Borderlands

Gamers have a tendency to exaggerate; in the heat of discussing a game, it’s common to hear someone claim that this RPG features endless upgrade combinations, or that FPS has a million different guns to choose from. Such statements are not meant to be taken literally, but are rather a sign of the speaker’s excitement about an upcoming game. After playing a preview build of Borderlands, it’s safe to say we’re excited about it, and if we told you the game had a million guns you could buy, sell, and eviscerate bad guys with, it would still be inaccurate; according to Gearbox’s President Randy Pitchford, the last weapon count for the game was 17,750,000, a number far greater than any development team on the planet could create by hand. And while we don’t know yet how big Borderlands will be (the preview build was just a small chunk of the overall world) it was chock full of Mad Max-like bandits, badass alien beasties (some literally named Badass, an enemy rank in Borderlands), and demented psycho midgets.  If that sounds insane, that’s Borderlands.

There are a lot of other interesting features that we could tell you about the game, information that has been slowly revealed and endlessly regurgitated during the game’s development cycle.  All you really need to know about Borderlands (besides that humongous, procedurally generated arsenal) is that it’s an open-world FPS/RPG hybrid that Pitchford hopes is as addictive and engrossing as Diablo or World of Warcraft. It looks like the Gearbox team might have met their goal too – there’s so much to do that we had set two of our editors loose on the game. Here are our first impressions.

Impressions from Dan Ryckert, Associate Editor:

It's hard to sum up the Borderlands experience briefly, but the shortest way is probably "four player co-op Fallout 3 with more of a focus on gunplay." It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and it doesn't exactly do the game justice. Borderlands certainly isn't a Fallout 3 clone, but it does have some of that same post-apocalyptic Road Warrior feel that worked so well in Bethesda's RPG.

Randy Pitchford and his team at Gearbox have done a great job of making the weapons the star of the show, and there's literally millions of them. Obviously, this is done through combinations of many interchangeable elements, but you'll frequently find new weapons that give you that "I need to go try this right now," feeling. I was certainly pleased the first time I picked up an SMG and realized it inflicted fire damage on enemies. I was even more pleased when I filled a "Midget Psycho" up with bullets from said SMG that caused him to burst into flames. As you progress, you'll unlock more room in your backpack and earn more quick-select slots, allowing you to carry a versatile arsenal with you across the wasteland. At most times, I kept a shotgun, a machine gun (or SMG), and a sniper rifle in my quick-select, ensuring that I could adapt to most any combat situation.

Cooperative play is bound to be a huge hit upon the game's release, and it's handled better than virtually any other team multiplayer experience I've seen. Your character, his/her level, and your entire inventory can easily travel in and out of your friend's games, and you're free to leave at any time without disrupting their play experience. If I log onto Xbox Live and my friend says he needs help with a mission, I can instantly appear, help out by blasting everything in sight with some rockets, and then leave the play session.

Let's say you're a level 15, your friend is a level 4 who's having trouble with the game, and your inventory is getting crowded with lower-level weapons that you don't use any more. With a few button presses, you can travel to their game and lend them a nice virtual weapons cache. By the time Jeff started his character, I had already significantly leveled mine up to the point of him not being able to survive in my quests. We remedied this situation by seating him in the turret seat of a vehicle as I drove around the wasteland, allowing him to quickly gain XP by demolishing countless hordes of Skags with his mounted rocket launcher.

After spending a significant amount of time with Borderlands, I'm definitely excited for the game's release. Its massive assortment of weapons, successful blending of genres, and promise of many late-night co-op sessions sounds too good to pass up.

Impressions from Jeff Marchiafava, Associate Editor:

My first experiences in Borderlands were pretty pathetic; Dan got a head start on me with the preview build, and since we were both eager to check out how the persistent character co-op worked, I jumped directly into his game as a new character, instead of cutting my teeth in a solo game. Dan was already at level 13 when I joined him – I hadn’t even played the tutorial.

So I tried not to take it personally when even the randomly generated gangs of wandering bandits were killing me – they were seven or eight levels higher than me after all. Still, my first hours with Borderlands were more humbling than playing Halo online. Instead of getting frustrated by my character’s fondness of falling to the ground and slowly bleeding out though, I was instead impressed by how flawless the co-op was working; the first thing Dan did was give me some of his old guns, gleefully explaining each one’s quirks and advantages. I couldn’t even use most of them yet due to level restrictions, but choosing and equipping items felt distinctly RPG-like. Everything else that followed though, was pure FPS.

My suck-age was further exemplified when we enrolled in a mission to find some missing pieces of a sniper rifle. They were deep within enemy-occupied territory, which included bandit snipers perched high atop the area’s twisting ravines, rocket launcher-wielding Bruisers, and flocks of pterodactyl-like bird creatures that dive-bombed us in giant swarms. To say I was out of my league would have been putting it mildly; I think Dan spent just as much time reviving me as he did shooting the never-ending barrage of enemies we were up against. Luckily, experience points are shared between players, so I was rapidly leveling up even while I was dying.

Before I knew it I had reached level 11, and although I was still underpowered for most of the enemies we were facing, I was closing the gap. More intricacies of the gameplay surfaced; dead players respawn at the starting point of an area without any kind of reset to the game world, meaning the enemies you killed are still dead, and the wounded ones are still weakened – the only penalty is a monetary fee, similar to BioShock.

Money found in the world and looted off of corpses is also shared between the players – but all of those fancy weapons you find lying around? They go to the person who gets there first, and while Dan and I were civil in splitting up the loot, I’m sure other players won’t be… in which case the built-in PvP Duel mode should come in handy.

After playing with Dan for an afternoon I tried creating my own game for some solo action. I started at the very beginning – complete with a robot-led tutorial on how to move and aim in a first person shooter – but as promised by Pitchford, my stats from the previous play session were intact, and I had all the guns and upgrades I picked up before as well. Suddenly the tables were turned; I was now the level 11 character up against level 1 enemies. Upon seeing my first gang of bandits, I pulled out my scoped pistol and aimed for my distant enemy’s head. The single shot resulted in his entire body exploding, his arms and legs scattering across the desert battlefield. I was an unstoppable force for these peons, and immediately saw that all of the earlier grinding and struggling just to survive had paid off massively.

Playing alone also gave me my first chance to take a calm look at my surroundings, and although it’s a point that’s been made numerous times before, Borderlands’ graphics are a style that is in a class all its own – one that will undoubtedly be cloned in the upcoming years. The world itself didn’t feel as fleshed out as a game like Oblivion; there weren’t a lot of interactive objects in the environment other than weapons, ammo, and containers holding weapons and ammo. But the game still endows a real sense of place, as if you are walking around in a real world, versus being herded from level to level in a traditional FPS. Even just tooling around and capping random raiders and Skags was notably enjoyable.

My solo experience also led to the realization of how deep the RPG elements run; virtually everything in Borderlands can be upgraded, including your health, shields, grenades, the amount of ammo and guns you can carry, your proficiency in each weapon type, your special abilities, and Artifacts that enhance those special abilities; the possibilities are… well, maybe not endless – but enough to get us excited for Oct. 20.