Pitchford On Borderlands

05 Aug 2009 at 13:05:00 by

Tamer Asfahani talks to Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford about Borderlands, the forthcoming open-world RPG shooter, and gets all the details on exactly why it's worth picking up. The video is below, with a full text transcript directly below that.

So Borderlands, it's just the game. You can start the game and you can play the game, and when you play the game by yourself, at any time you can invite a friend to join in the game with you – or you can join somebody else's game. When this happens, your character's persistent, so everything that you've done stays with you whether you're joining somebody else's game or somebody's joining your game. Everything you've earned, how you've levelled up, all your skills, all the gear you've gotten, and if you join somebody else's game and get a bunch of new stuff and level up even more, you can go back and continue the game you were playing and you'll have all that stuff with you because your character is persistent, it belongs to you, it's your character, you own it.

You can also take that character from single-player to multiplayer and back again, and co-op or whatever, and it's fine. This is a really important decision we made early on. It's part of the inspiration we had from Diablo, from loot and that kind of stuff, in that when I played Diablo the game just totally hooked me. But I played a lot of single-player, because that's what you do. You start the game up and you try it, you're playing it, and it's like “Dude this is really cool,” and I built my guy up and I completed the campaign and I'm like, “Alright, I'm gonna go online now.” But when I went to go online, they said “You know what, you're gonna have to start a new character because we're not gonna let you take your single-player character online,” and I'm like, “What is that? I'm invested in that! Really? You're not gonna let me do that? You're gonna make me start over?” It was kind of a let down, you know.

The whole game is drop-in drop-out. You're just in the world of Borderlands taking missions, and let's say you and I are in a game together and we want to fight against each other. Well, at any time you can walk up to me and you can do a melee attack. Slap me in the face, and it'll say “You demand satisfaction.” If I decide to melee you back, I'm saying I accept your challenge. No matter where we are in the world, a dome will cover us and we'll begin a duel - a dogfight if you will – and we'll see who's the best. Anywhere you are in the world, you can start to throw down and beat on your friends and see if you're better than them. Also, in this world, there are arenas kinda like the Thunderdome in Mad Max. Near each settlement there's an arena, and you can go into the arena with your friends and you can actually set up more of an organised game, like a deathmatch game or a team deathmatch game, and the arena inside is designed for competitive combat. There's a few of those scattered around the world, usually near the settlements, and there's always a fast-travel location so once you've kind of unravelled the world you can instantly get there and set up those kinds of games with your friends. But it's all in the context of the game. You're just in the game, and there's not like a separate mode or anything – it's just all in the context of the game, you just go and do it.

There's a couple of different ways to play it. If you play it like a shooter guy and you just go through only the story missions, we wanted to make sure that's contained in the context of what you're used to for a first-person shooter game, so you can burn through the story-based missions in about fifteen hours or so – but that's about 30 mission chains, and then there's about another 120 missions that are optional. There are dozens and dozens of hours of content if you wanted to consume it. You can do all of those missions, even the repeatable ones, and still not be at the level cap, and then you wanna go back and do a kind of New Game + kind of mode which is an even harder version so when you start again you can go through all the missions to reach the level cap. So there's a lot of value there, and that's just for one character. There's four character classes and you can build them out in different ways, with different specs, so there's a lot of value there for folks that want it. But it's also consumable for folks that don't have that kind of time to spend and they just wanna have the fun, and know that they're able to complete something, so you can do it that way too and get through it more quickly.

Comment