Borderlands Interview with Gearbox’s Mikey Neumann
Posted September 9, 2009, by Chris C. Comments ( 8 )
During this year’s PAX, Borderlands was widely considered by many as game of the show. The lines to play it snaked around multiple walls, and the wait times often teetered on a cool 3 hours. The 2K exhibitors were swarmed with ravenous compliments and numerous begged replays. Lucky for us, we had a chance to chat about the game with Mikey Neumann, Gearbox Software’s creative director. (Also, after the interview, Mikey commented on how I looked just like Colin Farrell. Beats being compared to Steve Buscemi!)
GC: So you’ve been working on Borderlands, have you been working on cross development for the PC, Xbox and PS3?
MN: Yep, all three.
GC: Okay, so Game Central is a PC-centered site, and we were wondering what the main differences are, if any, between the PC version and the console counterparts?
MN: It depends on what hardware you’re running, for the most part the PC will look about the same, but if you have a pretty killer rig, you can crank up the settings to make it look really, really awesome
GC: I’m kind of a story guy myself, and I was talking with Chet at Valve yesterday about Left 4 Dead and how story in games seems to be an afterthought, so with Borderlands, is this the case? Was there an active effort to develop the story separate from the game play?
MN: It’s definitely different than out previous efforts; not sure if you’ve played our Brothers in Arms games, in which I was actually the writer and cinematic director on three of those…
GC: I did. Good work.
MN: Thank you; that was definitely a different monster, like we really wanted to tell a specific story. (With) Borderlands, I think it’s more about the stories you tell about your experience. It’s a cop-out answer, but it’s about the smaller stories as well: we have a lot of side quests where like, a specific type of person will tell you and give you quests relevant to them. Like TK Baja: this guy’s had a pretty rough life, a Skag actually ate his wife, his leg, and his eyeballs.
GC: I hate it when that happens.
MN: Yeah, so he’s blind, he just sits in a chair all day, and all his quests are like: just go murder the crap out of every Skag you can find. There’s actually a boss quest he gives you to go find his leg from the Skag that ate it.
GC: Wow. Okay, so when you say “Skag,” is this like the native alien that inhabitants the planet?
MN: Yeah, a Skag is sort of like a dog-like creature that roams around on Pandora (the game word), they’re not overly dangerous if you just kinda leave them alone and walk around, but there are a lot of missions to kill them, and there are some bigger ones that will definitely come after you.
GC: Is this more of a single player experience? Or when you guys were developing, was there an active effort to make it co-op and multiplayer friendly?
MN: Yeah it was definitely coop from, like, build 1. Like when it was just gray with sticks running around. Like 4 sticks right? That was definitely where we wanted to focus the game; you can play it with your friends, it’s a game you can play split-screen, you can do whatever you want to do. That’s not to say that the single player got neglected- it is a really strong single player game. And we balanced everything to anywhere from 1 to 4 players, and we did a lot of focus testing. This is new with this game at Gearbox. We have an internal focus team that pulls people in from colleges and department stores; wherever we can find them… the thing about gamers is they’ll pretty much tell you what sucks. They’re not gonna bullshit you. They’ll just tell you straight up, “This is bad, and this is bad.” But we’re tweaking it over time to make it better.
GC: How many focus group tests has it gone through? A lot of people have said, “Well, focus groups are great. But if you overuse them, you have so many opinions coming into one area that it’s sort of hard because how do you tweak and satisfy everybody’s needs while still maintaining your original vision?”
MN: Definitely hundreds and hundreds of people (were used). And we trend data; you look at the overall score. We started focus testing up until now, so about a year. And the overall score of everything has gone up steadily, which is definitely showing us that we’re making people happy… a good example was we knew that our jumping wasn’t working, like about 6 or 7 months ago, it didn’t quite feel right and we really didn’t know how to explain it.
GC: Like jumping in general?
MN: Yeah- (it felt) floaty or something. I guess it’s hard to put into words. We focus tested it, and people were like, “I love this game! But your jumping sucks.” And everybody kept saying, “Your jumping sucks!” and we finally said, “Okay, guys, you’re right: our jumping sucks.” That’s not something we can just set aside… we actively worked on that until it was something we were comfortable with, it went back into focus testing, and it never came up again. And I think it’s examples like that where you normally just shove it aside and not attack (the issue) right away, but for us it became really relevant and helped us make the game more fun overall.
GC: So what did you actually do to fix that? To make it so that the jumping wasn’t a problem?
MN: Well, you adjust the gravity, the height, the speed. It’s all subtle stuff. The thing is, (it’s even in) movement- you put a millisecond lag on the right (analog) stick or something and your aim is just off, people will say your aim sucks, but they won’t be able to tell you why… and then you dig in and figure why it sucks in any case like that.
GC: So, this is gonna be a little bit of a loaded question, so bare with me-
MN: A loaded question? (Laughs) Okay.
GC: Is there any cross-play between PC and console?
MN: Noooo.
GC: Because back in the day, Shadow Run did it for a little while, when Games for Windows live was still applicable.
MN: Right, right.
GC: No plans to do that at all?
MN: Nahhh, hopefully we’ll sell so many on each console and PC that it won’t matter.
GC: Yeah, I had to ask, but I was hoping the answer would be no. So what are the main differences between co-op and single player? Did you design all the quests differently around co-op and single player?
NM: Everything’s the same; all the quests are the same, all the source stuff is the same. We do level up the creatures with more health and stuff and we have more creatures when you do play coop. So if you have 1, or 2, or 3, or 4 we actually balance the game actively at that time. So if you’re playing 2 people, and a third one comes in, a little message comes in and says, “The creatures of Pandora have grown stronger,” and it’s automatically balanced. If there’s 4 people, it rebalances again, on the fly, all the time. You can drop in, drop out. If you have a single player character, and you get all the way to level 10, start playing with your friends, that character goes everywhere you go.
GC: So I hate to keep using Valve, but it’s not like Left 4 Dead where you have 2 people drop out and 2 AI characters show up to take their place?
MN: No, (in Borderland’s case) they’re gone.
GC: So what are you guys looking at for a release date right now?
MN: October 20th.
GC: Is that cross-platform? For everything?
MN: Yeah- same launch.
GC: Are you doing anything with Steam, or is it boxed copies only?
MN: We’re trying to figure that out right now, but I can’t talk about it since we haven’t announced anything. But we are actively pursuing it.
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