That way it can escape from the zeitgeist it's built and start standing out again, rather than simply repeating itself over and over again.Your current IP address has been blocked due to bad behavior, which generally means one of the following: That's to the studio's enormous credit-but it might be time for the developer to reach back into its past and dust off the tactical squad shooter that I would like to see. It's not that Battleborn was derivative-it's that the DNA of Gearbox has become the DNA of triple-A games at large.
Since then, it's threatened to become a mono-studio, built solely around the success of one series. At release, Battleborn was famously overshadowed by Overwatch, with Gearbox looking on as its nascent community defected to Blizzard's rival game. While the studio had once been ahead of the curve, laying the ground for loot-shooters, Battleborn was an idea any other developer could conceive of-in large part thanks to Borderlands. It boasts a striking palette of deep reds, and hand-animated cutscenes set to old-school hip hop.īut Battleborn was a victim of Gearbox's own success. The resulting game is far from meritless, despite the shrieking dialogue which, like Borderlands, leans much too hard on idioms to get cheap laughs.
The intent was to do for MOBAs what Borderlands had for action-RPGs-folding the highly tactical mess of cooldown abilities, teamfights and friendly minions into the form of a first-person shooter. Gearbox's most fascinating failure, in a competitive field, has been Battleborn. When a new Brothers in Arms sequel was announced at E3 in 2011, it more closely resembled Borderlands than its parent series, eschewing historical authenticity for “tall tales”. It also seemed to close off a part of Gearbox's identity, to the frustration of long-term fans. Tactics were something you coordinated over voice chat, rather than with a right click on the mouse.īorderlands proved itself to be incredibly forward-thinking, predicting the direction of shooters over the next decade, and opening up a money seam that has sustained the studio to this day.
Like the Marines, Borderlands' four characters each had distinct roles, but now they came from the realm of fantasy RPGs: tank, mage, ranger, and berserker. The AI teammates that had made Opposing Force and Brothers in Arms memorable became co-op partners. The idea, at the time, was new: to apply the RNG, levelling and loot cycle of Diablo to an FPS, without losing the immediate and dynamic feedback players had felt in Half-Life.
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