Shack: So Borderlands is all about drop-in, drop-out play?

Randy Pitchford: Totally drop-in, drop-out. Your character is persistent. I can drop out of my game and join yours, and you might be farther along than I am.

Shack: Does the enemy difficulty adjusts as players join and leave?

Randy Pitchford: Kind of. When you're a bad ass, let's say--you saw Marc get to level 12 with the shotgun, that bad ass shotgun, that thing was awesome. Let's say you just started the game and he joined your game, and you're now at the very beginning, he's just going to melt through that stuff. That's cool, you want that, that's why you're building the power. But there is some effect that happens there, there is some math under the hood, we have to do something.

Marc Tardif: It's not like you're going ot be level 12 and start the game and the first thing you come across is a giant thing that's just going to own you. You will destroy that thing if you're level 12.

Randy Pitchford: You'll melt through the stuff. If you are much more powerful than what that was meant to be, you'll melt through it, and that's kind of what you want. You want to feel that power when you play.

Shack: Is there a system that balances the experience load based on level, so a higher level character can't "power-level" a lower one?

Marc Tardif: The math is very similar probably to what Blizzard does with Diablo, where there's a formula that says okay, characters within this level range are playing together, and this kind of stuff happens.

Shack: One thing that I love about Diablo is how immediately rewarding the click-based combat is. How much have you guys been focusing on basic combat mechanics?

Randy Pitchford: If you break down Diablo to its core roots, the skill, the gameplay skill required by the game, it's almost like playing your desktop. The same skills you're earning to play the game are the same skills you've earned to launch the application. You put the cursor over the icon, and you click on it, and then you click on other icons to kind of decide what happens when you do that.

But a first person shooter is a totally different root game when it comes to the skill test. It's about aim, target prioritization, tool prioritization, and it's about reaction time. There is a physical skill to playing a shooter. So all of the incentives and motivation in Diablo are outside of the skill test. Those are two separate concepts. No first person shooter has ever successfully--in terms of the skill test, this is absolutely a first person shooter, but we're taking all these incentives and motivations and we're laying them on top. Those are actually two totally separate things that don't really have anything to do with eachother, just nobody's every put them together before correctly.

Marc Tardif: The reward is basically what a slot machine is. Every single time you pull down a one-armed bandit you might get a reward; every time you click on a enemy in Diablo you might get a [good] reward. Or in Borderlands' case, sometimes you maneuver around and kill somebody with your gun, same thing, you might get a reward.

Randy Pitchford: It's something cool and meaningful that you can get addicted to. You know, my type of OCD, this stuff works on me like a charm. [laughs] I'm addicted to Achievement points on Xbox Live. I've played a little bit of WoW, but I'm an addict, so I have to stop, because if I actually played it the way I'm supposed to I would have to shut down the company or something.

Shack: I'm the same way. I can't play WoW because it would end up demanding all of my time.

Randy Pitchford: But even something as simple as Achievement points on Xbox Live, that's totally nailed me. All of us might grabbed to different degrees, but we all understand the psychology, even if we don't have a language to talk about it, we kind of understand why that affects us. It's just fun, it's just cool.

I want to be a bad ass--I want to get tougher. I like the crafted experience that we've always been making, and everybody's always been making, whether you're talking about some of our games from the past, or Halo, Call of Duty. But at the end of the day, the character is the same at the end as he was in the beginning, and the tools are just laying around the world, and it's just what I picked up at the time. You don't really get to feel that power growth, which is part of what motivates us.

Marc Tardif: And another great thing about Borderlands' reward system is, unlike a game like Diablo where you kill some random thing and it just drops a random sword, and it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense--in our game, if you come across a bandit, and he's shooting at you with this really bad ass submachinegun, and he's just tearing into you, you know that when you kill him, you get his gun. And all of these guns are procedurally generated. So you might come across a guy with a gun you really, really want, if you kill him, you get it. If you kill a guy with a really, really awesome shield, you get his shield.

Shack: The "drop" is seen ahead of time.

Randy Pitchford: Yeah. As a shooter gamer, my bar for plausibility is higher. We forgive so much when we play WoW. There's so much that, if we ever made a shooter where I press the action button and [my character] does this same generic animation three feet away from the object he's interacting with, we'd just get crucified. But we forgive it because of the kind of game it is and the way it's presented. But that plausibility is actually important. Why does it make sense that when I kill that Murloc he has a fin, but the other one doesn't? And why does he have a sword on him? He didn't have a sword when I fought him. That's weird.

But in a shooter, because of the way we're perceiving the world, and the production values, and just the way that we think that's supposed to be--it's like, that guy has that gun, and I'm gonna kill him and take that fricken gun. And when he dies, gold doesn't just fly out. [laughs] But that's what the chests are for too, because you don't know what's in the chests.

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