Borderlands Interview

The curiously named blog No More Game Blogs has published an interview they conducted with Borderlands art lead James Sanders during one of the game's midnight release parties.
Many first person shooter fans saw gameplay videos of Fallout 3 and got very excited over what looked to be a really cool shooter, only to be disappointed by the combat once they bought the game. Did you take Fallout's combat issues into account when you were making Borderlands?

(Oh absolutely, Fallout is such a great game; no one is going to say different about it. We played the heck out of that game and we saw things as shooter fans that we recognized weren't working so well. Borderlands has to be a shooter that was our main goal. It has to be a shooter but it also has to be a RPG and these thing need to work together. We were not going to release Borderlands until it was ready. It took us a little longer than we wanted but we know this game can hold its own as a shooter. A lot of heated arguments went into to making sure it could.)

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What do you think when people call Borderlands Diablo 2 with guns? Do you think this accurately sums of your game?

(Personally I love that analogy because it's very flattering. Diablo is a game that has a lot of the same characteristics as Borderlands. I don't think it is an accurate description of what we do though. Here is a different way of answering that question. How are they different? It has been nine or ten years since Diablo 2, we have a lot better graphics, a lot snappier gameplay, and you have guns. The whole idea of shooting something with a scope or reticule is very different from simply right click which is all you do in Diablo. As a game mechanic this is way more fun. It all depends on if you are good at first person shooters. If not maybe you are more of a melee person. It's up to you how you assemble your group to overcome obstacles.)