Borderlands interview with Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford25.08.2009

As president of Gearbox Studios, developer of forthcoming Role-Playing Shooter Borderlands, it’s no surprise that Games Com was a busy show for Randy Pitchford. We caught up with the industry legend himself in Cologne and he gave us the inside track on this year’s hottest game.

Hi Randy. We know there are RPG elements to Borderlands – does this mean we can embark on quests and ‘level up’ our characters?

Borderlands is a shooter at its core but it layers role-playing on top, but the role-playing is focused on certain elements relating to growth, discovery and choice, as they pertain to the action gameplay. So, from a growth perspective, you’ll get experience points by killing enemies and completing missions, and with these experience points you will level up and become more powerful – you’ll get more health and start to develop skills – and when you get skill points you can invest those in your character. There are four different character classes: A soldier, a hunter, a siren and a berserker and each of them has special skills they can develop that are unique to the character class and each character class has different specs, so a soldier, for example, can specialise in being an infantryman, engaging in combat with many different weapons, or you can specialise in support, which is about helping other guys on the team with ammunition or you can specialise in being a medic, healing yourself and your allies.

Each of the character classes has these specialisations, so the growth I mentioned is about picking a character and growing and developing that character to make them more powerful. It’s not just about your character’s stats, though; it’s also about loot, it’s about a guns... and there are a lot of guns in Borderlands, millions of guns, in fact there are more guns than all the other shooters put together. The number of guns, unique skills and characters also play into the other key themes of discovery and choice. Choice is about which character class you play as, how you specialise that character and, when thinking about weapons, you may say ‘well, this pistol is more accurate but does less damage but this pistol does more damage but has a slower rate of fire,’ which is an interesting choice.

Discovery comes into play as there are new things to uncover and new weapons to discover, so you’ll see a shotgun which you might think is like another but then you realise it doesn’t fire regular bullets – it fires acid shot, which puts a spray of acid on the enemy and melts their face off. That’s pretty awesome!

These are all role-playing elements that are layered on to the shooter and that is primarily what Borderlands is at heart. If you’ve played any of the big shooters and we put the controller in your hands, with Borderlands you’ll feel immediately comfortable – you’ll know how to move, how to aim, shoot, look down the sights and so on. We’ve even created an interface to match the types of games you’ll have played, which makes it really convenient and accessible, so you never feel like you have to fight the controls.

There are a lot of really compelling elements top the game, like levelling up, getting loot, acquiring new skills but there are some elements from RPGs we didn’t include by design. We don’t think dialogue trees are very fun, for example. You may have played RPGs where you listen to characters talk, you read several paragraphs and then you choose a set of responses and it goes on, it kind of equates to navigating a flowchart and that’s really boring, so we don’t have any of that in Borderlands.

Is the game completely open-world?

It is a large, connected world. When you start the game you’re introduced to the world and what goes on there and as the game progresses you can follow that first mission chain, of which there are 30, and you can choose to follow that path throughout, but you’re welcome at any time to go off that path and if you choose to do so you’ll discover things – perhaps in the middle of nowhere you’ll discover some bounty missions or an NPC might have a job for you, and some of these discoveries will lead to loot, some will lead to enemy territories with bad guys you don’t want to mess with, some will yield new missions. In fact there are over 100 optional missions that are side quests, if you will. There’s a lot of content to discover. It’s a very large, connected world and the landscapes are huge.

How many hours will it take to complete the main story of the game?

There’s a lot of value in Borderlands – some shooter gamers just want to consume the content and get to the end of the story, so if you just play the story missions and you’re

a really good player, you can do that in about 20 hours. If you want to complete more of the game and develop your character completely, as well as take on the optional missions – remember there are three times as many optional missions and side quests as there are main story missions – there’s up to 100 hours

of gameplay for each character to reach their full potential. And then when you win the game, you can keep exploring or restart in a new game quest mode, where all of the missions are reset and everything is levelled up, so it’s a lot more difficult but everything is worth a lot more experience and the lot is much better so you can increase your level that way, and of course there are the other characters to play through, as well and different specs for each character, so there’s a lot of value in the game and it feels great to be able to offer that to gamers.

How can you play Borderlands competitively against other players? Can you play the game in split-screen mode?

One of the most exciting things about Borderlands is the fact that when you enter the world, it is yours to discover but at any moment you can invite people to join you, or you can join them in their game. You can also play split-screen, which is a great way to play. When you’re playing co-operatively you’re in the world together so you’re levelling up your characters and completing missions together and it’s a lot of fun to work together and use your skills together. There’s also a lot of fun to be had by fighting against your friends, and we’ve supported this in a couple of ways. One thing we’ve done is implement a duel mode – anywhere you are in the world, at any time, you can walk up to an ally and perform a melee attack on them, and if they melee attack you back they’re accepting your challenge – a dome will surround you and you’ll immediately begin a duel, a mano-a-mano battle to the death – it’s a lot of fun and a great way to let off some steam!

In addition to the duel, there are arenas throughout the world and you can enter them at any time and set up an organised match. Inside the arena there is a battlefield, which is designed for multiplayer combat – it’s really designed for this kind of competitive deathmatch. The arenas are presented in the Borderlands world; this isn’t a separate mode so you can just go to the arena and, in the context of the game, it’s kind of like the Thunderdome in Mad Max – you can set up a free-for-all or team deathmatch. It’s an easy, accessible way to set up a deathmatch with your Borderlands character.