Borderlands

Borderlands is a FPS/RPG from Gearbox Software that puts players into the shoes of one of four playable mercenary characters as they traverse the hostile planet of Pandora in search of a mysterious "Vault," said to contain priceless alien artifacts.

Overview

Borderlands is an original first-person role-playing shooter game made by Gearbox Software. Its weapon system is a ground breaking content generation system that has a never ending variety of weapon and item drops. The game features a unique art style to complement its story, which places you in the shoes of a treasure hunter in search of priceless alien artifacts. Borderlands features four-player co-op online, and two-player split-screen play locally.

Backstory

Pandora isn't the best place to take a vacation

In the distant future, several colonization ships head to Pandora, a planet on the edge of the galaxy. The colonists are drawn there in search of a better life as well as vast mineral resources said to be on the planet, free for anyone's taking, much like a futuristic gold rush. The colonists soon find that there is nothing for them there, aside from the rumors of vast, decrepit alien ruins. These ruins are a beacon of hope for the remaining colonists emerging in the form of a mysterious vault that is said to contain vast stores of alien technology that - if found - would make the discoverers unbelievably rich. The only problem is that the first people to unearth the vault were completely wiped out before they could claim their prize - their discovery evidenced only by a scattered radio transmission, proclaiming the vault's majesty, but not its location.

Those that can, leave. The remaining population devolves into chaos and lawlessness much akin to a Mad Max style world. While some of the settlers seek the alien technology, most are simply trying to survive. Now, after seven earth years after the first landfall on Pandora, the planet's slow orbit brings a transition from winter to spring, and many horrifying creatures emerge from hibernation, making the planet even more hostile.

Character classes

Roland

Roland, The Soldier

Roland is a former soldier of the Crimson Lance, an elite private military group working for the Atlas Corporation. Roland's Infantry, Support and Medical branches of his skill tree include generating new ammo for both himself and those in his party, increasing his clip capacity and the party's health regeneration. Roland can gain the ability to shoot 'healing' bullets (grenades and rockets also included), which will damage his enemies, but heal his allies. His class specific skill is the deployment of a turret with a shield barrier, which can attack enemies or heal allies within range. Being proficient with all weapons, both long range and short, and having a robust health bar, Roland is considered to be the all-round supportive unit.

Mordecai

Mordecai, The Hunter

Mordecai came to Pandora to find a man named Demosthenes. After learning Demosthenes is dead, Mordecai sets out to find out what happened to him. Mordecai favors a sniper rifle which can be upgraded in regards to both his accuracy and damage through the Sniper skill tree. Mordecai can also be deadly with a pistol if specialized in the Gunslinger skill tree. Mordecai's class specific skill is his pet Bloodwing, which he can periodically call upon to damage or outright kill his enemies. The recharge time and number of enemies attacked by Bloodwing can be enhanced by skills. His melee weapon is a sword that he carries on his back. Mordecai is Borderlands' ranged combat unit.

Lilith

Lilith, The Siren

Lilith is one of only six Sirens in the galaxy, a group of people with incredible power, but no way to control it. She came to Pandora because she heard there was another Siren on the planet and wants to find whoever it is in the hope of learning more about herself. Lilith's class specific skill, "Phase Walk," renders her invisible to enemies and allows her to move quickly, even through bullets and enemies, damaging or killing them in the process. Her skill tree includes Controller, which is used for crowd control and defense, Elemental, which is used for burning and corroding enemies, and Assassin, which is used for a more direct-damage approach on enemies increasing critical hits and bullet damage. Lilith is the rogue of the group.

Brick

Brick, as Himself

Brick is on Pandora searching for his missing sister. A massive man, Brick takes the role of tank. His class specific skill is the ability to go into a Berserker-state, allowing him to absorb a huge amount of damage whilst rapidly regenerating health and killing enemies with his bare hands. The necklace he wears is adorned with the paw of his dead dog. Brick’s three skill trees are Brawler, the melee skill tree, Tank, the defense skill tree, and Blaster, the explosive weapon skill tree.

Gameplay

Gearbox has stressed that Borderlands is a first-person shooter foremost with a layer of RPG elements. This is good news for anyone who played Fallout 3 or Hellgate: London and was frustrated by the dice rolls dictating damage and accuracy. They've referred to the game as a " role-playing shooter."

RPG Elements

Character Progression

Brick's skill tree

Characters level up as they kill enemies and deliver quests. Leveling is capped at 50. At each level, players may assign points to character attributes and skills. Upon reaching level five, each class will gain access to a class-specific skill (e.g. Roland's turret). Moving forward from level five, players may progress through their skill trees choosing one of three paths to further enhance existing skills, and gain access to new ones. A max level character will have earned 46 points for spending in the skill tree -- 1 to gain access to the action skill and 45 to place as the player chooses among other skills.

Weapon Proficiency
In addition to skill advancement chosen by the player upon leveling, weapons skills are also advanced based on usage. These weapon skills give bonuses to reload time, stability, damage, rate of fire, cooldown rate and accuracy, depending on which weapon you are using.

Character Customization
Customization is present although it is limited to setting armor colors for your character. The base appearance of your character is static. Of course, you will also see any items you may have equipped.

Loot
The game has garnered comparisons to Diablo for its inclusion of a plethora of procedurally generated weapons. Some enemies will drop loot. In true medieval RPG fashion, treasure chests also appear throughout the world, albeit in more appropriate forms. In addition to guns, players will happen upon grenade mods, shields, artifacts, and class mods which will grant a boost to some of your character's skills. Vending machines are available to facilitate the buying and selling of loot. When you look at a dropped piece of loot, a box pops up giving you vital information about that item. Loot is also color-coded based on how common it is a la Diablo, the color coding rarity scheme is as follows, from least to greatest: Grey, White, Green, Blue, Purple, Yellow, Orange, Dark Orange, Pearl.

Quests
The game contains 160 quests. These are composed of 30 quests in the mainline story and 130 side quests. Most quests will be taken from NPCs and bounty boards in the games various towns and settlements. In addition to quests, the game includes repeatable scenarios complete with bosses that may be farmed for loot and experience.

Multiplayer

Borderlands features four-player co-op online and two-player local co-op in the console versions. The co-op allows for a persistent character to hop from one co-op game to another while keeping all the equipment and experience earned in a previous game. Progress in quests and the storyline, however, is confined to the game world of the player hosting the game. Difficulty scales based on the number of player characters participating. Play with more players and more enemies will spawn in the world. Money and experience rewarded for kills are divided evenly amongst players. Loot and ammo, however, belongs to whoever gets there first.

The game also includes player versus player combat to give you something else to do with all those cool weapon drops. In co-op, players can also challenge each other to a duel. One player melees another, and if they melee back a dome will form around them and they can battle it out. In addition, arenas can be found around the world where players can fight each other.

Weapons

One of the big draws of Borderlands is the promise of millions of guns that are all unique, generated procedurally. During the E3 2008 gameplay demo, Gearbox stated that each of the game's weapons manufacturers have rules and materials that define what’s available for them to use to create the weapons. The developers of Borderlands created a program that generates weapons based on a set of rules. According to Game Informer, Randy Pitchford reported that the last weapon count for the game was an astronomical 17,750,000.

Traversing the landscape

Designated spawn points throughout the world allow players to summon a vehicle. Players will be able to customize various vehicles with one of two different weapons (rocket launcher or machine gun) and paint jobs. This is one of two preferred traveling methods the other being the now familiar fast travel system that allows for instant teleporting between locations once they have been unlocked. Players will gain access to vehicles relatively early in the game with the fast travel system opening up later.

Challenges

In addition to achievements and trophies, Borderlands has an in-game challenge system. The challenges are structured like achievements or trophies, but they are separate from either system and they reward your character with experience whenever you complete one.

Death

As in Gears of War, fallen characters may be brought back by teammates by running up and holding a button until a revive meter fills. While the teammate is reviving the downed player, he/she is vulnerable to enemy fire since firing the weapon will interrupt the revive process. The healing player may, however, use the action skill and/or crouch without interrupting the healing process. Although the downed player cannot move he/she can continue firing while downed. As the downed player, you will slowly bleed out as your screen loses contrast. If you achieve a kill in this wounded state, you get a "Second Wind," which will revive you with some of your health refilled. However, if you fail, you will respawn at the nearest New-U station for a fee. The fee is a percentage of your total cash on hand.

Graphics

Old art style

At a time when there was still much to be done to finish other aspects of the game, the Borderlands art team found themselves with little left to do. They made a plea to Randy Pitchford and others to develop a distinctive graphical style more closely mirroring the style of their concept artwork. There was some skepticism over making such a large change at such a late stage in development. The art team was asked to develop a prototype of this new art style without the knowledge of Pitchford. When the prototype was shown, it was decided that this distinctive new art style was a must for the final game. These events led to the retooling of Borderlands into what we have today.

Pitchford was quoted as saying that the PC version "destroys" the consoles in terms of graphics. This is to be expected as we are several years into the console cycle while PC hardware has continued to evolve. However, it isn't often that we hear an admission of this sort from the developer.

Downloadable Content

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

A Tankenstein (pictured) is one of the new enemy types.

The first in the promised series of DLC, titled 'The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned' was released on November 24th, 2009 for Xbox 360 and PS3 priced at 800 Microsoft Points and $9.99 respectively, while the PC version came out on December 9th, 2009, costing 9.99 as well. The island includes new quests, new dungeons, a new areas to explore, new enemies and has around 4-6 hours of new content to explore. The expansion allows players to visit the Jakobs Weapons Factory, and learn more about the weapon manufacturers, as well as what went wrong with the island and cause it to be overrun by zombies in the first place. Players can teleport to the content, from a New-U station, as long as they are level 10 or above, and the area difficulty scales accordingly.

Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot

Roland fights off waves of enemies

The second DLC for Borderlands, titled " Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot" was released on December 29th, 2009 for Xbox 360 and January 7th 2010 for PS3 and priced at 800 Microsoft Points and $9.99 respectively. The central premise for this DLC package involves the player(s) participating in arena tournaments hosted by Mad Moxxi. Similar to the "Horde" mode from Gears of War 2 and the "Firefight" mode from Halo 3: ODST, these tournaments involve killing waves of enemies whilst subject to "Moxxi's Maxims", certain rule modifiers that will slightly alter the gameplay (for instance providing a bonus to grenade damage). There are two main types of tournaments featured; medium-length tournaments that will take approximately an hour to complete, and a hardcore tournament lasting up to 6 hours that must be completed in one sitting. The DLC also includes a bank to store items. A PC release date is yet to be confirmed but has been slated for "early 2010".

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx

Mordecai and Lillith face a new enemy in General Knoxx.

Very little is currently known about the third DLC pack for Borderlands. It was officially announced on January 28, 2010, but Gearbox had been hinting about its existence beforehand. Current confirmed features include an expansive new environment, new enemies, new weapons, new vehicles, new missions, and the level cap being raised to a currently undisclosed level (previously 50).

Easter Eggs

There is an homage to the movie "A Christmas Story" in New Haven, complete with Red Rider BB Gun and Leg Lamp. To get there you need to have the "Another Piece of the Puzzle" quest active. Here is a video with the exact location.

System Requirements

OS: Windows XP/Vista
Processor: 2.4 GHz or equivalent processor
Memory: 1 GB System RAM (2 GB recommended with Vista)
Graphics: 256 MB video ram or better (GeForce 8 series or higher/Radeon R8xx series)
Hard Drive: 8 GB or more free space
Sound: Windows compatible sound card

Other reviews for this game
Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot	X360	Jeff Gerstmann
The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned	PS3, X360	Jeff Gerstmann

blog	Achievement Update #111	GamerGeek360
blog	30 More Memorable Video Game Songs!!	Tireyo643
forum	Looking for Some Borderlands Co-Op	Kokaneez
blog	Adaptive Difficulty or Set Difficulty?	immike
blog	Completing Our Games #12 (Late Edition)	IceColdGamer
news	Level Cap Increase Coming To Borderlands	Jeff
news	Incoming: Giant Bomb's Game of the Year Awards Begin Tomorrow	Jeff
news	Giant Bomb's Game of the Year 2009, Day Four	Staff

Game Name	Borderlands
Platform(s)	Xbox 360 PC PlayStation 3
Publisher(s)	2K Games
Developer(s)	Gearbox Software LLC
Genres	Add a new genre Role-Playing Action First-Person Shooter
Themes	Add a new theme Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi
Original US Release	Oct. 20, 2009 need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	October 2009 know the real date?
Aliases

	BioShock
	Brink
	Diablo
	E.Y.E
	Fallen Earth
	Fallout 3
	Fallout: New Vegas
	Hellgate: London
	Mythos
	Rage
See All »

	9 Toes
	Baron Flynt
	Brick
	Claptrap
	Dr. Ned
	Dr. Zed
	Krom
	Lilith
	Mad Moxxi
	Marley
	Moe
	Mordecai
	Rakk Hive
	Roland
	Scar
	Scooter
	Sledge
	The Destroyer
	T.K. Baha
See All »

Playing Mordecai in Borderlands Learn to play as Borderlands' hunter character, Mordecai. Includes a list of skills, strategies, and builds for your character.
Challenge list An amalgamation from around the internet of the various challenge within Borderlands. Often whilst playing, you will see a popup informing you that you have completed a challenge, but there is no discernible way to view the complete list. Hopefully this guide will shed a wee bit more light onto the situation. Enjoy!