Borderlands Detailed Live from the Take-Two Presser
Highlights:
- Takes place on the planet Pandora.
- "Soldier" and "Hunter" classes.
- Halo-like dune buggies were shown, with two players cooperating to drive around and shoot at enemies.
- Large level bar displayed on the bottom of the screen--like a first person Diablo.
- Characters are persistent. Higher level characters can jump in and out of lower-level games created by friends.
- Over half a million weapons--procedurally generated. A revolver sniper rifle was spawned during the demo that even surprised Pitchford.
- One of the weapons had an electrical effect that exploded on contact. One weapon will be able to melt faces a la Raiders.
- Plenty of gore and limb loss.
- A cavernous mine "dungeon" was shown, with tribes of humanoid enemies to destroy.
- At one point the game shifted into a cutscene as part of the overall story arc.
- A lot of alien wildlife to deal with. A mad cow-like animal was shown.
We'll be getting our hands on the game later today and uploading the video walkthrough, so check back for more on Borderlands.
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Any idea on when it's shipping? This is one of my most desired games, simply because driving around in a buggy (I'm thinking BF2's marine buggy) while leveling alongside friends is going to be great. And I trust Gearbox to do it.
I wonder how often a small dev like Gearbox has deals with so many different publishers (Sega, Ubi, and Take 2...right?)-
Last I heard was late 2009, which at this point still seems a bit optimistic given the scope of the game. We can only hope, but I'll take a more polished product later over a buggy one today.
And is a 150-person dev house now considered "small"? I know it's nothing like the major developers like MS/N/Sony/Capcom etc, but that seems more medium sized to me than really small. -
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