Gearbox show off a little new Borderlands technology
Tech me up
Gearbox Software have opened up a little more about the next Borderlands, after yonks of mutters and murmurs. Well, about some of its technology. Potentially. Gearbox head honch Randy Pitchford showed off some of the Unreal Engine 4 tech "that will power the next Borderlands game" during Epic's 'State of Unreal' presentation at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. Gearbox have been working on lighting with black outlines, cross-hatched shadows, all that jazz. He showed a few scenes but did stress it "is not a video game, it's a technology demonstration". You can watch it online.
The livestream is archived on Twitch - skip to about 01:14:00 to see Pitchford and pal take the stage. The presentation is all about the real-time comic book lighting they have going on, with those black lines, crosshatched shading, and all that. He makes clear that it's just a tech demo, something their research and development folks have been working on, and anything and everything shown could change. Yokay!
As for the future game itself, he has nothing to say. He mentions that several of the assets shown, and that character, are production assets for a future Borderlands game but nope, nothing about what it is or when or how or why. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's a first-person shooter action-RPG with co-op support and vast numbers of procedurally-generated guns. Call it a hunch.
The Borderlands I'd most like more of, mind, is Telltale's Tales from the Borderlands. Gearbox's Borderlandses are bland as shooters, bad as action-RPGs, and wacky in ways I find irritating. But they do have co-op, and competent co-op FPSs are disappointingly scarce. I really did dig the fun Telltale had in that world, though.
