There came a point in our presentation of Borderlands where Gearbox president Randy Pitchford felt the time was right to play his ace: a revelation that was deliberately placed for maximum impact. “Borderlands will actually have over half a million guns,” Pitchford said, grinning. “Take all the guns from the games on the Xbox and all the guns from the games on the PlayStation, and I think Borderlands would still have more.”
To whatever degree the demonstration was choreographed, Pitchford must have expected a more enthusiastic reaction than the blank stares that greeted him. We love guns, and many of our favourite games would be worthless without their existence, but does any game really need 500,000 of the things? Indeed, once you get past 10,000, can you even notice the difference any more? Ultimately, Borderlands’ gun fetishism comes across suspiciously like spin: a unique selling point in a genre where bland games seldom reap the highest rewards.
The fact is that, while there may be 500,000 iterations in the game, the differences between each can be as arbitrary as the colour on the side or what kind of sniper scope is attached. Pandora – the planet on which Borderlands is set – is home to a number of weapons manufacturers, and each has a particular style. Some make archaic weaponry out of rare materials like wood, while others may make high-tech, laser-based weaponry or bullets with poison-spiked tips.
Every gun you find in the game will be a randomly generated conglomeration, so while there is the possibility of finding a super-weapon, the law of averages suggests that most will resemble one another relatively closely.
Our demonstration was also a first look at a new part of Pandora’s landscape. Previously, we had only seen the Salt Flats of the surface, but Pitchford took us down into the Barrens: subterranean caves where bandits are holding an alien artefact to ransom.
The environment was atmospheric, the combat seemed satisfyingly chaotic, and there was a commendable affinity for blood, but given that so many games can be described in that exact way, we were deliberately looking for what else Borderlands had to offer. We saw programmable grenades that could have their function altered on-the-fly, computer terminals that allowed you to change which acquired skills you’d like to use, sniper rifles with revolving chambers and exploding bullets; but as intriguing as they are, these are still just the details.
