Borderlands interview with Gearbox Software’s Steve Gibson20.08.2009

Games Com 2009 has opened its doors to the public and, as the industry prepares to showcase its best and brightest, we caught up with Gearbox Software’s Steve Gibson in Cologne to talk about upcoming RPS Borderlands, in the first of our series of interviews direct from Games Com:

Hi Steve – tell us about the setting for Borderlands.

Borderlands is set on a planet called Pandora and there’s a legend about the planet that alien technology was discovered there, so a company called Atlus capitalised on it and became the most powerful company in the universe. Other companies started showing up on the planet looking for more of this technology. The companies were there looking for this for years but when the seasons changed on the planet and the ice melted away, creatures started showing up all over the Pandora, making it incredibly inhospitable. All of the companies that could afford to left, so all that remained were settlements that people couldn’t afford to abandon - those are the settlements you’ll see here and there on Pandora - and bandit parties started forming. You show up there looking for this technology, even though everybody else has given up because the planet has become so inhospitable.

In the recent trailer you defined the game in its own genre – Role-Playing Shooter – what does this mean?

You have your shooter games that everyone knows and understands but we’ve taken the shooter from a first person perspective and we’ve layered elements of role-playing on top of that, elements such as growth, choice and a persistent character so you can level-up your character and build out their skills as you go on quest-like missions. We’ve got all of the elements you’d expect of a role-playing game but we haven’t done it to the degree where there are dialogue trees or things like that; we still wanted to keep the fast, visceral feel of a shooter but we’ve layered on what we consider the fun parts of role-playing, a kind of hybrid of the two different genres, and it’s called a Role-Playing Shooter.

We’ve heard huge numbers in terms of the arsenal available in the game – can you tell us about the difference between the weapon types and their modifiers?

Most shooters have 10 or maybe 20 different guns, where you get your shotgun at the beginning of a game and it’s the same one you have at the end. We wanted to create lots of shotguns! From there we decided we wanted lots of different types of weapons, and we want them to grow and change – so the role-playing elements apply to the weapons as well. Therefore we built software that procedurally generates these guns and there are literally millions of possible weapons. The basic premise behind the shotgun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle or repeater pistol are there but you’ll get the mixing and matching of procedural generation, so you could have a sniper rifle that has a revolver from a handgun with fire elemental cartridges, so you have a fire-breathing, revolving sniper rifle, or you could have a shotgun that actually fires rockets, for example.

You mentioned elemental effects – what are the different types of elemental weapons or ammunition available?

We have fire, explosive fire, electrical and acid or corrosive damage. These have their own advantages: Fire, for example, works well against animals with flesh; electrical damage works well against enemies with armour.

Can you tell us about the co-op feature? Can you play the entire game co-operatively?

The characters are persistent, so you can play the game by yourself or split-screen with a friend, or play co-operatively with four people online. You can take your character and build it up to level 20, for example, and then say I want to go online and play with my friends – you don’t have to start over; you can take this level 20 character you’ve been spending your time on and hop right in online so your friends, who can be at any level, can join you. You can really play the game however you want. You don’t have to restart because you’ve decided to play online or split-screen or in single-player mode.

How does this co-op play affect the Borderlands world? Is it easier for four players to play through the game together?

The game is the same regardless of how many people enter it; it’s the same quests, so you can go back and forth in play style as you wish. What does change is that the enemies get more difficult and there are more of them. The game is scaled dynamically so you could be playing for two hours in single-player and have two friends jump in and the game will scale up automatically and back down again if you return to playing by yourself.