Great interview with Randy Pitchford (Borderlands)

I posted this on SA, but I thought folks here would appreciate the read too, hopefully this will get you guys more excited about the game: (Note: this is not the complete Interview, I just jotted down the parts that I thought were interesting. I left out things like thoughts on PC platform, Inspiration for the game, more talk about Steam and MS, and Brick & Mortar retail experience).


There is a great preview of Borderlands/interview with Randy Pitchford on this month's Maximum PC.

It was a great interview, after reading it, I have even more respect for Randy, and Gearbox. They seem to have a good view on DRM, and from the sound of it, Borderlands will not be using any obnoxious copy protections:

Randy said:

… DRM has been handled terribly for so many years. For example. false negatives are a disaster for everyone. I'd much rather have a false positive, and allow thieves to play, than prevent a paying customer from playing my game. The industry has destroyed a lot of good will with DRM problems.

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He also talked about how it would be better if Steam was its own business, so that there wouldn't be much conflict of interest. Even though Gearbox has great relationship with Valve, but

Randy said:

I love Valve games, and I do business with the company. … Steam helps us as customers, but it's also a money grab, and Valve is exploiting a lot of people in a way that's not totally fair. Valve is taking a larger share than it should for the service it's providing. It's exploiting a lot of small guys. For us big guys, we're going to sell the units and we will be fine.

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He also commented on MS focusing on consoles more, but it is a good and a bad thing, a good thing since

some of us aren't sure we want Microsoft to control[distribution]

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The interview also had some good summary of things we already know about Borderlands for us PC gamers, for completeness sake, I will recap them here:

- Borderlands started on PC, so it is not a port, and it will look the best on PC. But it will be scalable for older PCs.

A 2-year-old PC will be comparable to the Xbox experience.

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- No lobbies needed for MP experience, and 2 ways to PvP (duel or arena).
- After game story line completion, you could replay the game where everythign will be harder.
- Some end-game (max level) contents to grind for gear. There will be DLC for Borderlands, for all platforms. GFWL will not be used, but Steam is still a possibility.