Borderlands - RPG and FPS make a Baby

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Gearbox Explains How the New Borderlands Art Style Came About
Written Wednesday, September 02, 2009 by Dan Webb

Speaking to x360a at GamesCom the other week, I asked Gearbox's VP of Marketing, Steve Gibson, why the new art style was adopted and how it got to where it is today.
“Well, that was quite a story. What basically happened was, about over a year ago the decision was made that we’re making a role playing shooter and we wanted to make it bigger. The promise we had with the role playing was, we wanted this gigantic world, so we started building out more to that and we leaned a whole bunch more on the coders and the level designers... but the artists were sitting there saying “our work is pretty much done... what shall we do?”

“So what they did was... “Well we want to improve the game and see what we think might be missing from it.” So what they did was go back and look at the concept art and they were like “what happened here, how did the game from our concepts end up looking like this?” Their ideas weren’t fully being communicated and they felt like the personality wasn’t coming through like it could, like it should.”

“The example a lot of people use... say the concept cars like Ford and all those guys. They pull all these concepts and you see these pictures. After it’s gone through the marketing guys and the business development guys, and the assembly line, you end up with a Taurus... and they’re like “that’s not what we drew.” So they were having the same experience.”

“So what they did was, what Randy calls an insurgency, where they grabbed a few of the artists and a couple of coders and they went off on the side and put together this prototype project and they wanted to prove that they could do it.”

“Obviously there is a lot of technology to get it to look like this; the lighting is different, the lining and all that stuff is all done through technology and art. So what they did was start working on this prototype and Randy caught wind of it and he was like, “this is tens of millions of dollars of project. We’re a couple of years in and that’s crazy, we can’t do this... I’m going to have to shut this down... we can’t do this.” But he didn’t want to like crush these guy’s souls. He wanted them to discover that that you can’t do this, you know, so he was like, “you guys pursue it a little more and give me a presentation in a couple of weeks and we’ll see where it’s at.”

A couple of weeks later, “he shows them the conference room, and the artists and the coders sit down and they say “okay, here we go, we’ve got something for you,” and he’s still ready to like shut this down cause it’s crazy. They show it and he’s floored and he’s like “we have to do this. We HAVE to do this.” It was taking everything that was drawn but wasn’t coming through and they managed to do it.”

“Fortunately for us we’re working with 2K who at this time, they’re fresh off this Bioshock hit. By the luck of the draw, we happen to be working with this publisher who had just had a hit with a new art-deco style and they were like, “well, it’s crazy to do this late in the game like this, but you guys have still got a year plus to build this out, flesh this out, and we think you guys can do this... so, we did it.”

The whole cel-shaded look is obviously a gamble, does Gearbox think that it will put off potential suitors and affect sales?

“That’s for the sales guys to figure out. We think that it’s great and we think that whatever the art style, it may affect how people look at the game, but it also affects the personality that you’re seeing. Say clap-trap being a dumb ass here [the small robot from the trailer]. Try to imagine that in the old art style and the personality doesn’t pop as well. So we feel the way the personality comes through, it’ll be a win.”

Either way, we love the new look.

Borderlands is out in North America on October 20th and in Europe on October 23rd.

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