Q&A with Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software

Gearbox Studios CEO Randy Pitchford talks Borderlands, Aliens, and more.

Be sure to read our hands-on impressions of Borderlands!

GamePro: This RPG-shooter style of play is a pretty popular genre now, with games like Fallout 3, Mass Effect, BioShock...

Randy Pitchford: Most of the games that blend genres come from the role-playing game angle. Games like Mass Effect and Fallout 3 tried to add the shooting on top. But BioShock is the only one that tried to add role-playing elements on top of a core shooter. BioShock is a shooter, but it's got growth to it, and choice. Borderlands has the same lineage, with a different angle. It's a shooter first, with the role-playing layered on top. We're taking our nods from Diablo II and WoW. You level up, use skills trees, find tons of loot, and so on. But we don't have any dialogue trees, so no reading a few paragraphs from an NPC. We want to be action, and we want to be fast.

So we boiled Borderlands down to the most accessible elements. We found three key words that described the core gameplay in Borderlands: Discovery, Growth, and Choice.

GP: Will there be more mission variety beyond "kill 8 enemies" or "collect 5 items" in Borderlands?

RP: There is! We hold your hand at the beginning of the game. We move you from "kill something" to "fix something" and so on. But as you get outside, the world gets much bigger. We see some frustration if players [get to the challenging areas] too soon, so we have to teach people how the game works early on.

GP: Some of the earlier versions of Borderlands put emphasis on the randomized environments, dynamically created environments. Has that feature been shelved?

RP: Yeah, we've definitely gone more WoW in that regard. The randomness of the world design....you could tell it was random [like in Hellgate London]. The random environments didn't work that well. There's still randomization in enemy population, chest contents, rewards, but the world is a crafted world now. It's a richer world, it's believable.

With Diablo III, I think we'll see they'll shift towards crafted environments too. It doesn't matter as much if the corridors are arranged randomly, as long as the loot and skills are compelling. Random levels are easy to make, but tough to make convincing.

Q&A with Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software

GP: What's the level cap for Borderlands? How far can you level up?

RP: It's currently 50. And that's a big experience, you probably won't hit 50 on a single playthrough. There's a "new game plus" mode, where you start the game over. I loved that Mass Effect allowed that, which I thought was a great decision...but I was just reading that Mass Effect 2 won't let you do it! Not enough games allow it.

When you restart the game, you find harder enemies and better loot. We wanted the player character to be persistent whether you are online or offline.

GP: What's unique between the PS3 and Xbox 360 online modes? Their online services are different beasts.

RP: Absolutely, they're very different. We're trying to leverage the expectations for each console's online experience. On the Xbox 360, online play is a very "Live" experience with in-game lobbies, game requests from friends, and so on. On the PS3, we have a little more liberty so we licensed technology from GameSpy to find friends and play online together. With the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC players, we're trying to match player expectations for their online experience.

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