Borderlands

Z

ZombieSupaStar

First time out of the vault
Probably my most hyped game this fall, although I fear it will be devoured by Modern War 2, and Left 4 Dead 2 hype.


Gearbox made some good half life 1 side games, so I have hope the gun play in this "shooter rpg" is fun, basically its like "Diablo 2 with guns" which seems like a lot better hybrid genre than "Oblivion with guns" did.




giant bomb recently did an interview and im pretty stoked!

http://www.giantbomb.com/news/we-played-borderlands/1590/
8-)

I did like the dig at the "auto leveling content" concept. I hate that stuff also, D&D or not...

and also a rockpapershotgun interview

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/28/hands-on-borderlands/

It’s like Fallout 3. No, wait, it’s like Hellgate. No, wait, it’s like Doom.

Well… it has some of the core values of all of those, but a very different implementation. It’s an RPG-FPS, fundamentally. But unlike Fallout 3 and Mass Effect and Hellgate, this isn’t an FPS-like targeting reticule built awkwardly on top of dice-rolls and statistics. It’s statistics and dice-rolls built on top of a first-person shooter. That simple inversion is key to why Borderlands works – this is an action game first and foremost. You won’t find yourself lost eight phrases deep in a dialogue tree. You won’t find a precisely-targeted headshot failing to hit because of some invisible maths, and you won’t find that aiming somewhere within a 20-foot radius of someone automagically punches a bullet through their chest. You will find that hiding behind a rock or running away stops you from getting shot. As does shooting first, and accurately.

The RPG stuff comes as a result of playing the FPS stuff well – you take out the various homicidal men, mutants and mutant-men efficiently, you earn yer XP and your loot drops. It sounds phenomenally simple, and it is. It’s just that no-one’s done it right before. Well, there’s Deus Ex and System Shock 2, but this is scarcely attempting to be those. No moral deliberation, philosophical pondering or literary references here. This is about the joy of meatheadery.
Click to expand...
 
It looked nice, but I don't like how they decided to change the artstyle to that weird kinda cartoony style.
 
The Russian Rainbow said:
It looked nice, but I don't like how they decided to change the artstyle to that weird kinda cartoony style.
Click to expand...

eh I think it looks better, it looked a bit drab before in the sea of mass effects, gears of war, and what you we have nowadays. It might age better also this way, my personal opinion is that zelda wind wakers art style still looks great even though its so old now, in fact I think it looks better than the newer twilight princess game, in a different way its also how WoW can still look good when it has no business to nowadays.
 
Looking forward to it (esp. with co-op).

And I really dig the change of graphics-style.

what does art-style have to do with perspective?
 
Dreadwolf said:
Looking forward to it (esp. with co-op).

And I really dig the change of graphics-style.

what does art-style have to do with perspective?
Click to expand...

Nothing, really.

Cel-shaded graphics work just fine in an FPS, take XIII for example. Gameplay was kind of bad, but it was a damn good looking game for its time and had a lot of personality.
 
ZombieSupaStar said:
eh I think it looks better, it looked a bit drab before in the sea of mass effects, gears of war, and what you we have nowadays. It might age better also this way, my personal opinion is that zelda wind wakers art style still looks great even though its so old now, in fact I think it looks better than the newer twilight princess game, in a different way its also how WoW can still look good when it has no business to nowadays.
Click to expand...
I have to say that I like it better as well and the cell shading style looks more like Rogue Galaxy than the visual abomination of Wind Waker (pumpkin heads and cone-shaped waves were pretty bad). I like the general style, though I'd like to see it in higher resolution as I think it will have some of the same weirdness that Rogue Galaxy had due to the black borders around enemies (not necessarily good or bad, it helps to make things pop but also looks unattractive to some folks).

I like a lot of what he has to say and the AI generated items sounds interesting, I don't think that it's anything all that new given that Diablo II did the same thing but with less variation. I liked his jab at level scaling and the way he described it sounds like what Diablo II did (from what I felt playing the game), so it should work well. I'd have to look at the dueling to see if it works out well, I can see restricting the players to a magical bubble giving a disadvantage to sniper-centric characters. The Thunderdome arenas in town could be cool if done right. What interests me most though is how they are going to combine RPG elements with the shooter elements in terms of control and such. I'm also interested in the AI, I'm hoping that it will have better AI that flanks and such rather than just the bull rush AI ala Fallout 3. All in all it sounds like it could be very interesting and fun if it's done right, I'll have to keep an eye on it.

One thing I hope that they learned from Diablo II was that limited inventory space is damaging to the game because it slows it down by forcing the player to go to town for the sake of dumping loot rather than a real need to visit town for quests, repairs (not that durability really added anything to D2 either...), restocking, or upgrading. EDIT: There are other solutions depending on how they deal with loot, town, buying and selling, repairs, upgrades, ect. but if it's like D2 and most of it's clones, limited inventory space just slows down the game.
 
That GearBoxBuilder sounds like a sweet idea (the AI designing all the weapons).
Looks cool. I like cell-shading as well.
 
combat doesn't seem very interesting as seen in the vid though. sure hope it does stuff like localised damage well...
 
ZombieSupaStar said:
Probably my most hyped game this fall, although I fear it will be devoured by Modern War 2, and Left 4 Dead 2 hype.


Gearbox made some good half life 1 side games, so I have hope the gun play in this "shooter rpg" is fun, basically its like "Diablo 2 with guns" which seems like a lot better hybrid genre than "Oblivion with guns" did.




giant bomb recently did an interview and im pretty stoked!

http://www.giantbomb.com/news/we-played-borderlands/1590/
8-)

I did like the dig at the "auto leveling content" concept. I hate that stuff also, D&D or not...

and also a rockpapershotgun interview

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/28/hands-on-borderlands/

It’s like Fallout 3. No, wait, it’s like Hellgate. No, wait, it’s like Doom.

Well… it has some of the core values of all of those, but a very different implementation. It’s an RPG-FPS, fundamentally. But unlike Fallout 3 and Mass Effect and Hellgate, this isn’t an FPS-like targeting reticule built awkwardly on top of dice-rolls and statistics. It’s statistics and dice-rolls built on top of a first-person shooter. That simple inversion is key to why Borderlands works – this is an action game first and foremost. You won’t find yourself lost eight phrases deep in a dialogue tree. You won’t find a precisely-targeted headshot failing to hit because of some invisible maths, and you won’t find that aiming somewhere within a 20-foot radius of someone automagically punches a bullet through their chest. You will find that hiding behind a rock or running away stops you from getting shot. As does shooting first, and accurately.

The RPG stuff comes as a result of playing the FPS stuff well – you take out the various homicidal men, mutants and mutant-men efficiently, you earn yer XP and your loot drops. It sounds phenomenally simple, and it is. It’s just that no-one’s done it right before. Well, there’s Deus Ex and System Shock 2, but this is scarcely attempting to be those. No moral deliberation, philosophical pondering or literary references here. This is about the joy of meatheadery.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...


Wait you tell me why I would like to play a rpg at all then?

I mean sure, Diablo did it but even it seems to have had more RP elements than the game you are talking about.


edit: It actually looked quite cool, a bit like XIII like someone said and I liked that game!
 
I've been keeping an eye on it for awhile. To be completely honest, I preferred the old style better. It just seemed more serious, although it wasn't nearly as pretty looking. Still, the game has a lot of potential.
 
SuAside said:
combat doesn't seem very interesting as seen in the vid though. sure hope it does stuff like localised damage well...
Click to expand...
A buddy of mine commented that the combat looked slow and I'd tend to agree. Also I it when games don't have localized damage or do it poorly (CS struggled with this off and on a lot, at one point the bottom half of the head was part of the body hitbox). I prefer that games push as far to the top of the skill spectrum as possible rather than doddle around the middle.
 
UncannyGarlic said:
I have to say that I like it better as well and the cell shading style looks more like Rogue Galaxy than the visual abomination of Wind Waker (pumpkin heads and cone-shaped waves were pretty bad). I like the general style, though I'd like to see it in higher resolution as I think it will have some of the same weirdness that Rogue Galaxy had due to the black borders around enemies (not necessarily good or bad, it helps to make things pop but also looks unattractive to some folks).
Click to expand...

This is old, but you have horrible taste, Wind Waker was easily one of the best looking games of the last console generation, and it did something that Borderlands is doing the entire opposite of, it didn't have those black outlines, the art design was fantastic, the animation was incredibly fluid and still rivals current gen releases, and the effects were incredibly stylized in a cohesive world where everything worked together and never clashed.

Calling it an "abomination" is short of having no idea what a comprehensive art style is, the game was nearly perfect in that regard since it was unified and complex without condescending to a generic pastiche of unfortunate humdrum design decisions.

What's funny is that was the issue with Rogue Galaxy, it didn't have any of Wind Waker's cohesion, it adopted the cell shaded style in order to stand out in the market, but in the end the art style was typical Japanese tripe that wasn't in any way unique, it's not just having cell shading, but it's utilizing it well and adapting to the format in order to make sure that it performs its function correctly. Unfortunately, too many people decide that it's simply a filter to place over graphics.

Rogue Galaxy did it wrong, XIII did it wrong, Prince of Persia did it wrong, No More Heroes did it wrong (to my greatest disappointment).
But on the other side of the fence, Wind Waker did it right, Killer7 did it right, Mad World did it right, Okama did it right, Viewtiful Joe did it right.

The issue is that there are a lot of games that do it right, that manage to place a unique art style on top of cell shading (cell shading is not an art style, let's make that clear, it's simply a method of producing graphics), but there always seems to be the little cluster of developers who just don't get it.

Borderlands is going in the wrong direction, the character art is abysmal, only a few of the enemies are interesting at all, and the environments for the most part are characterless garbage from what I've seen. I really hope the finally product turns out differently.

EDIT: Aside from that the concept is intriguing and it hopefully turns out better than Hellgate: London.
 
Eyenixon said:
Rogue Galaxy did it wrong, XIII did it wrong, Prince of Persia did it wrong, No More Heroes did it wrong (to my greatest disappointment).
But on the other side of the fence, Wind Waker did it right, Killer7 did it right, Mad World did it right, Okama did it right, Viewtiful Joe did it right.
Click to expand...
I'd agree that Rogue Galaxy didn't have outstanding visuals (they were pretty average) and that Wind Waker isn't entirely a visual abomination but the protagonist is and the style feels all around very child like (it was very hit and miss artistically). What it did that Borderlands isn't doing was it went in a very stylized direction, that direction helped to set it apart but it also ended up being damaging due to some poor choices (Link is #1). Okami is a game I always point to as doing graphics and style right (cell-shaded or not), that game still looks outstanding because it does a good job hiding it's graphical limitations with the style.

That said, I like the way that Borderlands went as the general art direction is interesting, if not unique in any way. I don't feel that all cell-shaded games need to be ultra-stylized. It manages to remain visually appealing (the black outlines are my major issue) and stand out from the pack. I think that they were smart to change the style so that they would stand out since before they just blended into the pack of games attempting to be photo-realistic. That said, it's not like it's in the top of the cell-shaded game list either but the fact that it's in a much smaller list helps it to stand out.
 
Box cover art is revealed and it's pretty badass:

borderlandsboxart.jpg
 
Looks neat, but still, the change of style messed it up for me a bit, I mean it still sounds like an interesting game, but eveerything just had a bit more of a serious tone to it before they decided to do the whole cel-shaded thing.
 
Thought little of it at first, but the more I hear about the game, the more I'm interested in it. I love the idea of element-based gun combinations, as well as monsters.

The only thing that bothers me a bit are the heavy black outlines on everything. That said, it gives it a cool 'playing with drawings' vibe. Furthermore, it doesn't remotely try to take itself too seriously, unlike the vomitous trend of having everything presented with 'epic epicness of epic' akin to Halo and GoW.

For now, it sounds more interesting than ID soft's Rage. While the latter has amazing new super space future technology implemented in the way it handles textures and geometry, Borderlands sounds... well, more fun.
 
Eyenixon said:
Looks like they're trying too hard.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the cover art looks like it's trying to be retro and ends up in a no man's land for me. I like that it looks different and that they were trying something they thought would be cool but I'm not sure if I really like how it looks. The images in blood seems to be a new thing that commercials have liked and it's never really clicked with me though I really like the stuff they put there on this cover.

Looking at the art up close I'd really like to see a comparison shot with the black outlines and without them because this closeup gives me the distinct impression that they are entirely extraneous (at least on the flesh, doesn't bother me on the face and hands).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top