The Mission: It's the last day of E3, and a tired team of Gearbox Software employees are willing to sit down for an open interview. Your stomach is growling, and your schedule is tight, but there will be lunch involved, and the developer's upcoming post-apocalyptic co-op shooter Borderlands (PC, 360, PS3) was easily one of the most interesting titles shown at the expo.

The Reward: More information on Borderlands, which takes the best of Diablo--procedurally generated loot and instances, for small group online cooperation--and combines it with gory shooter gameplay and Halo-esque vehicles. And a great burrito.

The Cast: Gearbox president Randy Pitchford, and executive producer Marc Tardif.

Shack: So how long have you guys been working on Borderlands?

Marc Tardif: Two years? Two years.

Randy Pitchford: We did concept development probably March-April, maybe April-May of 2005.

Marc Tardif: Concept development started, and then a really, really small team of a couple engineers and a couple artists just to get it up and running and try to make a prototype.

Shack: And what was the original concept?

Randy Pitchford: It's what you see man. Halo and Diablo put together. We've been wanting to make that game since Quake/Doom.

Shack: What did you guys think of something like Hellgate: London?

Randy Pitchford: I like what they were trying to do.

Marc Tardif: I would love to have played that game had they been given another eight months to a year [of development time].

Randy Pitchford: If they had the [chance] to do it the way it needed to be done, that would have been great.

Marc Tardif: I think they came at it from a different angle though. We're coming from a first person shooter angle and adding RPG, they came from an RPG angle and were trying to make it first person.

Randy Pitchford: So there's a little bit of a difference there in how it feels I guess, how it looks, and how it's presented.

Shack: So I assume the basic level setup in Borderlands is similar to Diablo? You buy things in towns, take quests, then go out and fight?

Randy Pitchford: Similar. One thing that's different I'd say is that, in Diablo, there's a big difference between an area where combat can happen, and an area where it's totally safe. [In Borderlands], it's just a world. And I don't know if we've decided that we're going to create some havoc in the towns, but we could if we wanted to.

Shack: But the focus is on grabbing quests and running missions.

Randy Pitchford: Yeah, we call them settlements, because that's what they are, and that's where you get quests, buy and sell stuff, store your loot, mess with your skills, and kind of maintain your character, and figure out what you're going to do next.

Marc Tardif: It's very mission driven. You meet people throughout the world. Those guys will have things for you to do. There's also the high level mission objective, but then there's also kind of the random side missions that you can go on, as well as what we call challenges. So there's actually people in the world that basically say hey, I bet you can't do this. And if you do it, they reward you with something. And those aren't like required to finish the game, they're just added things that you can do on top.

Randy Pitchford: If we think of say like Diablo--Diablo was such that you push out into the world, and then each layer of the world was randomly assembled, and then you'd have to uncover all the black, so to speak. But which layer was next was crafted. That's how Diablo was constructed.

Whereas if you pick up say World of Warcraft, the whole world was crafted, and you can go wherever you want--but if you go somewhere that you're not ready to face yet, you're not going to last too long. If you choose to take quests, the adventure unfolds along those lines. If you choose to just wander.. I think Borderlands is actually arranged more like World of Warcraft, where you can just choose to go that way--maybe you didn't take a quest, or maybe there is no quest--but you're just kind of like, hunting around. But I don't want to mislead people, and I don't want to talk about World of Warcraft too much, because [Borderlands] is a shooter.

Shack: Was there ever a point in the concept stage where Borderlands was an MMO?

Randy Pitchford: No.

Shack: Would you guys ever like to take a stab at an MMO?

Randy Pitchford: No. Not any time soon.

Shack: Are you MMO fans?

Randy Pitchford: Yeah, but the thing is, what's more important is the shooter experience. What we're trying to do is add a persistent character to a shooter experience. It actually breaks down if there are a hundred people side by side. You can't actually socially interact. And have you ever been on a 40 person raid? When you do that in WoW, it's not as social of a game. I mean there's social interaction there, but the group strategy has to rule or you break down the entire system. So really you're just a rank in the line.

Whereas when you're playing four player co-op in a shooter on the console, anyone at any moment could become the leader for what you accomplish right there. And then when you branch off and do your own thing for a couple minutes, it doesn't break down the entire team. In WoW, when you're in a five person dungeon, one player leaves and you're screwed.

Turn the page for more.