On day one of E3 2009 we had the chance to attend a behind closed door demo of Gearbox’s shoot slash RPG title Borderlands. The demo was presented by Gearbox’s own President Randy Pitchford and boy was he hyped about this title.

The demo started out with the Gearbox team giving us a glimpse of the 4 player co-cop and the different classes that fit each character. (cont)
Each character will have his own style.  There is your classic rambo bezerker guy, a stealthy female, and a sniper.  Unfortunately we were not given a glimpse of any of the other character class types.  As you progress in the game you gain levels and talent points which you can spend in three talent trees.  Each tree offering different buffs for your character.

The world of Borderlands is a wasteland filled with quest hubs scattered around giving you tons of chances to explore everywhere.  Don’t feel like exploring well you are in luck as there are over 160 missions in the game to do.  You can spend time in the open world doing missions and collecting the hundreds of weapon types or you can join up with friends to try some of the instanced missions.  From what I saw the world was very alive with a cast of characters and there was always something you could be doing.

Loot is a big deal in Borderlands and it is labeled in your very familiar grey, green, blue, and epic purple styles for the value of the item.  Randy Pitchford fully admitted that he is a lover of World Of Warcraft and wanted to incorporate things he loved about the game but wanted to see in a shooter.  The loot system was very easy to follow along with and the amount of items to collect is simply huge

The unique part of Borderlands is that your characters are persistent  in the world.  You can take them into any mission and any instance no matter what level.  Feel like helping out a friend who is of lower level?  You can hop right in and while you may not gain experience you certainly can use the time to collect loot you have never seen before.

Borderlands created a bit of a tornado recently by doing an overhaul to the graphic system and some people calling it ‘cel shaded’.  I can tell you that I really did not see any likeness to other cel shaders out there and the environment made you feel like you were fighting your way through a wasteland.

We would like to thanks the fine folks at 2K and Gearbox for letting us sit in on this demo and be sure to check out Borderlands as it releases this holiday season.