I first heard about Gearbox’sBorderlandswell over a year ago when I picked up an American magazine during a trip to The States. Its promise of hugely customizable guns and characters was very promising, but that promise has taken aturn for the crazy.
According to Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford, Borderlands contains more guns than the total amount of firearms contained within every Xbox 360 and PS3 game added together. Of course, this is procedurally generated content, but this game’s boast of 650,000 guns is still worth bragging:
“When you have a system that can procedurally generate this stuff, you just want to go nuts with it. The costs are totally different. All the development teams in the world added together can’t physically craft what the software we’ve made is building for us. you’re able to take all the guns in every game that’s been launched on the PS3 and Xbox 360 — add them all together, and Borderlands still has more guns. It’s not fair, because we built the software that’s making them for us. We’re not actually making them. But it’s really cool, because I haven’t even seen them all. [Laughs] It’s really neat.”
Although the guns are generated by the game’s software, Pitchford claims that they “look like humans crafted them,” making them indistinguishable from artist-created weaponry. Gearbox also won’t be showing these weapons off prior to launch, wanting the players to discover the vast arsenal for themselves.
The content generation system will also produce new missions, environments and enemies. It’s certainly promising a lot, but time will tell if it can live up to its technological promise.
