Borderlands Preview Round-up

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Written by BuckGB on July 28th, 2009

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Class skills also play a big role, as you'll get one skill point per five character levels to dump into a three-pronged tree. We were testing out the soldier class for preview purposes and found his skills to be split up into infantry, medic, and support branches. Before unlocking the more powerful skills near the ends of the branches, you'll need to start at the base, which in the soldier's case is a scorpio turret. This thing plops down beside your character and starts firing at foes, and depending on how you decide to allocate points, can be modified in several ways. If you max out the infantry branch, for instance, you'll get a guided missile upgrade that allows your turret to launch the explosives alongside its regular shooting duties. At the end of the support branch you'll find the turret pops out resupply packs every several seconds, which should be particularly useful in multiplayer scenarios. Someone who reaches the end of the medic tree will find an upgrade that increases health regeneration for you and friends for a brief period after a kill is made.

As we scanned the sandy horizon, we began to hear a high-pitched mechanical voice beckoning us. It was then that we realised despite its forsaken facade, Borderlands isn't nearly as lonely as we thought. A short jog toward the makeshift community introduced us to Claptrap, a seemingly good-natured robotic character with more than a few passing similarities to WALL-E and Jhonen Vasquez's GIR character from the short-lived Nickelodeon animated series, Invader Zim. Claptrap gave us the guided tour of the area, and as we ducked and weaved our way through narrow corridors of cliff-face and hopped over corrugated steel barricades, we were given glimpses of some of the other residents of Borderlands, including leather and armoured bandits driving souped-up Max Max-esque vehicles. Claptrap's role is as much comedic relief as guide, and when he's shot during an ambush while attempting to open a gate for us, he mourns his leaking fluids.

Indeed, for the latecomers at the back it might be wise for me to give a recap of what Borderlands is all about. It's a FPS/RPG hybrid from shooter veterans Gearbox and 2K Games. It's a sci-fi adventure about mercenaries searching for a legendary stash of alien treasure, and it offers drop-in/drop-out support for up to four co-op players. The character you build up is also consistent from game to game, so you could join your advanced-level chums on a difficult mission, level up and grab some awesome firepower, then head back to your own game to progress through the story. The project has been in development for quite some time now, but recently a rebellious group of coders started playing around with giving the game a new look. The move impressed Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford, and now Borderlands boasts a new 2000AD-style comic book aesthetic.

A lot has been said about the cel-shaded graphics, and I'll give my personal opinion. After five minutes, it's not noticeable, except for the occasional bold black line highlighting an object. You're too focused on playing. One great benefit of the cel-shading, however, is that it goes very far toward making the game very clean to work in. Unfortunately, the two areas I played, rusty town Firestone and (The Canyon), suffered from a lot of rusty red and browns. However, since this game relies so much on desert worlds, having the clean bold outlines really help the player, as well as look nice. While I struggle playing a game like Gears of War, with an enemy or key item practically camouflaged in the background, the cel-shading of Borderlands makes everything very clean and clear. I found that I always knew what, where and who I needed to get to. Unfortunately, there was still some jaggies I found in the game, like in certain background flags, that could use some tightening. But overall, yeah, this game looks hot.

The Gunman's Role-Playing Game: Shoot things, get experience points, level up and unlock new abilities on your character's skill tree. That's Borderlands, and that's a strong core design. One of the four characters players can choose from at the game's start is a soldier, whose skill development can improve the turrets he drops, his healing abilities or his damage mitigation. A bulkier character, Brick, can, among other things, improve his fists until he can punch money out of his enemies. A female, dubbed the siren, can turn invisible. And, with a classification like siren, maybe she can seduce enemies? Maybe, Pitchford said. So go shoot stuff and improve. Not a bad formula.

Fallout had problems with FPS controls - guns didn't feel or aim like guns. Borderlands is better than that, it feels like a shooter, but the gun's still lack the weight and the sense of propulsion found in hit FPS games like CoD:MW and Battlefield 1943. I imagine this task will be difficult considering the weapons are generated. I mean, how do you make a million plus weapons feel just right?

Thankfully, the game handles very well and while it is a (role-playing shooter) it plays closer to a true FPS than Fallout 3. Skilled players can line-up headshots with ease and score critical hits like crazy. Keep in mind, though, as an RPG there will be enemies that take a lot of punishment. Sure, headshots will give you bonus damage, but one-hit kills will go away when you confront some of the tougher enemies. I'm told that enemies can also be randomized for encounters akin to champion, elite, or the named monsters of Diablo II.

In addition to shooting and weapon proficiencies, you'll also be filling out a skill tree as you play. It starts at level five, when you get your first skill point. You'll earn one skill point per level after that. The first point seems to go into unlocking the secondary ability for your class. For the soldier class, that's a turret with an energy shield surrounding it, providing mobile cover and a handy weapon, too. As you place points into the different disciplines for the class, you'll earn additional bonuses. For the soldier, that shield turret can eventually heal players when they stand close to the turret. It can also restore ammo when you're nearby. You can also put points into doing more damage with certain weapon types, and so on. Each of the four classes has a unique secondary ability and corresponding skill tree. Though I stuck with the soldier the entire time I played, you can also choose the ranger, which is a sniper class. There's also a "siren" class, which gives you a female character that can trigger a phase walk ability that lets her walk through enemies and deal damage to a group by materializing in their midst. Lastly, there's the berserker class, who earns the ability to dish out a devastating melee attack. The game allows for four-player co-op and uses the same characters in both modes, so you can take your character into and out of multiplayer games with ease. The different classes sound like they'll work together pretty well and fall into some standard MMO archetypes. The berserker class, for example, acts as the tank in a group and will apparently have some options that let him draw aggro and get enemies to attack him instead of the other, less-resilient classes. Of course, you can mix and match players of the same class, too.

When we first jumped into co-op I chose the tank-like character Brick. Man, that guy has awesome strength, but I realized while playing that I'll definitely have to figure out some kind of plan of attack using him. Oftentimes I'd run up to enemies to try and bash the crap out of them with my fists, only to find myself dying on the ground while stronger enemies swarmed.

Eventually we're left to our own devices, free to explore the vast open-world of Pandora. Much like Fallout 3, Pandora's settlements are cobbled together from sheets of rusty metal, lumps of driftwood and other waste materials, so everywhere you travel has a ragtag, decrepit feel, drenched in dripping, painted graffiti and all the traditional hallmarks of decay and degradation. And like Pandora's patchwork architecture, the weapons - of which there are literally millions to unearth - are unconventional combinations of various salvaged components, meaning that you're never quite sure of what you might find.

As I run between each subsequent quest (kill X number of monsters, collect X item from Y location -- actually, Borderlands almost has me hankering for a World of Warcraft session...) I begin to simply knife (my melee attack) the pestering Skaag as they race toward me. But taking out the gas-masked hunmanoid enemies is both a little easier and a little harder than the Skaag. They're easier in that they tend to stand still as they fire at me; they're harder in that, well, they're firing at me, damn it! But a quick duck behind cover, and, after a few quests, a purchasable (from a vending machine) regenerating energy shield helps prevent the Swiss cheese factor.

The debug menu was fascinating, though, as it's basically a giant database of all the possible combinations of guns you can have, from sniper rifles with shock damage and a blue scope to uzis with flame effects and a red barrel. For each category the total number of possible guns was listed and, at the top, was the total number of guns that could be created with all the possible combinations.
That number was 3,166,880.

Progression at first is gentle and logical. Collect a weapon; kill bandits; venture beyond the town's perimeter to hunt for loot in the dangerous wasteland beyond; fight off packs of savage skags (alien dog things); take on your first missions from other mysterious residents for cash and kit; learn to use vending machines to stock up on items; gain enough experience to level up and explore skill trees.

(Borderlands) has taken cues from some of the biggest titles in gaming, and produced what is shaping up to be a stellar FPSRPG. It's not necessarily a new take on either of those genres, but it blends them so seamlessly that FPS fans are going to realize they have a lot in common with RPG gamers pretty quickly. The four-player co-op seems like the next natural steps for fans of (Bioshock) and even (Halo,) because, as it was explained to me, (Master Chief is still the same as at the end of the game as he was at the beginning,) and (Borderlands) is looking to change up that entire experience.

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