Gearbox Software have spoken a great deal about all the improvements they’ve made to the Borderlands formula with the upcoming Borderlands 3. Though the threequel won’t be reinventing the wheel for the beloved franchise, it will be honing its craft and attempting to refine it even further, which, for many, is exactly what it needs to do anyway. Among the many things it’ll be polishing up even further is, of course, the combat.
Speaking with GamingBolt and answering some of our questions during a group interview at E3 2019, Gearbox Software’s Anthony Nicholson, working on Borderlands 3 as a Senior Producer, spoke about the improvements that the developers are making to the combat, talking about things such as destructible cover, more mobility options, more attack options, improved enemy AI, and a lot more. As per Nicholson, combat in Borderlands 3 doesn’t have to be a straightforward “shoot the bad guys” affair, and offers many options to players for how they want to approach scenarios.
“We really wanted tight gameplay and gun feel,” Nicholson told GamingBolt. “The team has worked really hard where the game feels really good whenever you’re shooting from the hip and when you’re aiming. Going back to your earlier question, we wanted to make sure for people who are playing this game for the first time that it feels really good to them as well. Things like progressing on the characters: we’ve added things like slide and now butt-stomping is back in this. There are different ways for you to attack different combat pockets.”
“You don’t have to just take enemies head on,” he went on. “We have destructible cover, and different destructible barrels that kind of interact. So there are so many different ways for you to tackle things. You can run and slide behind cover, or you can jump on top and kick a barrel over it. And those things interact with other things. Like spark barrels interact with water, fire barrels interact with oil. There is a lot of cover that’s destructible. Enemies are a lot smarter, and our AI is a lot tighter in this game as well. Even if those guys want to go and hide behind wood, we can shoot through it and still take them out.”
Borderlands 3 is out on September 13 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, while a Stadia release has also been confirmed for a later date. The looter shooter will be launching with level cap of 50, and the developers are claiming its main story alone, without all the side content, is going to be roughly 35 hours long. Read more on that through here.