E3 08 Preview: Borderlands
Gearbox Software is best known for their Brothers in Arms series of games, and now they're endeavoring on creating another brand new franchise: Borderlands. This one's been in the works for a while, and at E3 this year, they've gotten far enough to show it off.
Borderlands is a science fiction game taking place on a remote planet where the environment is brutal and only the toughest survive. There is little in the way of humanity here, and those who are still here - corporations abandoned their unprofitable attempts at exploiting the place years back - are tough and most will try to kill you. It's got kind of a Mad Max feel, although it's not specifically post-apocalypse - the planet you're on never really had any respectable amount of civilization to begin with. Gearbox licensed Unreal Engine 3 for this game, the same engine that powers the Gears of War series and BioShock, and they've got it so that outdoor areas are streamed to the player without "zones" or long load times.
The game is played as a first person shooter, and up to four people can play together online. It's kind of like Halo's vehicle sequences combined with a traditional action-based shooter along with a loot and level system from a sci-fi Diablo. If that sounds appealing, the demo shown by Gearbox president Randy Pitchford and a couple of producers on the game playing together showed that they're on the way to realizing that potential.
The quest they were on was to infiltrate an iridium mine to find some kind of alien artifact that a group of bandits had stolen. Going in blazing, the bandits' vehicles didn't stand up to the guns on the players' own turret-mounted machine gun. The ability to switch seats (and have it animated in a cool, almost-Army of Two style) between driver and gunner was in, and the vehicle battles are played in a third-person mode that gives you a great viewpoint of the action.
Heading into the mine, the two figured out which paths they were going to take and set up their weapons. At this point, there are over 650,000 combinations of weapons, all possible with various parameters that allows the game to "build" a gun piece by piece. I got to see Gearbox's demo of the game twice, and the weapons they picked from made for pretty different tactics and results once they were fired. Guns with blue coloring on them have some kind of electric effect, green ones fire out acid, and red ones are incendiary. Some guns have different scopes or ammo capacity, and one of my favorites was a sniper rifle with a big revolving chamber that slides out for popping out spent casings and dumping new ammo in.
Taking out the bandits wasn't particularly easy for the producers to do, as they kept getting pretty bad guns through the game's loot system. Eventually they had to spawn some new ones with a cheat code, and popped out about a hundred then chose the best from that selection. That's when the bodies started to fly - the shotgun that the Soldier character had was a great backup weapon and would easily take limbs and heads off, while the Hunter character mainly was sniping from a distance and hitting the bandits that lingered in the back. With some powerful MIRV grenades that explode once and send out new projectiles that then all explode themselves, the Soldier was able to take out a few guys at a time. With some tweaking of skills via his "software" and a couple of passive increases in his rifle skill, the big, slow rifle the Soldier was firing was adjusted to reload faster and fire a little more accurately. With a full leveling system and unlockable and configurable skills that work inside cybernetic implants, the game seems to promise a lot of depth. As the game gets closer to release, we'll see if that system holds up and keeps people coming back like Diablo did (and recent PC title Hellgate: London didn't).
The demo ended with the leader of the bandits making a little speech via a cutscene before jumping in for a battle. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the battle, but I was impressed with how different the demo went for the two producers in the couple times I saw it. Borderlands is being made for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 and is currently set for release in early 2009.
