Borderlands Interviews

Gearbox president Randy Pitchford has been busy answering questions about Borderlands lately, with two more article-style interviews popping up yesterday.

The first is at IncGamers:

What do you say to anybody that says (Well look, I’ve got Fallout 3, why the hell should I buy Borderlands?)

That’s like saying (Hey, I saw Star Wars, why should I ever see science fiction ever again?) I think if you’ve got Fallout 3, you should absolutely check out Borderlands. If you liked that… I mean, they came from the role-playing vector, and they started to add shooting on top, and we’re clearly coming from the shooting vector and we’re starting to add role-playing. What that means is that the shooting is really good, the guns feel good, and then you’ll also notice the role-playing parts we did include are things like lots of loot. Tons of loot. And levelling up, and getting more powerful, and developing skills, but there’s also some role-playing things we don’t have. You’re not going to go to an NPC and get in a dialogue tree, you’re not going to get the three paragraphs of text. We don’t have any of that because it’s about action, it’s about fast-paced fun.

While the other is at The Game Reviews:

“No one’s really done it well in a first-person shooter before, so that was our challenge, and that’s our mission,” Gearbox Software President Randy Pitchford said.

This mission was undertaken for a love of the classic Diablo game play loop – kill stuff, get loot, kill stuff better. That love means that “you’ll definitely see a lot of influences in Borderlands from that kind of gameplay,” as Pitchord explained.

“I and many people at Gearbox have loved that loop and been addicted to it. There’s been a lot of folks that have done it, and even done it well – Blizzard of course is at the peak,” Pitchford stated. “I think my first experience with that was Hack, Nethack. I put thousands of hours in Nethack.”