Tuesday 27 November 2007

There goes the business plan then...

I posted this in a thread on Rock Paper Shotgun about Borderlands, but it's worth repeating here.

“The game will also have a unique feature similar to Diablo’s random level generation system. This new system will generate a nearly endless (750,000+) number of item variations. According to the preview of the game in Game Informer magazine,

“We saw a ridiculous amount of guns, but perhaps the strangest was a revolver that fired shotgun shells. Gearbox is constantly surprised with what the system comes up with. They’ve seen rifles shoot everything from homing darts to rockets. ‘One of the guns tracks onto something and locks, and after three seconds, (the target) suddenly explodes,’ director Matthew Armstrong says.”

Ah bugger. There goes the genius business plan I’ve been nursing for the last five years… I was going to try to sell it to Valve as well…

1 comment:

humpolec said...

Phrases like "(750,000+) number of item variations" don't impress me anymore - you have to be careful with procedurally generated content, too much of it can get boring and/or stupid.
Random dungeon generation is great, random monsters and artifacts not necessarily so.