Gearbox interview

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Borderlands is looking very different from the ultra-realistic, Mad Max affair we saw two years ago. It's now colourful and charming but oddly no less gritty. And there's some seriously deep RPG mechanics to get to grips with. Here's how.

By opting to layer RPG icing on top of an FPS cake (and not the other way around) developer Gearbox hopes to deliver a shooter that's a bit different from the norm. So far the tons of customisation options and generous four-player co-op has us perked, even if it is a big proprietor of World of Warcraft questing.

We recently caught up with Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford to find out what the bloody hell's been going on with Boarderlands.

Natural first question - where on earth did this new 'toon' art style come from?

Pitchford: Well after we decided to add another character class and make the game larger, we decided to push Borderlands in to late 2009.

The artists were done so they were like, 'what are we gonna do?!' So a couple of them went back and looked at their original concept art and they thought that was cool.

They didn't even tell me what they were doing but a few of them hid away and started working on getting that concept art 'look' into the engine. They didn't tell me what they were doing but I got wind they were doing something about two weeks in to it. I said 'OK, you've got another three weeks, build a prototype and that's it, you're done.' I ended up thinking 'I don't know what they're going to show me, but I'm shutting it down.'

It just floored me. I'd never seen anything like it. It was really, really cool. You know when you see a concept car and it's got all these cool curves and it's totally stylish? You never actually get to drive them. The same thing happened to us; we came up with all these cool concepts and then people got involved and distilled things down.

Do you think, with the original style, the game started to look a bit like Fallout 3?

Pitchford: A lot of games start to look the same when you do the 'realism' style. That's a risk.

Has the change allowed you to do anything crazier than you could before?

Pitchford: One thing that it did is, back when we originally conceived the game we wanted it to have a lot of attitude, style and personality and I think that was actually missing for the most part when we were in a realistic style.

Once we brought the concept art through in to the game we were able to cut loose throughout the style.

We had 'elites' because we copied World of Warcraft, and then our elites became 'badasses' - you actually fight a badass! There's that kind of stuff throughout the game now. It's like the polar opposite of Brothers in Arms. It kind of reminds me of back when I worked on Duke Nukem; just fuck it - let's have fun.

There are thousands of variations of enemies and weapons in the game. Why did you decide to go for the random approach rather than your own scripted bad guys and guns?

Pitchford: Our original design intent - my goal - was to take that shooter loop and then generate on top of it that kind of things that generate the compulsion I had when I played Diablo; loot, levelling up, skills... I don't think that had really been done before.

There are several folks who have tried to start from the RPG vector and layer a shooter on top, but no one's started with a shooter and layered an RPG on top. And when they do mix these genres they tend to get mixed up in other things, like dialogue trees and other parts of RPGS that distract from what a shooter's all about - fast action.

So we came up with these key words to kind of drive us and amongst them were things like, 'growth', 'discovery' and 'choice'. When we think of that applied to weapons... I love first-person shooters and we ask questions like, 'what's your favourite shotgun? What should our shotgun be?' and the programmers and designers will debate this. And we were thinking if we care about choice, why can't we have all the shotguns?

Just thinking about shotguns we had thousands of permutations on a whiteboard. All the development teams in the world added together can't build that many guns, because there are more guns in Borderlands than all the shooters on the PS3 and 360 added together. We had to build software to do it for us, so we built a procedural generation system that built all these guns.

Is there a finite number of guns? Do you have a sheet somewhere with every weapon on it?

Pitchford: Yes, but it's not a sheet (laughs). There are millions of permutations. I think the last count was like 17,750,000.

Do you have a favourite then?

Pitchford: Oh, that's like asking a spider with a billion larvae who their favourite child is.

Right now I like the surprises. Yesterday we were playing and this bandit came over a ramp with flames jetting out of him. I was like, 'what the fuck?' The dude had an alien flamethrower, I'd never seen that before. I was like, 'kill that freakin guy!'

Does the game balance certain guns to certain levels? Is a lower level character going to find that alien flamethrower for example?

Pitchford: Yeah that alien flamethrower probably won't show up in a lower level. There is some randomisation like when you open a chest we're not exactly sure what's going to come out, but probability tends to work in balance curves.

The other thing too is we've kind of used conventions from role-playing games. So if you've played World of Warcraft you'll know green weapons are better than the white ones, 'oo, that's a blue!', 'holy crap, that's a purple!' Some of the bosses you kill drop purple loot. We were comfortable with borrowing those conventions because they're standard and they're familiar.

We're already taking crazy risks blending the genres, and so in conforming to the standards it makes the game more accessible we think. It's tough for us because there's a temptation in development to invent everything, and that's where we can get ourselves into a lot of trouble. I've played a lot of games that had good intent but they tried too much.

Like Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway before it, Borderlands has now had a pretty long development stretch. Have those timespans affected your opinion on how long you should be working on these games?

Pitchford: Every experience teaches us things. If we're good, if we're smart, we learn as we go. So yeah of course every experience that I and the team have had has helped us grow.

This particular project has had more invention than we're used to so it's actually kind of spawned a new way for Gearbox to think about R&D;, which is going to be not just a benefit for Borderlands but a benefit for everything we do beyond that.

I'm really grateful to have been in the situation where we could take this kind of risk, if for nothing else than the education from that process. Because it's very difficult to predict when you're trying to invent something. Like the AI system that develops all the guns for us... that doesn't exist. We couldn't license any software, we just had to figure that out.

So with all this procedural content and randomisation, when does the player's experience with Borderlands actually end?

Pitchford: Well there's a level cap, so once you've reached that you're definitely committed. You're probably thinking 'where's the DLC?' (laughs). Even with the level cap you can still grow your character through better loot, better equipment, better shields, and there are different customisations and combat mods too.

There's also an end to the story missions. In fact, if you just ignore all the side stuff and only do the story missions - there are 30 mission chains - it's about a 15 hour experience, which is about the length a typical first-person shooter. There's about 120 non-missions chains, so that's where the more RPG guy can get immersed and just do everything.

And we have to ask, what's the going on with Aliens: Colonial Marines?

NOTE: Randy Pitchford later sent CVG the following statement: I love Aliens and I love Gearbox Software's Aliens: Colonial Marines. I am extremely committed to the game and I'm very confident in Sega's commitment to the Aliens brand and to our game.

I can imagine that there are a LOT of Aliens fans out there just like me that feel we've been waiting for our true Aliens game since we first saw the film and now that we know it's in development, we want it NOW!

I know that there hasn't been much talk about what we're doing for awhile and that more details would be very juicy. Like so many people, I've been patient for years to finally be able to play this game and now that I'm actually involved in the creation of it I can tell you that it's extremely challenging to continue to be patient as it develops. I want to tell all! But I can't.

But I can say that we are working hard and that there are great things afoot and I know that when the time is right, Sega will be excited to share more details about the game. Until that time, I guess the only thing anyone can do is just keep pressuring Gearbox and Sega to spill more beans. Maybe one of us will eventually crack.

Andy Robinson