EL33TONLINE: Borderlands
Monday 12 Oct 2009
The biggest surprise of rAge 2009 for me was Borderlands. DJ Hero, Guitar Hero 5, Uncharted 2, Forza Motorsport 3, Brutal Legend - those were on my radar and on my “hope to buy” list. But Borderlands, being a first-person game (not my favourite genre), an RPG with MMO leanings (definitely not my favourite genre), wasn’t even on my map. 2K and Gearbox, please forgive me my ignorance - it’s not easy to keep track of the hundreds of games that come out every year, and even more difficult to choose which ones to pay attention to.
Fortunately Megarom, 2K’s South African distributor, had a four-player LAN set up to try the game out on, and I managed to get a go at it. If I had played singleplayer for a few minutes, or even if I had watched one of the excellent demo’s by 2K’s David Halse, I would probably have thought “pretty cool,” but I don’t think I would have been swayed to seriously consider buying it. But that would have been my loss. Now I’m trying to tell people about it so that I have a crowd to play co-op with.
Borderlands is touted as a first person RPG shooter. It’s a bit like Diablo, it’s a bit like World of Warcraft, it’s a bit like Fallout. But it’s really its own beast - it doesn’t really feel like any of those. To begin with you choose a character class - you can be a soldier (Roland), a berserker (Brick), a hunter (Mordecai) or a siren (Lilith). In your group of 4 players (online or on a local network), it’s probably best to have some sort of balance, but the game doesn’t force players to choose any particular class. Each character class has a tech tree of skills that they can begin to acquire once they reach level 5. Unfortunately we could only play to the first boss (9 Toes) so I didn’t get to assign any skill points and try my berserker rage.
To begin with you find yourself in what looks like an old Western town, but it’s clear that you’re some time in the future. In the future old Western towns will have vending machines that sell guns. There’s a doctor in the town that gives you some quests to do. Anyone in the group can accept the quest and everyone’s map is updated with the quest location and your hud is updated with the goals. My first surprise was that I felt like I actually knew what I was supposed to be doing. This is an odd experience for me in a multiplayer, team-based game. The current quest is displayed on the screen, the waypoint is displayed as a big diamond on your compass, and your co-players show as triangles on the compass too, so it’s clear where everything and everyone is. If you hold tab down you can see the map, but for the most part I found it unnecessary.
The first quest is to shoot some skags. Get yourself a gun and go hang out by the gate of the town, and an R2D2-like little robot called Claptrap comes to open the gate for you by interfacing with an electronic console. The skags are easy - just level 1 or 2. When you kill them they drop loot, like money, ammo or health. The game scales the difficulty of the creeps that spawn based on the number of players in the game, and it scales the quality of loot drops based on their level. There are also caches of guns and things hidden around the levels. The gun drops are random - you might get a brilliant gun or a rubbish one. Supposedly there are millions of different guns - but really this just means that guns are made up of parts and the parts can be combined in millions of ways. You can’t do the gun-building yourself (other than to add a bigger ammo cartridge), so the only way to get a better gun is to find one. If you get really lucky you’ll find a super-rare gun - it all depends how the game feels.
I’m sure you would be forgiven for not realising that Borderlands is an RPG when you see the game in passing. There are no boring conversation-trees to read, no inventory screen to allocate rings on to each finger, no serious save-the-world plot. When you look at an item such as a gun its attributes are shown in a little pop-up next to it, and pressing and holding E takes the gun and equips in one go. The plot does have something to do with trying to find an awesome treasure. Of course, with the planet being called Pandora it’s unlikely the treasure will be as good as they say. The RPG elements show up in the way you gain experience for kills (this is shared with all other players even if you got the last hit, thank goodness), in the way you get better equipment, and in the way you gain new skills as you level your character up. As you shoot enemies you can see the amount of damage you’re doing appearing above the enemy, and as you play you will become a more potent bounty hunter able to face up to tougher enemies - thus opening new areas to explore and new loot to find.
Borderlands doesn’t take itself too seriously. The art-style is a little bit cartoony and the world is a little bit deranged as you’d expect borderlands to be. Everything is over-the-top, from the exploding barrels that spew acid or fire to the psycho mutant midgets to the crazy quest givers and bosses. This is wonderful. Other than a few outliers (Paper Mario for example), RPG’s are the most annoyingly self-important games in all of video-gamedom. Borderlands feels like a game where crazy random stuff is going to happen that will be laughed about over campfires for years to come. It’s also a game that needs to be played to be appreciated - in the half an hour we had with it I went from not knowing too much about it other than the marketing bullet points to really looking forward to its release. I have a feeling this will be the surprise of the year as people try it out and pass on the fun by word of mouth.
Head over to our previous coverage for more information about Borderlands, including screenshots, trailers and an interview with 2K Games’ Dave Halse.
Contributor: Peter
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