Borderlands Is Bigger Than We Thought

Expect attitude, style and personality. Oh and of course a lot of guns.

Published 10/08/2009 at 8:30.
By djhsecondnature.

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Remember a short while back we brought you news that Gearbox’s RPG layered FPS would have somewhere in the region of 3 million guns, well we were wrong. I know, it does happen from time to time. There are those of you sitting there now thinking; “Ah! I knew there couldn’t be that many,” well stop being so smug. We may have been off the mark, by quite a bit actually, as Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford reveals that “the last count was like 17,750,000,” which is simply a ridiculous amount of weapons.

“Just thinking about shotguns we had thousands of permutations on a whiteboard. All the development teams in the world added together can’t build that many guns, because there are more guns in Borderlands than all the shooters on the PS3 and 360 added together. We had to build software to do it for us, so we built a procedural generation system that built all these guns.”

In his interview with CVG, he mentions that by following the story based missions the game is roughly a “15 hour experience,” however, “there’s about 120 non-missions chains, so that’s where the more RPG guy can get immersed and just do everything.” This is a title that is beginning to speed up the hype train pretty quickly. With four player co-op, a wealth of RPG elements layered on top of a unique and charming art styled FPS, this could turn out to be one of the sleeping hits of the year.

Source: CVG, tip: Person678

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fogcity94 | 10/08/2009 08:35
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258 TSA Points | Member since: Aug 2009

WOW! that’s alot of guns.
Lets hope there’s not a trophy where you need to have fired every gun at least once.

That would raise the playtime a bit.
carson321 | 10/08/2009 08:43
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927 TSA Points | Member since: May 2009

I was struggling to see how there could be so many in the first place, can’t quite remember the original story and couldn’t be bothered to read it again but i’m guessing the likes of a handgun, then the same handgun but with a silencer counts as two?!
Vandix | 10/08/2009 08:44
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OMG, that’s a lot of guns…
I’m getting this game on release day, that’s for sure…
hannes_truce | 10/08/2009 08:55
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I thought this game was mental before, not i think it’s about 6 times as mental 17+ million guns?
*brain dribbles out of ear*
cags | 10/08/2009 08:59
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@fogcity94 if there is, I certainly hope it’s a platinum!
Severn2j | 10/08/2009 09:15
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I don’t really see the point of statements like this.. Okay, there are 17m+ guns. Great, but really what they are saying is that they use a procedural system to generate the guns, so the actual number is irrelevant. Its not like you’re going to use them all is it? If anything having that many makes them all equally worthless, and you’ll just end up using one you like and sticking with that. I’m much more interested in the other aspects of the game, so it would be nice if their PR dept would focus a bit more on that side of things..

The last paragraph in the article sounds pretty cool tho. :)
- stingraz | 10/08/2009 09:22
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  2619 TSA Points | Member since: Jul 2009
  
  I agree with yeh there severn2j, but i think they are just going for some new world record personally. It would actually be hilarious if the game wasn’t any good! Can you even keep ur gun once you’ve found the one u like, i mean if theres so many & you run out of bullets, you’ll never be able to find the same one twice !?!
- Richie | 10/08/2009 22:14
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  It’s not about being able to use them all – it’s about customisation. There’s 17 million different possibilities of guns, accessories, ammo, sure, and while you may feel its pointless, what it means is it gives the player the ability to play exactly how they want to play. Rather than choosing from a preset selection where you make do with whichever you like the most, it gives you more freedom and hopefully the ability to get a much more perfect weapon for each individual player’s gameplay style.
  
  Or at least that’s how I read it :D and for me, that’s very very cool. It’s not the number that counts but the amount of freedom it represents.
Gastos84 | 10/08/2009 09:21
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4238 TSA Points | Member since: Apr 2009

I wonder how much they are paying the person that has to count all of them!!

Although it is impressive, it’s now ridiculous. Is there any need for that amount? It might give the game a bit of re-play appeal though.
cc_star | 10/08/2009 09:32
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11320 TSA Points | Member since: Forever

I’ll repeat my comment from the last article.

Pointless.

Once you’ve got past the rifle, then rifle which fires 0.1m further and machine gun, then machine gun which fires 1 extra round/sec mechanic is there an awful lot more to say about it. It doesn’t matter if there’s a hundred thousand weapons, one million or 3 trillion you’re never going to use them all.

I’d like to see the devs talk more about the game than a feature designed purely to create column inches and fanboy comments.
- Bilbo_bobbins | 10/08/2009 09:46
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  Yep, I agree. 17 million guns will not make be buy this game. Even if they said 100, it still wouldn’t. It’s the gameplay that makes a game, not how many guns you can have.
  
  I will keep an eye on this one though, because it sounds interesting, and I do love a bit of co-op.
- Tuffcub | 10/08/2009 15:56
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  Totally agree… the modifications to each weapon to make the 17 million combinations will be so small they are unnoticable. Anyway, the 17 million weapons – that could just be the graphic design – not at any point did they say that they would perform differerently. It could just be a machine gun with a paint job.
stingraz | 10/08/2009 09:32
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The graphics so far look great, but its starting to look like Red Faction…
- retro_ | 10/08/2009 11:32
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  Minus GEOMOD 2.0 I suspect.
fogcity94 | 10/08/2009 09:32
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You could play through this game many times and still come accross guns which you haven’t seen before. Although there is probaly like 1 million versions of the pistol.

And I think that alot of these wepons would just be the same but with things like one having a grip, one with silencer, one with a pocking out bit to the side ect.