Borderlands Interview, Part II: “I’m Excited That You’re Excited!” or “MAINSTREAM’D!”
A few weeks ago I contacted Randy Pitchford, co-founder and CEO of Gearbox Software, for an interview regarding Borderlands, the upcoming DLC and the possibility of a sequel. Randy was nice enough to make time in his busy schedule (i.e. playing and making video games for a living – lucky bastard!), to answer some of the questions.
This is part two of that interview and covers the possibility of a sequel, some technical questions, and other random tidbits.
You can find Part I here.
[Sidenote: Read my on-going review/in-character/commentary series on the game, ‘The Borderlands Chronicles’:
- Part I: “Zed’s Red Baby!” or “Skag Skirmish”
- Part II: “9+3=12” or “Why Don’t They Call Him 3-Balls?”
- Part III: “Vending Machine Tycoons” or “Give ‘em Hell Bloodwing!”
Enjoy!]
:: ON BORDERLANDS 2 ::
Bronte (B): Mike Neumann has all but directly confirmed a sequel to Borderlands. Can you comment further?
Randy Pitchford (RP): I think Mikey just said that he can confirm that there’s a “chance” for a Borderlands 2. I think he was playing around with the journalist there… He also said, “Obviously, nothing so far is planned. We’re working on DLC.”
B: Come on! You know you want to!
RP: I don’t have anything to announce at this time, but I’m really excited that you’re excited. 🙂
:: ON TECHNICAL ISSUES ::
Thank you for not allowing PC to be a bastard-child, secondary-citizen to the console generation. Do you feel a game designed from the ground up on the PC has better cross-platform development? Or vice versa?
RP: I think PC development has become more complicated and tricky over the years. But I also think we can do even more there. We’re looking at sales and looking at forums and we’re prioritizing things in our support of the game and are going to take influence from the data and the experience to affect our future decisions.
B: Halflife, Brothers in Arms, and now Borderlands. Do you feel getting hit IP’s that demand expansions and sequels stagnate a studio’s creativity or enhance it?
RP: We just try to make video games that we think are fun, cool and those we want to play ourselves. I think that it’s important for us to spend time on things we want to spend time on. Sometimes, that’s new things and sometimes, that’s caring more for things with which we’ve already spent time. I think if we had a magic wand, we could magically create more time for ourselves because there are so many things we want to make and so many things we can spend our time doing.
B: Borderlands, for a lot of people, was a painful experience because of the troubles with online play and LAN issues. What steps is Gearbox taking to ensure these issues are sorted out for the upcoming content?
RP: I think that is the thing I wished was most different… And we’re investing more support in those areas. There are some awesome people here that really care, even after the launch, in correcting the troubles. We’ve already deployed some updates, for platforms, that have addressed some of these issues and we have more deploying as soon as we’re clear to do so. I think the connectivity issues that some customers are having will be soon cleared up and I think the experience has taught us and our publishing partner a lot which in turn will make the connectivity experience in our future games much better.
:: MISCELLANEOUS ::
B: Are you aware that your name’s initials also stand for “Role Playing” or “Randomized Pew-pew?”
RP: I am now. Thank you for pointing that out.
B: Was it really you that killed those play testers?
RP: That was some funny thing that IGN did. I had no idea that they had even done that, but after the surprise, I was highly amused by it. I even dressed up like the fake me for our costume party at the studio during Halloween because what else could I be?
B: Are there any plans to bring that madman to justice?!?
RP: MAINSTREAM’D!
Are We New At This? 
“Thank you for not allowing PC to be a bastard-child, secondary-citizen to the console generation.”
WTF game were you playing? I love Borderlands and all, but the PC version IS a secondary-citizen to the console versions. The interface is identical to the console games and entirely caters to using a gamepad. Trying to use a mouse with it leads to often frustration. There’s ways to work around this and it doesn’t interfere much with the core gameplay. There was however no effort made to provide a good mouse based interface.
The interface was customized for the consoles and then shoved right onto the pc. That is the very definition of secondary-citizen.
I am playing the same game bud. I don’t find any interface elements clunky. In fact, the only interface thing that irritates me is the limited screen space in split-screen, and that is on the Xbox.
The comment may also be misunderstood. Gearbox Software claims that they developed the game from the ground up on the PC as well as the consoles. Having played both versions, I honestly can’t say I find the PC version at all inferior to the console one.
Matter of perspective, I suppose.
It’s not exactly inferior, it’s just identical. What works well for the console does not work as well on the PC. For example, quest log and other dialogs where there is text that scrolls, you can’t scroll it with the mouse. There’s no scroll bar, buttons, or mouse wheel support. Instead you have to hit the pageup and pagedown keys. This kind of problem is then repeated then for many other aspects. Basically you have to use the keyboard far more than the mouse. If it was really developed with the PC in mind I would have expected the interface to cater more to the mouse and follow more of the standard interface designs games on the PC that take advantage of the mouse and larger display area.
If a game was made mostly with the PC in mind and then ported to the console by just making the right stick control a mouse cursor in certain interface sections. While technically identical, in such a case I’d consider the inferior as it was not designed to work best with the expected controller.