindless. Just what the console kid’s love…..
Yeah, I wanted to try it out a few days ago…. Then I saw the installation instructions. No mod is worth that amount of grief. Sheesh… Let me know when someone figures out a way to install it that doesn’t require me to first install 14 other mods, each with their own byzantine installation instructions and prerequisites.
@Jalf – what instructions? It requires CALIBR and CRAFT to be installed (each a single ESP file that you drop in place), and then you just drop FWE in there – it’s a single-ESP mod as of the last few versions.
You might have been trying to run the older version, which was a horribly complex mish-mash of modules.
Fallout 3 just doesn’t feel like an FPS to me… I know it’s in first person perspective, and you shoot things, but somehow it just doesn’t. For me FO3 is an RPG with an FPS veneer. Stalker (for example) is a shooter with (light) RPG elements.
The comments regarding the control for Bioshock ring a bell (although I disagree with the linear stick thing. It’s an analogue stick, surely the amount you move the stick varies your movement speed?). I suck using a controller to aim in shooters, but tbh I think it works better than kb/m as far as movement / looking around goes (or at least feels more natural). I actually played through Bioshock using a 360 controller; I couldn’t aim for shit, but it just felt right somehow. That goes double for Dead Space of course (except the asteroid bit, had to switch to mouse for that).
This post, I will be mostly… writing in parentheses.
Ah, although you may have a point if you don’t have Fallout Mod Manager and Script Extender, which are pretty much required for running ANY FO3 mod, but.. yeah, if you want to run any mod, you’ll want those.
UK_John
absolutely agree. It seems that production costs force some makers to dumb down their games to appeal the bigger masses.
As far as i know, this kind of reasoning doesn’t work on PC.