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After 15 years, it’s easy to forget how much Borderlands changed the industry

Pabio November 5, 2024

Today, you might consider Borderlands a tired franchise. The recent film adaptation lost more than $100 million at the box office and scored poorly with reviewers, including our own two stars Borders Review. Borderlands 2despite its launch over a decade ago, remains the highest rated game in the series’ history. The new games in the series please fans but change little to convince detractors. While that may be what the show looks like today, it was a different story when Gearbox launched the first Borderlands 15 years ago.

By injecting its shooter with an infusion of skill trees, randomized weapons, and Diablo-like cooperative play, Gearbox discovered a formula that changed the industry. It wasn’t the first looter shooter, but it defined the new genre. Additionally, the team has also found the key to creating successful live service games outside of MMOs. Looking back, it’s also easy to forget that Borderlands wasn’t destined for success: Gearbox was taking a huge risk, because the only developer who had ever attempted something similar was a resounding failure.

Learn from the masters

Playable characters in Borderlands check a nearby job board to find jobs. — (Image credit: Gearbox Software)

The last portion

Borderlands 3 review: “A treat for fans of a Borderlands game”

By 2005, when Gearbox Software began working on Borderlands, the studio had made a name for itself as a work-for-hire company. Formed by former employees of 3D Realms and Bethesda Softworks, the creators of Duke Nukem and The Elder Scrolls, the team’s first games were expansions to the original Half-Life game. Blue Shift and Opposing Force Proved Gearbox Can Make Shooters and Its Working Port ValveThe console shooter opened the door to do the same for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and Halo: Combat Evolved.

Given the focus of its founders’ previous companies on shooters and role-playing games, it’s perhaps no surprise that Gearbox Software would make a name for itself with a game merging the two genres. But it’s about looking back with hindsight. When the studio began work on Borderlands, it was in the shadow of a similar game’s disappointing launch.

In 2007, Flagship Studios, a team of former Blizzard employees who had worked on Diablo, launched Hellgate: London. Although it was not exclusively a first-person shooter, since it could also be played in third-person, and many of Hellgate’s character classes made extensive use of melee weapons, it It was the first action RPG that could be played in first person, making it technically the first of the looter shooters. Despite this honor, the game is now just a footnote in history. The genre-blending experiment collapsed a year later when Flagship Studios closed its doors after launching to mixed reviews and attracting only a small player base.

When Borderlands launched seven months later, it entered a world that had proven hostile to its nascent genre.

Choosing between masters

Fighting raiders in the original Borderlands (2009)

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

The original pitch for Borderlands in 2005 was “Halo meets Diablo”, where gear would be front and center. Or, like creative director Mikey Neumann presented it at GDC in 2010“a game where the loot came out of every orifice.”

But even then, the team had to choose which of the two games would be its protagonist: the shooter or the RPG. Based on Gearbox’s extensive experience working with Valve on Half-Life and Counter-Strike, the Halo port for Bungieand fresh off its first original series, the WWII shooter Brothers in Arms, the studio naturally chose to focus on creating a shooter with RPG elements.

So while Borderlands has multiple classes and you level up your character with XP gained from killing enemies and equipping various gear and loot, that’s the extent of its RPG influences. Your actions in the world don’t have the kind of branching narrative consequences you’d see in first-person RPGs like Deus Ex or Cyberpunk.

By simply taking the loot and upgrade system of RPGs and grafting it onto a shooter, Gearbox has created a shooter with a compulsive gameplay loop. Add to that procedural content creation that saw the game feature over 15 million randomly generated weapons, four-player co-op, and a world that scaled in difficulty to match your skill level. Borderlands was also a shooter you could sink hours into. “While most shooters finish in a few hours, Borderlands takes much longer,” Jim Rossignol said in his report. Eurogamer Review. A sentiment echoed in many other reviews.

Original Borderlands skill tree for Brick

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

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Reviewers also found that constantly unlocking new gear and leveling up made them want to keep playing. Gearbox hadn’t just created a gripping shooter; he had found a way to fill it with much more content than other developers and systems, which could attract players hour after hour. This powerful blend of systems would have a lasting impact on the video game industry.

After Borderlands, many other first and third-person shooters learned from Gearbox’s integration of loot and leveling systems. Yet while Gearbox’s game had a rough ending, with its campaign ending after players completed the final mission, subsequent developers integrated these same systems into early live service games. Warframe And The division followed in 2013 and 2016 respectively, but in a neat historical loop, Bungie – from whom Gearbox had learned so much when porting the original Halo to PC – released its own looter shooter, Destiny, in 2014.

Borderlands’ influence extends beyond just looter shooters, however. Gearbox has developed simple ways to integrate class systems and skill trees into a first-person shooter. While other developers were experimenting with this at the time in other genres, like Bethesda with Fallout 3, Gearbox was more on the RPG side of the equation. Borderlands was one of the games that pushed RPG elements into more action-oriented genres, a torch that has Ubisoft recovered in Far Cry 3.

Watching it today, it’s easy not to notice how innovative Borderlands was in 2009. But that’s only because its influence is so widespread.

After 9 months and more than 800 hours of attempts, the Borderlands 2 player manages to complete the entire game without getting hit once.