Borderlands NDA Lifted, Maurice Dishes On His Gearbox Visit

Steve Gibson emailed late last night and said I can now talk about my Borderlands play time last Friday, that was quick eh?
First off, here are the pics from my visit.

And now what I can say about Borderlands.

- Only played for about 1-2 hours. SO take all my comments with a grain of salt. You can't get a real good feel for a game like Borderlands in that amount of time. That said, all I've been thinking about is getting to play Borderlands again, which must mean it's awesome. I played on a xbox360. There was only one pc setup in the testing room, and like 10 or so xbox360's, no PS3's.

- The sounds and feel of the guns are really well done. The first gun I used felt awesome.

- Graphics = really nice. Framerate is solid on the xbox360.

- The game is very much a shooter. You run around and shoot stuff, gain xp, find loot. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat.

- The story elements from what was shown, are going to be very simple quests. Kill x amount of these guys. Or kill this guy. Or take this to this guy. Or get this from here and put it there. The game is about Shooting/Looting not complex dialogs paths. In addition, I think they made the story simple so that it would work well with co-op, but that is just my guess.

- I didn't get to drive any Vehicles. I did see buy guys driving them around.
- The AI is okay. I had to use cover to stay alive. Using cover means running behind things, or crouching behind things. works pretty well. No blind fire :( It was sad to see some enemies just standing out on the open taking fire and not doing anything about it while other enemies used cover. Didn't seem like the human style bad guys used group tactics, but again I'd need more play time to be sure. Seemed like bad guys sometimes took cover, maybe it had to do with the bad guy type? Like shooter or brawler. Not sure.

- I got to play a lv25 char for co-op with 3 other people on the lan. Lots of fun. BUT some of the bad guys were just uber'd humans that seemed to take endless amounts of damage and then just fall down. Not sure if the endgame will be like this setup they had for us, or different, hopefully there's some depth there that I was missing. I liked playing the single player portion at the beginning much more. Maybe I didn't spend my character points in the best fashion. I was playing the tank guy, and tried to power up his punch and damage resistance. But I still died a lot rushing and punching people out. BUT that tactic did work well when the bad guys where all focused on shooting my teammates, I could then kinda flank/sneak up on the badguys form the side/back and punch them. So i guess there is some depth to the co-op play. Might be a lot more fun if you know the people you are playing with better.

- Did I say the sound is awesome? It is.

-Fought some of the larger creatures, they were pretty cool. You had to get someone around the back of them to do real damage. Again in a team play environment this meant some people had to distract the big guys while other  players went around back to kill them. The elemental attacks of these creatures was sweetass and made you think twice about rushing them.

-The game is not one large open world from what was shown. Looks like it’s areas connected with “doors”. So there are load screens. I’m not sure if that is what it’s like through the entire game. But I’m pretty sure it’s not GTA/Crackdown open world style. The areas we played in were pretty large (think other ut3 engine based games), and I’m guessing there maybe huge driving areas a some point, but again I’m pretty sure you’ll be seeing loading screens as you change areas. It’s possible that for the demo they had us in a controlled environment, so we couldn’t get out and see stuff we weren’t supposed to.

- The didn't really answer the Steam availability question, seems like the PC version will be available via some electronic download, but Gearbox wasn't ready to discuss that.

-You can ask me questions, but I only played for 1-2 hours, so I may not be very much help.

-October 20th people! HOLY CRAP I CAN'T WAIT!