Mon, Jul 09, 2012 | 06:54 BST

Borderlands 2 – Gearbox’s “renewed commitment” to PC

Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford has confirmed the studio’s commitment to delivering a stellar gaming experience to PC users with Borderlands 2. As if Claptrap’s love letter wasn’t enough to confirm this already.

Speaking during a developer’s session at Rezzed, Pitchford said when Gearbox develops a game, it’s always developed on PC because even the PS3 and Xbox 360 development kits are “plugged into” the system.

“We develop on the PC, it’s how we make games,” he said. “Even our development kits for console are plugged into PCs. However, we are developers and we take a lot of things for granted as most of us aren’t worried about dealing with our network configurations and things like that. So, we’ll do it and not worry about the consoles. But what we learned after shipping Borderlands 1, was customers who play on the PC expect better treatment within the game itself.

“If you look up that Claptrap love letter you’ll see some of the things we’re doing. It shows a renewed commitment to not just ourselves, but the customer side of the PC game.

“With both BL1 and BL2, the PC version is the best looking, highest fidelity version of the game, but what we’ve learned, is that the details are important to you on the PC and we made a strong effort to improve those details in the product.”

The efforts made to create a better PC game, which Claptrap outlined, are as follows:

  • 100% mouse usable menus/mouse wheel scrolling.
  • Achievement support
  • Cloud save support
  • Control pad support
  • FOV slider
  • Friends list support
  • Integrated V-sync option
  • LAN support (including offline mode)
  • Logitech keyboard support
  • Mouse smoothing options (can be disabled completely)
  • Native multiplayer matchmaking
  • No port forwarding required
  • PC-specific UI
  • Push to talk
  • Remappable keybindings for keyboard/mouse
  • Support for higher resolutions

“It’s a miracle we did what we did with Borderlands 1 – it’s a big risk to build a new IP, Pitchford continued. “We spent every dollar we had on that game, and while we had a nice budget, it still had us confined to being rational and responsible of what is expected to happen.

“Fortunately BL1 was a tremendous success, millions and millions of units sold. We’re at 6 million units sold right now, and that is exciting for a new IP -its unprecedented really.

“That means, we were able to put the budget into BL2 that it deserves – a budget I wish we’d had for the first game – and as such we can up some of our priorities.”

Borderlands 2 releases on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in September.

13 comment-trail-alt Posted in: 2K, Development, PC, PS3, Shooter, Xbox 360
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13 comments

#1

Edo
07/07/12, 6:46 pm

Thanks…

#2

noherczeg
07/07/12, 6:48 pm

Nothing new here but I still love them for their efforts :)

#3

HauntaVirus
07/07/12, 7:00 pm

Getting this on steam for sure, let us pre-order already!

#4

DSB
07/07/12, 7:22 pm

Damn, six million. Pretty strong post-release sales there.

Just don’t screw up the matchmaker please.

#5

Ireland Michael
07/07/12, 7:31 pm

Borderlands 2 will never sell. It’s being sent to die.

#6

Talkar
07/07/12, 7:48 pm

While it is still very awesome how much effort that is being put into the pc version of the game, i still remember when these things were standard…

#7

roadkill
07/07/12, 8:18 pm

Hey let’s just be optimistic and be happy about this. So far it sounds awesome!

#8

mad1723
07/07/12, 9:28 pm

@5: Optimism is your second name I guess? Honestly, I don’t see BL2 being a failure. It promises to have more of the same thing that made BL so good and then build upon it. I don’t see how it could be worse or sell worse.

@6: They were not standard in all games, especially FOV sliders, which people assume these days that every game pre-2000 had, which they didnt all.

#9

Maxey
07/07/12, 9:44 pm

#8 fov sliders weren’t standard because they didn’t need them in the first place.

#10

Edo
07/07/12, 10:14 pm

@5 That Pachter guy is a real Nostradamus…

#11

Ireland Michael
07/07/12, 10:27 pm

@8 Lawl. I was parodying Pachter.

I love Borderlands, and I think this will be a roaring success.

#12

Talkar
08/07/12, 9:16 am

@8
No you are right FOV sliders weren’t standard, but it was standard to edit the FOV in the .ini file or some other settings file. You can’t even do that for the majority of games today.

#13

silkvg247
08/07/12, 9:49 am

@12 Agreed. Config file or console, most of the old FPS had FOV adjustment. Indeed I can’t think of one that didn’t.

That said I’ve also seen plenty of modern games also have the same, BL1 you can adjust FOV.

@8 Actually #6 is right, PC games used to have every option imaginable as standard. And even if they weren’t in the GUI, it was file configurable. Although I am talking about the era between Quake 1-Quake 3.

————-

I also don’t like how these features are advertised as some shiney extra. All the settings are in the game already, all they are doing is exposing the properties through a GUI, and saving/loading them to a config file, which beleive me isn’t a lot of extra work.

It would only be a lot of work to allow adjustment if said variables weren’t actually variables at all but hardcoded (like the graphics of keys in skyrim), something no AAA dev should get away with (I’d fire them on the spot, unless they were a trainee, in which case I’d have a gentle word with their mentor).

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