Back then, Borderland was a grungily realised post-apocalyptic blaster with an extraordinary interest in guns. Lots of guns. Years ago Gearbox Software head Randy Pitchford took us through a demo and guns was where Borderlands was
at. A system was in place that allowed a near endless stream of weapons via a combinations of characteristics: weapon type, magazine capacity, projectile power, reload speed, sight design, and more.
Gamers love guns, so Pitchford was going to give us more than we could handle. At the time it was a novel idea – a game where you couldn’t really just play through until you got the uber weapon and then kill everyone in your path. But tastes and trends shift rapidly in gaming. What was a clever wrinkle a couple of years back was shaping up to be nothing more than a crippling gimmick in today’s market.
Gearbox needed to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Pitchford – an accomplished magician since his younger days – was the right man for the job.
Who can? The Randyman can (apologies to Willy Wonka)
In the last half a year Borderlands has gone from being one of the lost boys of gaming to the savvy punter’s dark horse, a quiet achiever who marches on towards release while the waves of hype around everything from id Software’s RAGE to Prototype to Modern Warfare 2 crash against the stony rocks of gamer scepticism.
To the drawing board! First step was a public redesign of the game’s look. The gritty, dirtastic, and dare we say – generic - graphics went out the window in favour of a “not quite cel shaded but actually pretty close to being cel shaded” style that’s drawn praise since its release. Whatever reason Gearbox had for the shift there’s no doubting with the likes of Gears of War 2, Fight Night Round 4 and Modern Warfare 2 setting new benchmarks with visuals, trying to play in the realism-in-graphics stakes is a mug’s game. The comic-book approach not only gave Borderlands’ design team a breath of fresh motivational air, it takes Borderlands out of the pixellated quagmire of Unreal Engine-d clones and their kin doing business out in the dystopian new world so loved by developers.
Shine those pearly whites, not-Judge Death guy
Oh, there’s also another obvious reason. Bethesda Softworks dropped Fallout 3 last year, a triumphant interpretation of post apocalyptic gaming that blew minds on console and PC alike. Borderlands setting, black sense of humour – even the poster style at times on the vending machine interfaces - just wasn’t different enough to Fallout 3’s to avoid comparison. Having people think you’re competing with
last year’s game – even if you aren’t – is also a recipe for mediocrity. The stylistic shift helps offset that factor, making Borderlands more Sin City to Fallout 3’s Pulp Fiction.
But the visual overhaul was only half the story. The other half was a shift in the way Gearbox started talking about the game. The emphasis on guns, guns, guns – gone. Now the Borderlands pitch is RPG shooter – classes, upgrades, skill trees and quest elements. We’ve seen it in action, we’ve played it in single player, and we’ve sampled multiplayer in the form of co-op. And it’s
good.
Visuals in motion. “This build is a month or so old,” Pitchford warns us as a caveat against any oddities we may see. The graphic novel style works well. Jaggies are visible in the terrain and on player models, but the action is still fluid. And this style looks a lot more distinctive than the standard treatment we’re used to.
In the first play stanza, we’re given control of Roland, the game’s balanced, soldier class. We play through the first five levels of the game – essentially the tutorial and opening quests. The action at first is highly linear with only one branch (and it was a minor one) in this first five level burst. We start off with a robot companion showing us around Fyrestone, a bomb shelter meets tin shanty town in the middle of a wasteland. Your robot buddy is a trifle neurotic, but falls short of seeming contrived.
To the left, to the left - the trashcan with the antenna is a friendly
It may look like a design student’s “reimagining” of an upside down dustbin but there’s every suggestion the little critter will be sticking around for more than just the first five levels we played.
After being lead around for a while and learning the interface basics, we’re off performing tasks for a couple of the local denizens. Fetch this, kill that. Curiously, we start off with a handy assault rifle but the only weapons we’ll pick up before the final showdown for our single player demo are handguns with arguably less utility. Limited ammo drops mean I dipped onto the handguns periodically, but really it was something I wanted to avoid, the rifle doing a lot better job of dropping enemies.
There’s plenty of signs flicking through your inventory that Pitchford’s tons of guns system is still here, even if it’s no longer a big talking point. While you only can equip a couple of firearms at a time, you can stash more in your backpack. We’re holding onto a “rusty” rifle, just one differentiation tag of many. Thankfully the ammo system is streamlined – you won’t be forever hunting around for the right bullets. I suspect Gearbox has reduced the ammo drops to weapon type – it doesn’t matter what kind of a shotgun you have – if you find shotgun cartridges, they’ll work.
In case you’re struggling figuring out where to go an intelligent waypoint system tells you where next to go – or at least the direction. A map also can be brought up of your area, and currently it shows where your objective is. I switched between quests and the waypoint indicator was updated accordingly on my compass. The final quest in our demo involves taking down a character called “Nine Toes”. It’s a three stage quest: blowing up a barricade, locating a special weapon, then duking it out with the bad guy. The waypoint system is sophisticated enough to not just point you towards the final boss/objective, but rather to each stage along the way.
Combat is what you would expect. You have a Left 4 Dead style melee move when the baddies get too close, as well as a zoom system that varies in power dependant on weapon. Like Team Fortress 2, critical hits are possible and shown on screen. Enemies will show a health gauge as you wave the sights over them, which does make it easy to figure out who you should be knocking off first.
Crits out for the lads (and lasses, Lilith fans)
One entertaining inclusion in combat is when you die – or rather when you’ve sustained enough damage that you’re at death’s door. “Fight for your life” flashes up in red and you have to kill a bad guy from a reclining position to get a second life. The build we played gave players ample time to do this – roughly 5-10 seconds from what we could tell – so it really does depend on your weapons and ammo at the time – as well as your ability to deal with your aim being off kilter.
Playing nicely with others. With single player acclimatising us to the controls, it was time for our multiplayer session. Pitchford pointed out that co-op – the mode we were playing – is something that seamlessly blends with the single player experience. You can play the same quests solo or with friends.
For the purposes of the demo we were given characters bumped up to level 20. We got the rundown of the four classes in game before we were allowed time on one. There’s Brick, the tank. He’s able to take more hits and is a melee powerhouse. There’s Roland, the aforementioned all-round soldier. Lilith is the “siren” class, capable of going invisible, moving super fast, and unleashing magical mayhem. Mordecai is the hunter class – a sniper specialist with a pet “Bloodwing” – a bird he can make attack distant targets.
Each of these classes has a signature special attack move – it’s unlocked at level 5 with your first skill point
before you can spend points in any of the specialist skill trees – each class has three. Roland has a handy shield and gun turret – you can hide behind it and waste incoming enemies and even kite the bad guys flanking you around into its range of fire. Lilith has her stealth and magic attack functions, Mordecai has his pet and Brick has
our favourite special – a berserker rage mode which turns him into a melee beast, doing massive damage up close. The left and right trigger buttons on the controller work the corresponding fist. Brick’s voice effects are hilarious – alternate screaming and yelling “blood blood bloooooood!”.
Power levelled. To make things interesting, we were given characters bumped up to level 20. This appears to be close to the game’s cap, as it allows you to stop just one point short of getting the top tier skill on a given tree. Taking into account the initial point you blow on your “special’ move, you’ll need to be level 21 to get the top slot. Which seems a unusual level cap – so we wouldn’t be surprised to hear it was 25 or 30, allowing you to grab a few skills from the other two trees or snag some more from your own.
Just don't call him two dimensional...
The skill trees each has are intended to provide further enhancement of their special attacks as well as their abilities. I selected Brick, and ended up dumping all my points in the damage oriented tree. The other two focused on his ability to take a beating or avoid one, but the tree I selected focused a lot on making Brick’s berserker mode last longer, and reducing its cool down time, to the point where it probably needs balancing – it was literally available almost always when I needed it, rather than being something you have to actively plan around unleashing. From experience Roland’s special is similarly powerful – except the downtime is more pronounced at level five with no skill points to affect it.
I didn’t play the other classes but I did observe the tree titles for Lilith were “Controller”, “Elemental” and “Assassin”, suggesting some some mind-powered human manipulation, casting and burst kill action respectively. Mordecai’s were “Sniper”, “Rogue” and “Gunslinger”, which should seem pretty clear to most gamers, with the exception of “Rogue”, which might delve into melee more than the other two.
Looks familiar. Running with three other players in co-op mode revealed a few things. First, Borderlands triggers the same kind of emotional responses as other RPGs with multiplayer focus. At least it did for me. In no time at all I found myself gritting my teeth and mentally palming my face as half our crack team wandered the landscape seemingly aimlessly. All players can heal others, as well as ninja the ammo, dollar and health drops that come off defeated monsters. Figuring I could use them the most, I opted to flog as much health as I needed to stay alive, and damn the consequences. Apart from a rare moment of teamwork where we all were in combat, I decided not to heal others … as they usually were out of harm’s way anyway.
Always a good sign: when your team actually plays together
Brick definitely shines in melee range. By stacking damage skills, I essentially was able to bolt into the heart of the fray with berserker rage active, wail on a few people, then run for cover, where my teammates would then …
not kill off the big bad monster wanting to smash my face in.
From what I could observe the monsters in Borderlands have a RPG-style “aggro” range. You can see them and have direct line-of-sight, but once you get within a certain distance – and it’s a healthy distance at that – they’ll come after you. The monsters are often “chained” together by an AI flag so I was finding times where even if I carefully “pulled” one monster I’d get a few of his buddies coming along for the ride. Again we were warned the game’s build could get a little buggy, so I wasn’t surprised when I found a pair of monsters “stuck” on the terrain allowing me to kill them without risk.
While we were playing on what appeared to be system link, I did observe some netcode oddities. Sometimes I would encounter a team member whose model was dangling upside down off the terrain; scanning the room I didn’t see anyone chilling out bat-style, so I’m assuming some maths has gone haywire. When they weren’t inverted the team moves smoothly on the screen and you had a good handle on what people were up to. Borderlands combat can be quite cover intensive, so the old familiar charge you get from ducking in and out at a hostile enemy remains strong.
Seen this before? The multiplayer questing and skill talent system reminded us of World of Warcraft in many ways, which raises the obvious question: why not give this the MMO treatment? The answers are plentiful, starting with “cost of entry” and probably ending with “let’s see if gamers like this first”. I couldn’t help but wonder how fun it would be hunting rival teams of players in a brawling, sprawling open PVP world as opposed to taking down Skags and Bandits.
Stay a while...stay forever
Developers hate it when their games get compared to others, but there’s no denying Borderlands benefits from influences from Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, even Team Fortress 2. It’s still its own game with a flavor of its own. Perhaps a better way of putting it is players who’ve enjoyed the above will smile – not smirk – in recognition. There’s still a hefty amount of clean-up to go, as well as a nagging thought of this game could go to the next level as a MMO – but for now what we’ve seen is highly promising.
