T w e n t y S i d e d

Based on what the developers have said about the game, Borderlands was apparently a title that came together at the last minute. It shows. Almost every part of the game seems to be missing something obvious.

The Airing of Grievances

In the PC version, the multiplayer matchmaking was handled through the now-defunct Gamespy, which was awful and inconvenient when it wasn’t outright broken. The game had voice chat but no real interface, which means that once you joined a game it was always just broadcasting your default microphone with no option for push-to-talk, no ability to mute yourself, no control over the volume, and no hint that this was happening. The field of view was shamefully narrow, to the point where it felt like you were “zoomed in”, as if you were always looking down iron sights. I actually find this nauseating. Even today, the only way to fix this is to hack config files.

Rockets didn’t work properly, character classes weren’t really balanced, and it was far too easy to grief people and far too troublesome to deal with griefers. The developers bragged about how they simulated bullet trajectories instead of using the more typical hitscan approach, but in practice it was wonky and the only time you’d notice the difference was when it malfunctioned. The game ran poorly compared to contemporaries. Claptrap would pester you constantlyEven interrupting combat and story dialog! if there were quests available that you hadn’t yet accepted. The interface was obnoxious to use with a mouse and keyboard. Some simple gameplay conceptsLike respawn stations or the bounty board. were patronizingly over-explained by voiced characters while other less obvious topicsLike weapon proficiencies and ammo storage limits. weren’t explained at all.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 4: Diamond in the Rough”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

When development on Borderlands began, there was a “religious war” among the team as to whether the game would be an RPG or an FPS at heartAgain, my source for this is the Gearbox talk at GDC 2010.. Sure, this was supposed to be a fusion of the two gameplay styles, but you can imagine all the different possible games that could arise out of that simple idea. It’s not like this is the only game you could make with the elevator pitch of “FPS+RPG”.

In fact, that idea had already been done, eleven years before work began on Borderlands. System Shock came out in 1994, and it was basically a mashup of Ultima Underworld and Doom. But that was just one game out of dozens you could conceive of, and the Gearbox team needed to figure out how their particular take on this genre blend was going to work.

For example, you could imagine this shooter gameplay in something more Fallout-ish, where you’ve got dialog trees and stats for influencing people. You can imagine something more like KOTOR where you’ve got a morality meter and lots of binary player choice. You can imagine something more like Elder Scrolls, where the player wanders an open world, looking for dungeons and questsIt’s a good thing they never made this, since I probably would have played it until I died.. You can imagine something like Dragon Age, where the player character plays a particular role and gets caught up in a bunch of political intrigue. Or maybe something like Deus Ex or Dishonored where you could employ stealth and diplomacy to vary between lethal and nonlethal playstyles.

But in the end the “RPG” we got was more the Diablo style of RPG where the character-building stuff all feeds directly into combat. There’s no dialog wheel, no factions, and no moral choices. Every NPC gives you the exact same dialog regardless of character class and behavior.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 3: Cast of Character Classes”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.