Borderlands Retrospective: Halo-meets-Diablo, Critical Co-op, & Changing The Art Style
It's always interesting to see what a studio thinks of their latest production, and one of the most unique productions of 2009 was definitely Gearbox Software's Borderlands. Having started in 2007 as their latest project after Brothers in Arms, the game had a fairly generic post-apocalyptic style serving to deliver a much more unique concept of randomized weapons. Then, in late 2008, the team shifted directions almost entirely, ending up with a more stylized, colorful art style which likely rescued the game both internally and at the marketplace. To find out more about what Gearbox thought, Patrick Klepick at G4TV wrangled an interview with the lawless bandits at Gearbox, and we're delivering a taste of what he squeezed out of them.
One of the most interesting comparisons came up when asking about the origin behind the game: it all started when Gearbox was porting Halo to PC, in 2003. As the game's director, Matthew Armstrong, notes, Bungie displayed an idea for procedurally generating weapons, but only on a small scale:
We looked at this and I thought a little beyond that surface area of how they did it to make it more convenient, let the designer have more control over the weapons, and I realized that if you did this right and you evolved it the right way, you could have a first-person-shooter that had literally millions of weapons all designed or built with a fairly small group of people using systemic design. I go to one of our producers at the time and mention this and I say "I don't know what we do with this exactly" and his response is "well, you do Halo-meets-Diablo. You make that promise."That turned out to be a solid promise, as gamers found out in droves six years later. But a lot of the success of Borderlands came from its viral appeal, which in turn is a product of its strong co-op gameplay.
To find out more about what made that a hit, aim for the jump below!
Gearbox admits they may have underestimated the rocket-like takeoff appeal of their quirky title, but they were aware that co-op should be a key part of it, which is why they included it from the start: "In the first two weeks of development, we were playing four-player co-op," Armstrong said. "It's significantly easier to balance a game in co-op if it's always there, if it's there from the start." This was no easy task, development wise, but the team recognizes the stability of their coders and designers for making such a feat possible.
Similarly, it's tough to imagine an open-world shooter where the rocket launchers can shoot lightning as being an ideal candidate for split-screen gameplay, but Armstrong again notes that this was a feature they had to have: "A big part of what makes a word-of-mouth game worthwhile is you come in, you sit on the couch and you say 'hey, come over and check out this game out and play with me.'"
There's definitely a case to be made that Gearbox was determined to bring back the fun, cooperative experiences of games like Diablo, but what made the title stand out in a crowd of shooters was definitely its art style. What started as a simple tech demo by some of the artists ended up being an ideal change for the game into a more crazy, over-the-top look which utterly changed the game's tone. A glance at any commercial or bit of dialogue in the game confirms this, but the director sums it up:
For a lot of people at this company, that was also the tipping point for what this project was. The art style change really brought into focus what the game was. The art style finally meshed with the game's personality and the gameplay style and that really, really made it easier to develop and to work on it.It also did a world of good for the gamers, as evidenced by their in-house testing:
With the old art style, we had a gun and it shot people and it set them on fire, right? So we have this gun and we get people playing the game and their response is "where's my incendiary ammo? How do I load the incendiary ammo? How do I make incendiary ammo work with this gun?" We say "no, no, no the gun makes the bullets incendiary." [Then, they'd say] "How does that work?" That question kept getting asked. We changed the art style -- no one's ever asked that question again. Those questions go away because it's fanciful and it allows us -- [and] the player -- to make a certain leap of faith into an understanding that the crazier and wackier and more fun things can exist in this world.So it seems that, where Diablo had magic, Borderlands just needed a few steps away from other shooters on the market in order to have the idea of element-infused guns and badass enemies jive with players.
Overall, Borderlands looks to have succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of 2K Games or Gearbox Software. Though they knew they had a strong project on their hands, it was still a risk to come out swinging in the same quarter as other shooter giants like Modern Warfare 2, but it's a risk that paid off immensely.
To know more about Borderland's sales reception, as well as what the team wishes they could've put in the game, check out the full interview linked above, then let us know what you wish you could've seen on Pandora!
faePuck
Posted to Video Games on 22 January 2010
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: borderlands, gearbox software, interviews, retrospective
I really liked the game. Currently it's on the backburner, but I got fairly far into it.
I would've liked to see the original though. I loved the original trailer for it.
That being said, that would only have worked if they went for a more serious tone ala Fallout 3.
The cellshaded certainly fits the silly cartoon-like way the game turned out as better.
I was completley uninterested in this game, but sat down with a friend to play it when he got it for christmas. 4 days of pretty much non-stop playing later and I can see the appeal (addiction) of the game. The endless custimization plus the sheer fun of new and massivley more powerful randomized weapons make each skag kill a fun suprise. The treasure hunt aspect is what makes this game crazy fun.