Dumbed down shmumbed down! A Borderlands Q & A with Randy Pitchford, president and CEO of Gearbox Software

I inherently dislike any PC title with a "multiplatform" label. Stripped of its complexities in favor of bigger icons, bigger text, and simpler gameplay, the PC version usually feels like a console port. Often, it really is a console port. No offense to the console people, but the hardcore audiences on either side have different standards. This is why EVE Online and its spreadsheet-like gameplay may never hit consoles.

In 2008 I noticed Borderlands was scheduled to hit the PC, 360, and PS3 sometime in the future. The overenthusiastic hardcore gamer in me groaned, laughed, and slightly sobbed. I started losing all interest in the title once referred to as a combination of MAD MAX(!) and DIABLO(!). A year later developer Gearbox Software released the title's trendy trailer featuring DJ Champion (above). With a renewed interest and an upcoming interview with a rep from the company, I harnessed my previous skepticism and unleashed it in a series of questions. Little did I know Randy Pitchford, president and CEO of Gearbox, would answer. And answer he did, with refreshing honesty and a sprinkling of PR-talk. Don't hate. It's his job to sprinkle a bit of hype on his games.

Equipment plays an important role in endgame PvP in World of Warcraft. Some say the role is too important, trivializing player skill. In comparison, how important is equipment in Borderlands as it relates to PvP?  

Randy Pitchford: World of Warcraft is all about gear because the skills involved in playing the game are very simple. You just click icons on the screen to make stuff happen. I don’t mean to belittle that – I mean I have played a LOT of World of Warcraft. But it’s just not the same. The compulsion of getting loot and leveling up and accomplishing missions for rewards and developing your character class and your specific skill tree spec – yeah those things are good things to reference from World of Warcraft. But when you’re talking about the actual tactile skill involved in playing the game… that’s another story. I mean, Borderlands is a shooter. So, you better look at Call of Duty or Halo if you want to know what that is going to feel like with the controls in your hands. When it comes to the skill involved in moving and aiming and shooting and how that affects the results, comparing World of Warcraft to Borderlands is like comparing apples and Pluto.

What kind of balance issues did you encounter with so many combinations of classes, weapons, and open-world gameplay?

Randy Pitchford: That’s a really big question. It’s not easy dealing with these kinds of things and we’ve had a few things really help us in that regard. One thing is the way the systems were designed and built. The guy that really drove the core game design – the director of all that – was a guy named Matt Armstrong and he was fortunate to have a lot of really brilliant engineers that created all these incredible new technologies for managing balance on individual and global levels using a data driven system and other new technologies for procedurally generating literally millions of weapons for the game. There are a lot of amazing designers and engineers on the team that all worked together and challenged each other and even, at times, were patient with each other as we explored this space and figured it all out.

I can't wait to play this on the PC, but I fear since it's also being developed for the console demographic that a "dumbing down" might have occurred. You're welcome to change my mind.

Randy Pitchford: The PC version is great. The fact that you just said what you did is going to make a LOT of our developers really happy because a lot of them feel that the best version of the game is the PC version. There’s a reality to this business in being multiplatform and if you’re going to get games as big and as relevant as Borderlands on the PC and you’re going to be thankful there are console versions to drive more sales because we couldn’t rationally afford to do what we’re doing if it was only on PC. But a few reasonable commonalities about cross platform games are something the smartest real gamers can roll with and be comfortable with especially with Borderlands because, at the end of the day, the PC version of the game really has some nice advantages that make it the favorite platform for most of our most hardcore developers at Gearbox.

How has the development of Borderlands aided, or will aid, the company in the development of future titles?

Randy Pitchford: The Gear Builder Artificial Intelligence system that we created to procedurally generate the millions of weapons in the game is just a huge tactical advantage that Gearbox now has that’s going to impact a lot of what we do. Also, we’ve developed some amazing new lighting and rendering technology that has some incredible applications in the unique look of Borderlands, but also other unbelievable applications with other art styles as well. The technology we’ve developed there and the new technology that comes next is going to give us some huge advantages for the rest of this generation. Also – with every experience you develop your processes more and individuals are better able to understand and anticipate the strengths of the rest of the team and how to leverage them, so Borderlands really is something special in a lot of ways but it’s also going to help everything we do moving forward, including DLC for Borderlands, really exciting.