Gearbox Software shot to fame with its Borderlands franchise, with the sequel Borderlands 2 releasing late last year and still going strong with DLC content. Now, with the next generation of consoles upon us, what plans are there for the next iteration of the franchise?
Speaking to AusGamers, Gearbox’s Paul Hellquist wouldn’t divulge anything about what the studio was necessarily working on. However, he did state that, “There’s obviously more power, so some of those performance things will diminish, but…we are always filling up all of the performance we are given by the hardware manufacturers, so I’m sure we’ll have different challenges.
However, since it was a performance issue that capped the number of on-screen players in the previous games to four, could we see that cap lifted on the Xbox One and PS4? Hellquist replied that, “There is also a thing we’ve talked a lot about internally with going more than four, where we think that if we go too much more than four, the experience will actually start to break down; that four is kind of a nice sweet spot, in terms of enough craziness, and of all of these different personalities and character classes and everything, but you can still kind of keep track of what’s happening.
“We do have a little bit of a worry that if we go to eight or sixteen or something crazy, that everyone will spread out, and you’ll kind of actually lose that more intimate ‘we’re working together’ kind of experience. So there’s an interesting balance there that we’ll need to investigate.”
So while the answer isn’t necessarily “no”, there is at least talk about adding more players to the equation. What that equation eventually adds up to remains to be seen.