DoctorFinger
10-15-2008, 06:26 AM
Gearbox is a busy studio right now. How busy? They just shipped Samba De Amigo for the Wii, they're about to ship Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. They've got Borderlands and Aliens: Colonial Marines in the pipeline. And those are just the games they can talk about now.
1UP (http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3170527) spoke extensively to Gearbox head Randy Pitchford about all these games, and more.
Of particular interest (to me at least) are his feelings on Borderlands. When it was announced last year everybody latched onto one tidbit: the game would include over 500,000 guns, each procedurally generated.
It's not about the number. The number makes it easy to communicate. But, really, it started with ballistics. You've got to have your shotguns. In a typical first-person shooter, it's like, "We're going to have a shotgun. What's our one shotgun? What's our one shotgun going to be like?" With Borderlands, we said, "You know what? I like the shotgun from Half-Life 2, but Mark likes the Jackhammer from Painkiller, and Brian Martel, my partner and VP at Gearbox, his favorite shotgun is the Doom II shotgun." Everybody has a favorite shotgun, you know what I mean? Why don't we have all of the shotguns? And then, for each type, better and better versions of them? Why don't we have thousands of shotguns? Why not?
There's the shotgun class, sniper rifles, assault rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, tactical machine pistols, pistols, and revolvers. Now, I've got nine classes of weapons, and I'm just in ballistics. Each class has thousands of guns, and then we have rocket launchers, plasma guns, laser cannons, and meson cannons. We've also added the alien stuff, which is where the extra 150,000 weapons came from. The alien stuff's really wacky, with all the stuff we remember from side-scrollers, like the three-shot. Crazy stuff. And we're actually not going to show any of it. We're going to let all that be discovered when you play the game. We don't want to spoil it.
When you have a system that can procedurally generate this stuff, you just want to go nuts with it. The costs are totally different. All the development teams in the world added together can't physically craft what the software we've made is building for us. You can take all the guns in every game that's been launched on the PS3 and Xbox 360 -- add them all together, and Borderlands still has more guns. It's not fair, because we built the software that's making them for us. We're not actually making them. But it's really cool, because I haven't even seen them all. [Laughs] It's really neat. He compares the drive for weapons in Borderlands to that in World of Warcraft, and hopes his game is that addictive.
He also speaks about balancing Borderlands, Geometry Wars and being an Achievement whore.
Source - 1UP (http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3170527)
1UP (http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3170527) spoke extensively to Gearbox head Randy Pitchford about all these games, and more.
Of particular interest (to me at least) are his feelings on Borderlands. When it was announced last year everybody latched onto one tidbit: the game would include over 500,000 guns, each procedurally generated.
It's not about the number. The number makes it easy to communicate. But, really, it started with ballistics. You've got to have your shotguns. In a typical first-person shooter, it's like, "We're going to have a shotgun. What's our one shotgun? What's our one shotgun going to be like?" With Borderlands, we said, "You know what? I like the shotgun from Half-Life 2, but Mark likes the Jackhammer from Painkiller, and Brian Martel, my partner and VP at Gearbox, his favorite shotgun is the Doom II shotgun." Everybody has a favorite shotgun, you know what I mean? Why don't we have all of the shotguns? And then, for each type, better and better versions of them? Why don't we have thousands of shotguns? Why not?
There's the shotgun class, sniper rifles, assault rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, tactical machine pistols, pistols, and revolvers. Now, I've got nine classes of weapons, and I'm just in ballistics. Each class has thousands of guns, and then we have rocket launchers, plasma guns, laser cannons, and meson cannons. We've also added the alien stuff, which is where the extra 150,000 weapons came from. The alien stuff's really wacky, with all the stuff we remember from side-scrollers, like the three-shot. Crazy stuff. And we're actually not going to show any of it. We're going to let all that be discovered when you play the game. We don't want to spoil it.
When you have a system that can procedurally generate this stuff, you just want to go nuts with it. The costs are totally different. All the development teams in the world added together can't physically craft what the software we've made is building for us. You can take all the guns in every game that's been launched on the PS3 and Xbox 360 -- add them all together, and Borderlands still has more guns. It's not fair, because we built the software that's making them for us. We're not actually making them. But it's really cool, because I haven't even seen them all. [Laughs] It's really neat. He compares the drive for weapons in Borderlands to that in World of Warcraft, and hopes his game is that addictive.
He also speaks about balancing Borderlands, Geometry Wars and being an Achievement whore.
Source - 1UP (http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3170527)