Randy Pitchford on high profile FPSs and fanboys

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.

VideoGamer.com: What happened with Aliens for SEGA? Wasn’t it meant to be here at E3?

RP: They’re still teasing it. I can’t wait to show it. I think it takes great discipline to do what they’re doing.

VideoGamer.com: So it was SEGA’s decision not to show it?

RP: Here’s the thing. I want to show it, everybody wants to see it. They’re going to go make the decision to do that when it’s the best value for what their marketing and promotion strategy is.

VideoGamer.com: It’s got nothing to do with the quality of the game?

RP: No, no, no, no. The game is awesome. I can’t wait to show it.

VideoGamer.com: Maybe Leipzig?

RP: Well, I don’t know. It’s not up to me. I wish it was. Some things, like Borderlands, where we partner with a publisher like 2K, Gearbox is developing this original brand. There’s control there. 2K of course is a brilliant publishing team. They launched BioShock. They’re working really hard to help launch Borderlands. There’s a different kind of strategy involved in communicating about the game. Also different rules. With something like Aliens, Fox owns that and SEGA has to worry about how they market and communicate within Fox’s boundaries. I’m just so outside of the loop on that. I’m just doing my best to make a good game.

VideoGamer.com: For the fans who wanted to see more on the game at this E3, there’s no issue with the game technically or anything?

RP: No, no, the game is in great shape. People are going to freak out when they see it. I can’t wait to show it.

VideoGamer.com: Yeah, it seems as though you’re busting at the seams to get it out there.

RP: Yeah, but it’s fine though, because we’ve got a lot going on. I can’t be in three places at once so I spent this E3 talking about Borderlands, and that’s been really good. I can’t be in all three places at once. So maybe that’s part of it too. I think for right now Borderlands is a really big opportunity for us, because we’re building a world, we’re building a universe, building gameplay. You know there’s a game design here that hasn’t really been done like this before. This is the first game where your character is persistent, ever in the genre, and that’s pretty… A, it’s not easy, but it’s also pretty neat. Like when WoW happens the risk is that I have to shut down my company because that kind of gameplay addicts me so much. I’m not going to do anything else but play World of Warcraft. But you know, I’m able to resist that and direct that drive and motivation towards building something that can do that to me.

VideoGamer.com: How hard is it launching a new IP? Is it the biggest challenge in gaming?

RP: It is a big challenge. Think, what are the new IPs? What’s out there? Tell me some of the other IPs.

VideoGamer.com: Mirror’s Edge.

RP: OK, yeah, that’ll come soon and looks pretty neat. What else is coming out?

VideoGamer.com: It’s difficult.

RP: Yeah, I guess Fracture is a shooter. The trick is you want to make a promise that is exciting. We all as creators want to do things that haven’t been done before, but we also have to be familiar enough so when we hear about it, it’s like “God, I wanted that!”. To me that’s what Borderlands is for us. We love playing the shooters we make and the games like Halo and Half-Life and some things we’ve been involved with. And we love playing these games, but we’ve never had a game where you can actually get better as a character. When I play Halo, Master Chief is the same at the end as he is at the beginning. Some of the other things, like our character getting better, these are things that addict us to stuff like Diablo. How do we apply that to the shooter genre? There have been a few people that have tried to come at it from a role-playing angle and add a shooter on top of it and they haven’t really done that well. We’re shooter guys. We’re coming from a shooter angle and adding a role-playing element to it.

VideoGamer.com: So it’s a role-playing shooter?

RP: Yeah, shooter is the key. Yeah, I think RPS is a good descriptor.

VideoGamer.com: So how long is it going to take to finish development?

RP: We’re coming in 2009. We’re very far along but we have a lot of work to do. But you saw the game, it’s in really good shape. We have to add some more reactions and behaviours to our human characters. We’re also kind of still teasing. The game’s really big. There’s lots of things in the world. I’m really looking forward to some of the next opportunities to really unveil it all. But I think right now it’s a great way to introduce people to what we’re hoping to accomplish and what we’ve already done, what’s strong about it. But yeah, it’ll come in 2009. We’ll probably get more specific about our date when we reach alpha. One thing that’s true about Gearbox is, we’re going to make great games, you know. Some of what we’re doing is inventing and with invention there is a bit of uncertainty, so we do have to adapt a little bit to that. We’re going to fulfil the promise we make and we’re going to meet and exceed expectations if we can. So that makes it always weird for me to talk about dates before we’re sure.

VideoGamer.com: Is this a shooter that’s going to take gamers a long time to complete given that it’s got RPG elements? What kind of hours are we looking at?

RP: It depends. If you want to blast through the quests I think it’ll be about the same… we want it to feel, for people who just want to consume it like they consume shooters, we want it to feel not too short but not too long. For people that really just want to develop characters they can play it over some time.

VideoGamer.com: What’s the sweet spot then?

RP: I mean, I think Call of Duty 4 got really lucky. I think that game was too short, but they got away with it because it’s pretty good. I think 20 hours is too long for a narrative shooter, so for me somewhere around the 10,12,15 hour mark is a sweet spot depending on how varied this experience is. I think though, a lot of quests and a lot of the opportunities in Borderlands can mean you can spend 50 hours in this world – if you want to go off to the side and level up, do the side quests or do this challenge thing over here. There’s a lot of choice here. I don’t know if you played Diablo, but when I played Diablo II I finished the game and I was like level 40 something, and so I took that character and started again – then I was about level 60 something. Then I joined some friends and we did Act III three times in a row because Act III was so good. You know what I mean? Eventually I was like level 99 and I was like “Sweet!”. I think there’s going to be some gamers who want to do that. That’s the kind of gamer I am and I’m going to be doing that in Borderlands.

VideoGamer.com: So you’ll be able to do that in Borderlands? You’ll be able to finish and then take that character and start again?

RP: Your character is persistent. You can be half way through your game and then you convince me to buy it and I’m like level 0, and you say you’ll help me out. You can join my game with me over the internet and we can play together. You’ll have your character with your skills and your level and all of your equipment and you’re going to be a bad ass because you’re half way through, and we’re going to melt through the beginning of the game. I’m going to be like “Oh crap, this guy’s tough!” and you’ll be like “Blam!” and gib that guy to bits. And I’ll be developing stuff and as we play long enough together you’ll find some new things maybe, some better equipment here and there, and you’ll certainly get some experience and develop some skills. That character is yours, so when you go back and continue your game, you’re going to have all that stuff you had when you were playing with me. And the two of us could go together and join and play with her, in her game for a while. You can create new instances and start again. You can create one instance where you’re like half way through the story, one where you’re starting at the beginning and one where you’re at the end, and you can take your character – your character is persistent, very much like Diablo.

VideoGamer.com: So how many players can play at the same time together?

RP: Four on the internet. It’s four-player cooperative. It’s like Diablo (laughs).

VideoGamer.com: Are you going to have any competitive modes?

RP: You know, we’ve thinking about it. We’re not focussing on it right now, but it’s a possibility. I think the best thing people can do for us right now is say, “we love your promise. Get that done and then we’ll tell you what to do next”. Once we launch this thing, if the world says “we want that”, then likely we’re going to react, and if the world says “give us more quests!” or if the world says “give us more areas to explore!” or if the world says “give us the ability to fight with our friends”, I don’t know what the next step is, but if we try and put all that in the game you’ll never get to play the game – it’ll be 2010 or something. We’ve built this platform and we want to present it, and then we want to react and keep it alive, a lot like how games with worlds are maintained. We want to listen to what’s out there. We want to see ourselves, what do we want? What do gamers want to play? At the end of the day my job is to entertain you (laughs). You know what I mean? I want to reach as many people as possible and I want people to be gratified by what we give them. So I think the best thing people can do when they think about the possibilities of Borderlands is say: “Good promise, like what you’ve done there. Get it done and we’ll tell you what to do next.”

VideoGamer.com: Is this your baby? Did the idea come from your brain?

RP: Parts of it. The idea of mixing these genres together is something Brian and Mark Tardif and I have been talking about since we founded the company. I think the story, we all loved Fire Fly and I think that’s an influence. Here’s the thing, there’s so many talented people, once you commit to a mission, these guys created all these gun manufacturers, they made logos and back stories, and figured out where this company started making pharmaceuticals. It affects their designs, there and their art direction. I didn’t come up with all of that. I don’t, I have an interesting seed in this and I can do a lot to be a catalyst for things and I can sometimes help hone that big idea and I can put things in motion that can allow all the talented people to help bring it to life together. Honestly I don’t deserve half the attention I get. I’d be nothing without these guys back home. That’s my seat and that’s cool and I’ll do my job, but these guys back at Gearbox. We’ve got 200 people and they’re like, these are some of the most talented artists, designers and programmers that I’ve ever known, and I’ve been in the business for a long time. Some of the guys have been around the block and I’ve been working with forever. They’re never wrong and they’ve seen it all. Then you get these other guys and them come in and they’re fresh and they’re new and they’ve got all the energy in the world that they’re just going to run off in these interesting directions that are super super risky, and half the time they fall on their face. We’re like, “Dude that is awesome and we never would have done that because that’s crazy, but look what you just did”, and it works and you find a way to get it in there. It’s just really cool and a lot of folks are, there are a lot of folks in the industry that are in that spot where they’re able to kind of explore. They have some resources and they have some talent and they’re able to kind of do it. Too much of the industry is recycling stuff and doing exactly what you’d expect, but there are folks out there that are inventing and building brands and making new things happen, and I think that’s a really fun place to be.

VideoGamer.com: What do you make of trophies on PS3?

RP: That’s pretty interesting. I want to play with it first. I think it’s a cool thing. I’m addicted to achievement points on the Xbox 360 so I understand a part of what that’s about. I actually have over 71,000 gamer points.

VideoGamer.com: Wow. How do you find the time?

RP: It’s all I do. It’s my life. I make ’em and I play ’em. That’s my entire life.

VideoGamer.com: Did you play Avatar?

RP: Yeah I did (laughs). The five minute thousand. That’s part of it. That helped me. Of course I did. If you’re an achievement hunter you definitely played that game. I play just about every game on the platform and I like PS3 stuff too, so I hope that works correctly to help create some other incentives to explore games and to play more games on the PS3, because I love the PlayStation 3 platform. But I’m curious about the implementation of it. We’re just starting to explore what they’re offering there.

VideoGamer.com: So you’re not under any obligation to support it?

RP: We will support it because we think it’s cool and we think what Sony’s doing is cool. We want to be part of that. But there’s not like a requirement or anything. They are pretty cool about it. I’d like to see what happens, but we haven’t designed them yet or figured out what they’re going to be.

VideoGamer.com: What about Home?

RP: That’s neat. I want to play with it. It’s kind of weird. I don’t understand why I don’t have it yet (laughs). Right? Shouldn’t we have had it already? When did we first hear about it? A year and a half ago? What’s the deal? I think they’re trying to bite off a lot there and make it really really complicated and I agree with some of the intent behind it, but we need a very simple, quick way to do what they’re offering.

VideoGamer.com: I guess that’s one of the beauties of Xbox LIVE?

RP: Yeah, it’s super accessible and fast to get to where you want to go. I have all the platforms. I love them all for different reasons. At the end of the day it’s about the games. For Metal Gear Solid 4 I’m a frickin’ PlayStation fan. When Gears 2 comes I’m an Xbox fan. I know there are some players who can’t afford all the consoles, so that’s one of the reasons why I’m a multi-platform developer, because my goal is to entertain you. If you can’t play my game because I decide I’m going to be a fanboy for one console or the other I’m only really hurting myself. I’m just locking the door to a whole bunch of people who can’t afford them. I think we’re very fortunate, those of us in the industry, that have access to all these tools and all this great entertainment, but most of the world doesn’t have all the consoles. I choose not to pick sides. I choose to enjoy it all, to help my stuff exist on it all, as best as I can.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time. Much appreciated.

Borlerlands is due out on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2009.