Borderlands Interview

Destructoid recently caught up with Gearbox president Randy Pitchford and grilled him for more information about their “role-playing shooter”, Borderlands.

In the game you can develop your own weapons, correct? How does that work — is it randomly generated weapons?

Yeah, so I don’t know if you’ve ever played Diablo or World of Warcraft?

Of course, yeah.

There’s a lot of weapons. So it’s like that, except this is a first-person shooter, so your weapons are guns — mostly.

In World of Warcraft there were a lot of cases where it was like (Okay, here’s a sword and it’s called this and it’s got these stats.” And then “here’s another sword and it’s called something else, and it’s got these stats … but it’s got the same picture.) We wanted to make sure that if there was a unique-named gun, it also had a unique look to it that matches what the intent of the weapon is.

For example, if you find a gun where the stats say it’s more accurate, when you look at the gun you’ll see that it has a longer barrel or something. When you get a gun that can hold more ammunition in its magazine, when you look at the gun you’re like, (Yeah, that’s got a long magazine.) Or, (Oh, it’s got a drum on it. That’s got a lot of rounds.) It actually looks like what it’s supposed to be. Or, (This gun has an electrical effect that will shock people and [it] shoots lightning rounds,) and you’ll see blue, kind of, energy emanating through components of the weapons.