Borderlands Interview

Shacknews has slapped up a three-page interview with Gearbox's Mikey Neumann about a range of topics related to their newly released role-playing shooter, Borderlands. Onward...
Shack: Any plans to expand on item trading beyond the "drop this on the ground and hope the right person picks it up" honor system?

Mikey Neumann: We were pretty careful there. We wanted free-for-all looting for now. Then we'll look at what the community really latches on to or wants, and we'll move in that direction.

I haven't had a problem with it because I play with my friends, co-workers, and sometimes random people and we'll agree to loot rules. A lot of times if we wanted something, we'd duel for it. That seems to be the best way. It's kinda the honor system. It is fun to fight your friends and show who's the big dog to get certain loot drops.

If people are clamoring for some trade stuff, or clamoring for some better trade rules, then we'll look at that moving forward. I mean, if you look at the first release of World of Warcraft, it had like, what, 20% of the features it has now?

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Shack: On downloable content, what's the limit? Have you run into any technical hurdles--no new classes, no rocket ship etc.?

Mikey Neumann: We're finding out some interesting things that maybe we didn't realize before. So far, none of them have been game changers.

To be specific, we are making DLC for all three platforms simultaneously. We don't want any customer to miss out. I will say that our first DLC is an additional story, it's a tight little story that's pretty cool, a whole new area with all-new monsters and all kinds of stuff. It's definitely something that people are going to want, because it's more of what they are going to want to do--explore more, find new stuff, meet people. That's all there.

I think the limitations we're running into are under the hood stuff, that if we're did our job right you're probably not going to notice. Once they start seeing the new stuff, I think they're going to get where we're going with DLC specifically.