Borderlands Interview

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford continues doing the rounds for interviews, this time answering questions from users via Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

John_Arr: Does he think grimy, brown, ‘˜realistic’ style visuals still hold value, or should everyone be experimenting?

Yeah, everything holds value, but one of the things I hope is that if Borderlands is a success it makes it easier for more of us to take risks. The reason why we’re afraid to is because it makes it more difficult to predict the results and we have to be able to make more than we spend or we stop getting the chance to do so. But the success of Borderlands will hopefully inspire more people to think (yeah you can do that and be rewarded.)

And we’re really confident too because we have 2K as the publisher, and 2k did Bioshock. That was a bit risk, both the art style I mean, art deco. Art deco? Is that gonna sell? And then blending genres, but wow they were really repaid for that risk, so that worked out. I loved buying Bioshock, I then when I was repaid in my experience of it I’m happy to buy more. I think it would be nice to have some of our best creatives in this industry be able to be free, but at the same time, we all have varied tastes. There are certain things that are supposed to be realistic. When we do Brothers in Arms we feel like we have an obligation to treat that subject with respect, y’know? The less you have to root your game in history, the easier it is to get away with that. We’re okay with Team Fortress 2, for example, but part of the reason we like Brothers in Arms is because it puts you in the boots of a soldier and makes you feel like you’re one of the band of brothers. If you take the realism out of that, then what are you doin’?

[I ask if realistic graphics necessarily involve the degree of desaturation we see so much of lately, or if it’s purely a technical issue].

There’s some other things you can do there, but I think the language works, you know? When you played Modern Warfare 1 and you did the mission with the spectra gunship, if it wasn’t rendered like that, and wasn’t like the Youtube video we saw from the gunsight view with the infrared vision with the terrorist getting gibbed, and Infinity Ward let us play that. If it wasn’t rendered like that, it wouldn’t have worked. Sometimes the way we render a scene, it’s actually okay to follow the convention that you’re trying to evoke. If you deviate from that, you do yourself a disservice. However, within the spectrum of war as a presentation, there’s a lot of treatments, and I do think the pallete’s gotten a little narrower than it should be allowed to get. It’ll be interesting to see what we do in the future there when it’s time for us to talk about it.