Pumping Irony

I totally missed this at the time, but the Borderlands NDA was dropped a few days ago for press and players who attended a recent visit to Gearbox HQ to play the game. Focus testers are still bound by their NDA.

There are two post-NDA forums with a lot of information, one at the official Gearbox forums, the other at the fansite Borderlands Guide forums. I’ll highlight a few bullet points here though, since those threads are getting crazy in length already.

All the players who are spilling the beans were careful to mention that they only got 1-2 hours, the games were setup by Gearbox not themselves, and were limited to a few areas, so take that into consideration on some of the bullet points. Platform-wise, it seems everyone played the 360 version. There was only one PC on the scene and no PS3′s. The PC shooter guys didn’t bash too much (that’s a rare thing in and of itself) only saying their preferred controls are mouse and keyboard but that they fared just fine with the 360 controller.

• Level cap is 50.
• There are no melee weapons in the game, though certain humanoid enemies use melee weapons. Each character has a default melee action: Brick punches, Lilith does a palm strike, Mordecai does a sword slash and Roland does a combat knife slash. You can upgrade your guns with melee addons such as bayonettes. When using the ‘melee’ skill, the game automatically uses whichever (default or weapon upgrade) melee is stronger.
• Loot distribution is Free For All. Again, Gearbox started the games for them so it’s possible there are other loot distribution options, but FFA is what they dealt with at Gearbox HQ. However if FFA turns out to be the only mode Borderlands ships with, that will make PUGs a frustrating and risky venture.
• Borderlands is a true shooter, ie. no RPG mechanics under the hood artificially making your shots miss like you’d see in Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. However, the more you use a given weapon type, your character’s proficiency with it increases, though no one said what effect proficiency actually has on anything. Traditional shooter rules apply: crouching is more accurate than standing, and single shots are more accurate than bursts. Also there are no RPG attributes to increase as you level.
• Controls on the 360 are similar to COD4: A to jump, B to crouch (which is a toggle, and crouch-jumping is possible), X to reload and interact with environmental objects or pick up loot, Y to change weapons. Left trigger switches to gun sights. Left bumper is the character’s special ability. Right bumper is grenades. Click the analog sticks to melee and sprint.
• The 360 maintained a solid framerate even with lots of enemies on-screen.
• Death animations are a mix between ragdoll physics and set animations.
• You can equip ammo modifiers to your gun to add effects such as acid, etc. to your ammo.
• AI is decent. More advanced bandits will take cover, etc. like you’d expect in a shooter but the lesser types will stand there and get shot. I haven’t read anything about monster AI so it’s probably exactly what you’d expect.
• Skill trees are setup more like an MMO than Diablo. There are three trees to choose from and most/all of the skills are passive rather than active “oh crap!” buttons with long cooldowns. Each tree culminates with a single super power.
• In addition to all the gun mods, there are grenade mods as well so you’re not just limited to the standard frag grenade. One mentioned was a “transition grenade” which would heal you with whatever damage it did to enemies. Just like the gun mods, you can have several available in your inventory and quickly swap to a different mod type any time you need to.
• Quests are fairly simple and the typical MMO style formats. Kill ten rats. Kill this boss. Deliver this item to an NPC. Etc. The story is kept somewhat simplistic possibly to accomodate for the focus on cooperative play rather than specific characters like in a single-player game.
• What MMO players would call an “elite” or “boss” is called a Badass in Borderlands. Since the difficulty scales in cooperative play, everyone has said with four human players the Badasses more than live up to their name.
• The Medic role has a passive skill about halfway down a skill tree that will both damage enemies and heal players. One player mentioned a strategy for a particular Badass where Brick tanked the Badass and he stayed in the back and shooting Brick in the back of the head with healing ammo to keep him alive (and using Brick’s size as cover) and shooting the Badass when Brick’s health wasn’t critical.
• The world is open and (mostly?) seamless but there are “doglegs” (ie. instances) that are repeatable and full of hard enemies and good loot.

I’ll stop there. Tons of additional information is available in the two forum threads I linked, especially the official Gearbox forum. If you have the time, by all means stop over there and give it a good read. But be warned, it’s at 86 pages before it was locked.

Unrelated to the NDA, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford said this week that there will not be a pre-launch Borderlands demo but they might get out out post-launch. Borderlands is currently in certification mode, meaning it is feature-complete and the team is polishing things up for launch. They’ve already had more ideas during this phase that will be included in DLC. Sounds like they’re already working on two DLC expansions and they will be listening carefully to the community for ideas and to adjust their DLC plans to fit what the players are looking for.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under FPS, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.