Pitchford On Borderlands Page 2

05 Aug 2009 at 13:05:00 by

Why did you choose to go with that art style?

You know, it's a good question, why we were doing a more realistic look and then we went kind of over-the-top with the art style and developed this art style that looks like our concept art, and a lot of people wonder why we did that. And it's hard for me to put a finger on it because it was my decision to let it happen, but it was actually mutiny. We made the decision last year to spend more time on the game – we added a character class; we made the world bigger; we actually expanded a lot of the designs that we had internally, things we hadn't even talked about yet. We invested more in the gear builder system which, I remember when I first talked about the game I said, “Hey, there's a half a million weapons,” and there's actually now millions of weapons. So we made the game a lot bigger and we decided to do that in the middle of last year, which means we pushed it into late 2009. The artists were kind of done, and they were like, “Well what're we going to do?” So some of them went back and they looked at their original concept art, and they thought they could do something really interesting and unique. What they wanted to do was to take the concepts they'd done and try to bring those to life in the game.

But then real people get involved, and things get distilled down, and you don't wanna take too many risks, and all the coolness kinda gets boiled down to something just plausible and safe. Our artists were like “Dude, this is our thing, this is our game. We could just make the concept car, you know!” And so what happened, they were gonna do it. A couple of guys were working on it – I didn't even know what they were doing, I got wind that they were doing something – and I said, “Look, we're making a game. Come on, you guys, we've got a production schedule, we're doing our thing.” And they're like, “Hey, just let us try.” I agreed with one of my partners - one of the other owners of Gearbox, a guy named Brian Martel who's an art director at Gearbox – to give them a few weeks, and he was gonna work with those guys to make a prototype of this idea. They took me into the conference room, and I still had no idea what they were doing. I just knew that if it was gonna happen it was gonna radically change the art. That's all I knew, but I didn't know what. They brought me into the conference room, they sat me down, and they were gonna fire this thing up, and in my mind I'm like “Dude, I don't know why I let this thing go on, I'm just gonna have to shut this down, this is crazy, I don't know what it is, I don't even want to know, it's terrible, it's a bad idea, we shouldn't be doing this.” And then it came up on screen, and it's like... holy shit! That is awesome! That's so cool!

What do you say to anybody that says “Well look, I've got Fallout 3, why the hell should I buy Borderlands?”

That's like saying “Hey, I saw Star Wars, why should I ever see science fiction ever again?” I think if you've got Fallout 3, you should absolutely check out Borderlands. If you liked that... I mean, they came from the role-playing vector, and they started to add shooting on top, and we're clearly coming from the shooting vector and we're starting to add role-playing. What that means is that the shooting is really good, the guns feel good, and then you'll also notice the role-playing parts we did include are things like lots of loot. Tons of loot. And levelling up, and getting more powerful, and developing skills, but there's also some role-playing things we don't have. You're not going to go to an NPC and get in a dialogue tree, you're not going to get the three paragraphs of text. We don't have any of that because it's about action, it's about fast-paced fun.

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