Randy Pitchford on high profile FPSs and fanboys

We talk at length to the Gearbox founder about Borderlands, Aliens, Hell's Highway and game development.

Randy Pitchford is always excited about the game he's developing, so when he's got three high profile first-person shooters on the go he's almost uncontrollable, as we discovered at E3 when we sat down with the Gearbox founder for a chat about Borderlands, Aliens: Colonial Marines and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. Read on for Randy's thoughts on Home, PS3 trophies and why Call of Duty 4 got really, really lucky.

VideoGamer.com: How are you coping make three high profile next-gen FPSs at the same time?

Randy Pitchford: Well, they're not all done at the same time. There's a difference in happens in pre-production, and what happens in post-production and in the middle of production. In pre-production teams are smaller, and we're figuring out what we're doing, we're prototyping. And it's actually really effective for us. A lot of teams, if you have a team that only has one game at a time, and you hear about this a lot unfortunately where they finish and fire everybody. By doing it the way we do it, we have very, very talented, creative people, and we do what we do because we want to be busy. We're really hungry. We want to do this stuff. The opportunity to build a brand like Borderlands and to do some of the other things we're doing, this is why we do what we do.

There's a couple of advantages we have by doing this. When we're in pre-production and our team is smaller, we have other projects that are in production or maybe post-production and there's different people in that. When we're landing a game we have people that are closing, making sure we're able to be certified on platforms, doing all those things you need to do for each of the platforms. These aren't always the same people so it actually helps us be very specialised and be very effective. The other thing is, if we were making one game, when we plan our budgets you invest so much in technology, but we have a few games which are using similar technologies so all of our games are benefiting from this. Brothers in Arms is better because of investment we made in Aliens, and Borderlands benefits from all of that because we're inventing here, and AI there, and graphics, and we licence things to. We started with the base of Unreal Engine 3. The same version that's being used in Gears of War 2. We're able to leverage that technology and put our own on top, and that investment is bigger than what it would have been if it was just one game.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned at UbiDays that with Brothers in Arms you've been able to improve upon the visuals seen in Gears of War. If that's the case, then does Borderlands improve things even further?

RP: Like I said, our technology investment affects all of our games, so that's how that happens right. If I was only doing Brothers in Arms or only doing Borderlands or only doing Aliens I can only spend so much. Now I can take all three of those budgets for technology, add them to together and get something better.

VideoGamer.com: So will Borderlands be better looking than Gears of War 2?

RP: Well, did you see it? It looks beautiful. There's trade-offs. Gears is a beautiful game, great art and some amazing graphics. The gameplay is a certain style of gameplay. Borderlands is an open world that we can explore, so that's something that I can't quite do in Gears. I proceed through Gears regularly and their game is about the action of that moment, that fun, really visceral game that we repeat. Borderlands has some other things that just don't exist without the technology we've created. We have hundreds of thousands of weapons and other equipment, and each one of those things takes some memory and takes system resources. So we had to develop technology that allowed that to efficiently move around and in and out of memory to allow the multiple processors on both the PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 to be able to track and render and deal with all the mathematics behind all this. And that's not uncomplicated technology, that was hard to do. If it was easy to do, that's how all weapons would be made in games. No artists can do what we just did. You'd need every artist in the entire industry to build as many guns as there are in Borderlands and it would take them 10 years. You can add up all of the weapons in every first-person shooter ever released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and Borderlands has more, it has like an order of magnitude more. Humans can't do that so we need software to do this for us. It's pretty neat. You get these weapons and they look crafted. They look great. They feel like some human designed them. It's really wild stuff. The humans designed the software and the thinking behind them, and thought about what each manufacturer's style was going to be and what kind of content they would use in the weapons, and we wrote the software that would fill in the blanks for us.