Gearbox Software’s Borderlands franchise is arguably the standard for loot-based FPS games and many of its mechanics have carried over into over series like Call of Duty and Destiny. It’s not as though the developer is unaware of it – at PAX South, franchise creator Matt Armstrong spoke about those inspirations (as reported by IGN).
“One of the big difficulties we had, which I think people kinda don’t remember as well, [is that] when we started testing [the original Borderlands], it became really clear that nobody knew how to play this game.
“Right now, if you give someone who’s never played Borderlands a copy of Borderlands 2 they’d pick it up pretty quickly,” he added. “Because there’s a lot of games that have added role-playing elements to them; Call of Duty has role-playing elements in their multiplayer. Destiny’s out there, and that’s really cool, and they have a lot of inspiration that they may have taken from us [crowd laughs].”
Of course, CEO Randy Pitchford clarified Armstrong’s comments. Gearbox actually worked on Halo: Combat Evolved for PC and said that, “[Armstrong] didn’t mean it like the way you just took it. You have to understand that Matt himself learned a lot about procedurally generated worlds from a data-driven system that we learned actually from Bungie when we worked on the Halo franchise.
“Our [Borderlands] characters’ jump height and movement is framed around Halo – that was our starting point. We want this to feel like Halo, because Halo’s awesome. We love Halo. There’s nothing bad I can say about Halo or Destiny.”
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