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

Today, you might think of Borderlands as a legacy franchise. Latest adaptation Lost over $100 million at the box office and received poor reviews from critics, including our own two-star Borderlands Review. Borderland 2despite being released over a decade ago, it remains the highest rated game in the series’ history. New games in the series delight fans, but change little to win over detractors. While the show may look like this today, things were different back in the day. Transmission released the original Borderlands 15 years ago.

By introducing a Diablo-like skill tree, randomized weapons, and co-op play into its shooter, Gearbox had discovered a formula that would change the industry. It wasn’t the first looter shooter, but it defined a new genre. Moreover, the team also found the key to creating successful live-service games outside of MMOs. Looking back today, 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 already tried something similar had failed miserably.

Learning from the masters

Borderlands game character actors scan a nearby job board for job openings. — (Image credit: Gearbox Software)

Last portion

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In 2005, when Gearbox Software began work on Borderlands, the studio made a name for itself as a work-for-hire company. Created 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 for the original Half-Life. Blue Shift and Oppositing Force proved that Gearbox knows how to create shooters and is working on a port ValveThe console shooter opened the door to do the same for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and Halo: Combat Evolved.

Considering that its founders’ previous companies focused on shooters and role-playing games, it’s perhaps not surprising that Gearbox Software made a name for itself with a game that combined those two genres. But this is in retrospect and hindsight. When the studio began work on Borderlands, it was in the shadow of the disappointing launch of a similar game.

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

When Borderlands released seven months later, it was entering a world that would not be kind to its fledgling genre.

Choice between masters

Fighting raiders in the original Borderlands (2009)

(Image credit: Gearbox Software)

The original idea for Borderlands in 2005 was “Halo meets Diablo,” with gear to be front and center. Or how creative director Mikey Neuman introduced it at GDC in 2010.“a game in which prey came out of every hole.”

But even then, the team had to choose which of the two games would be its luminary – a shooter or a role-playing game. Building on Gearbox’s extensive experience working with Valve on Half-Life and Counter-Strike, the Halo port for Banguiand having just released its first original series, the World War II shooter Brothers in Arms, the studio understandably decided to focus on creating a shooter with RPG elements.

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

By taking the loot and leveling systems of RPGs and incorporating them into a shooter, Gearbox has created a shooter with a compulsive gameplay loop. Add to this procedural content creation, which featured over 15 million randomly generated weapons, four-player co-op, and a world whose difficulty scaled according to your level. Borderlands was also a shooter that you could spend hours playing. “While most shooters finish in a few hours, Borderlands takes significantly longer to complete,” Jim Rossignol said in his report. Eurogamer review. This sentiment is 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 didn’t just create an exciting shooter; they found a way to pack it with significantly more content than other developers and systems, which could keep players engaged hour after hour. This powerful combination of systems will have a lasting impact on the gaming industry for Borderlands.

Since Borderlands, there have been plenty of other first- and third-person shooters that have learned from Gearbox’s integration of loot and leveling systems. However, while Gearbox’s game had a rocky ending, with its campaign ending after players completed the final mission, subsequent developers built the same systems into the first live-service games. Warframe And Department followed in 2013 and 2016 respectively, but repeating history, Bungie – from whom Gearbox learned so much when porting the original Halo to PC – released its own looter shooter Destiny in 2014.

However, Borderlands’ influence extends beyond just looter shooters. Gearbox has developed simple ways to integrate class systems and skill trees into a first-person shooter. While other developers at the time were experimenting with this in other genres, such as Bethesda with Fallout 3, Gearbox largely stuck to the RPG side of the equation. Borderlands was one of the games that brought RPG elements into more fast-paced genres. Ubisoft taken from Far Cry 3.

Looking at it today, it’s easy to overlook how innovative Borderlands was in 2009. But that’s only because its influence is so widespread.

After 9 months and over 800 hours of trying, a Borderlands 2 player manages to complete the entire game without getting hit.