Borderlands E3 Preview
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The game itself appears to be a similar mix of familiar elements and ingredients being put to work in unusual ways. Borderlands is primarly a first-person shooter, a co-op action game with support for up to four players, but underneath that there are several RPG-like qualities. For a start, the game is class based, offering a quartet of diverse characters who can be further customised via branching skill trees. For example, much of Gearbox's E3 demo was devoted to Brick a hulking great meathead who acts as the obligatory (Tank) class. Brick's strength can allow him to go on an adrenaline-fuelled murder binge, but with a bit of tailoring you can adjust how he brings the pain. The (Heavy Handed) skill (which is coincidentally the name of a character trait in the original Fallout games) will up the brute force of his attacks, while (Sting Like A Bee) will presumably allow him to make a single, painful attack before immediately collapsing dead on the spot.
All of these skills and abilities will be fuelled by experience points, so expect a cheery little XP score to pop up every time you blow away a critter or marauding gunman. That's all fair enough we see this kind of thing In lots of action games these days but things get a bit hairier once you start to look at Borderland's approach to loot. If the words (epic) and (drop) cause you to start dribbling like one of Pavlov's dogs then it's time to grab a towel, because this game will have lots and lots of shiny things to pick up. In particular, Borderlands is packed to the gills with guns. At one point Gearbox claimed that there would be half a million different firearms in the game; now they're claiming that there are more than 650,000 different weapons to try enough for everyone in the vicinity of Nottingham to have their own unique shooty-bang stick.
