Prologue: Borderlands
One of the most impressive titles on display at Gamescom for OneLastContinue was Borderlands which is coming from 2K Games and Gearbox Software this October 23rd. Gearbox invited Team OLC to take a look at the latest build at the event and we weren’t disappointed.
Borderlands is what Gearbox itself calls a ‘first-person-shooter-role-playing-game’ and takes place on the distant world of Pandora. Sound familiar? That’s because the name of the planet in the upcoming James Cameron film Avatar has the same name; but that’s where the similarities between the two end. Where Avatar’s Pandora is a lush, vivid landscape with strange, wonderful and mostly dangerous lifeforms; Pandora in Borderlands is an arid, dry wasteland with strange, wonderful and mostly dangerous lifeforms such as the doglike Skags.
The core gameplay may be that of a first person shooter but like any good RPG you constantly gain experience each time you kill an enemy or complete a mission objective. Upon receiving enough of these points you then gain access to new skills, or abilities as it were via the skill tree which allows you to upgrade yourself when possible. Each of the principal characters have access to their own unique skill trees and abilities so teamwork, as they say, is essential. As these characters level up with the experience gained by wasteland wholesale murder, you can increase basic stats for them such as HP, accuracy and stamina. It looks quite robust and dare we say it – grindy. Think World of Warcraft style leveling up, questing and raid type scenarios. Then once you have that firmly in mind add in some Fallout 3. Add a dash of uniqueness and you get the general idea of Borderlands. Of course with four characters it’s probably best not to play alone…
If you’re playing with others in the co-op mode then logically you’ll take different paths in order to gather the widest range of skills possible. What the team at Gearbox guys were able to show us involved a good twenty minutes worth of co-op gameplay, something which they told me doesn’t differ much from single player since the game features optional jump in co-op. And not just online co-op either, unlike a lot of games these days Borderlands will also feature split screen local co-op, but whether that’ll be up to four players we don’t yet know but we can live in hope.
Once we get a further and final look at the game pre-release we can formulate our thoughts a bit more cohesively, but right now our hopes are high.
Borderlands launches on October 20, 2009 in North America, October 23, 2009 internationally for PlayStaion 3, Xbox 360 and PC. Whilst you’re waiting why not check out the lovely embedded, and quite amusing, “behind the scenes” video for the game above. You’ll like it.
