Borderlands Preview

New visuals, same FPS/RPG gameplay.

Several different games popped into my head as I played Borderlands for the first time. The strange yet beautiful landscape of Pandora reminds me of Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland, and the central gameplay contains a similar mix of exploration and bullet-heavy combat. There are also traces of the modern MMORPG – particularly in the “kill X amount of creature Y” quests that pop up from time to time. Then there’s the Diablo II influence, typified by the branching skill trees and by the endless piles of shiny, shiny loot.

You’ve never seen loot like this before, though. For a start, the vast majority of your prizes have triggers, barrels and holes that spit out bullets (or, indeed, some other form of lethal projectile). In case you’d forgotten, this is the game with over 650,000 different weapons, the majority of them being randomly generated. That stat could make a gun-nut stain his Charlton Heston Memorial underpants, but prior to my hands-on time I had concerns about this massive arsenal. Would this gargantuan selection limit the value of each individual gun?

On the basis of what I’ve played so far, it would seem that the answer to this question is both “yes” and “no”. I picked up at least a dozen guns during my recent playtest, and it’s fair to say I only really used four or five of them. However, I certainly wouldn’t describe the ones I didn’t use as worthless. Here’s the way it worked for me: as I roamed the desert plains of Pandora I would pick up new weapons wherever I found them – in chests, in stores or on the bodies of people I’d killed. Much of the time I’d be picking up shooters that were very similar to ones I already owned, but with slightly different stats; perhaps I might have two repeater pistols – one with a higher damage rating, the other with a quicker reload and a bigger clip. Yes, these distinctions are fairly minor, but the choice allows me to fine-tune my approach to combat – and that can only be a good thing. You can carry loads of weapons at once, but it seems that you can only switch between two of them at any given time, so you tend to stick to the ones you like. Later in the demo I got to see some of the stranger boomsticks that the game can generate… but we’ll come back to them in a minute.

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.

There are hundreds of thousands of different weapons

2K’s recent hand-on event was divided into two halves. First I and my fellow hacks were given half an hour at the very start of the campaign, allowing us to get to grips with the basic action and feel of the game; after this we were warped forward in time to a later point in the story, giving us the chance to use some tooled-up level 20 characters. I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I found that both sessions seemed to rocket past. Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess.

Session one began during the early moments of the campaign, just minutes after character selection. For this first test I was playing as Roland – the soldier character who appears to be something of an all-rounder. As you might imagine, the opening scenes are essentially there to ease you into the game and it concepts. You’ll enter the first settlement of the game – a largely deserted shanty town, populated by an amateur medic and a hyper-chatty robotic unicycle – and promptly run into a gang of Mad Max-style bandits. These chaps look pretty menacing, but they don’t put up too much of a fight, leaving you plenty of opportunity to practice your headshot skills. Combat controls are everything you’d expect from a game like this: you can free aim or aim down the sights of your gun using the left trigger, while a quick melee attack comes in handy for anyone who gets too close. Unlike Fallout 3, combat in Borderlands is driven purely by player skill – so if someone’s in your crosshairs when you pull the trigger, they’ll definitely take a bullet; no invisible dice rolls here.