CGSociety - Borderlands

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Gearbox Art Director talks to CGSociety about the
characters and animation style of Borderlands.

CGSociety :: Game Production Focus
30 July 2009, by Peter Rizkalla

One of the most outstanding looking and promising titles shown at E3 was Borderlands: released by 2K Games; developed by Gearbox. Gamers will remember Gearbox as the same guys who put together 'Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway'. Borderlands is a role-playing game slash first-person shooter and, since its conception, Borderlands has constantly been a work in progress with a dramatic change in visuals late last year.

The extensive QA process is due to its computer generated weapons drop system. Not many game houses ever choose to release a game of this genre because the sheer amount of work Borderlands required was a gigantic exploit. Personally, I’m excited. After seeing Borderlands in action at E3 I instantly set my sights on it to see how the game would come together in the end.

It's great to see guys like Gearbox pushing the envelope of game development because it only spells good things for the game industry as a whole. The Gearbox Art Director of Borderlands, Brian Martel, took time out to give us a deep look into the development of this enormous endeavor. Like I said, the visuals of Borderlands went through a massive overhaul last year with the introduction of a new, cell-shaded scheme. The Gearbox team did not want the game to look like every other shooter out there but rather have it look like animated pre-renders.

“From the artistic side we wanted it to truly feel like a piece of concept art that has come to life," says Martel. “We talked about how when we all look at a piece of concept art. Take a concept car for example, the end product rarely looks like the artwork. Especially in Detroit where you wish they would make some of your favorite designs but they rarely do.” Borderlands is set in a ruined world that is filled with bandits and where giant, mutated monsters are a constant threat. “From a high level world standpoint we wanted the world to feel like the fringes of space the distant frontier of space if you will," says Martel. “We were trying to have you experience a world that was overrun by nature and bandits but had a long lost treasure to be found.”

Borderlands looks like it plays very similarly to the classic RPG, Diablo. If you remember, Diablo had players choose a character class and play through a massive, ever changing environment where the development of character strengths was the player’s choice and where weapons fell randomly and could contain a multitude of different attributes. Another title that Borderlands reminds me of is XIII which was a story driven, first-person shooter whose graphics were completely cell-shaded. Borderlands looks like a mixture of both Diablo and XIII but, rather, is set in an open world. Martel tells us “We wanted to create a game that married the addictive RPG desire to find the next cool weapon or item with a great FPS game that had all of the super action the genre is known for and in the end the end become a new amalgamation the RPS or Role Playing Shooter.”

“Something more akin to a sketch or a type of rendering technique used on the page of concept art. We are using normal maps to give us form, depth, and specular information to accentuate what is happening inside of the lines of the ink like outline. In additionally we have taken great pains to get ink lines in the defuse map. The textures are more akin to a gauche under-painting with ink on top of it. The interior lines in the diffuse art coupled with the line drawn outside of the model give it a completely hand drawn concept art look that is jaw dropping, especially when you see it move!”

With any cell-shaded form of mapping there is a constant problem with adding a sense of depth. This is where lighting comes in. Lighting a cell mapped world requires a very delicate touch or the whole game will look totally off. Martel explains “We added some really amazing lighting techniques that give our scene a lot of contrast while grounding all of our objects and characters in the world. That coupled with the realtime ambient occlusion really sets everything in the world and puts that last touch to make it truly concept art like. We also used a ton of emissive textures, color shading masks to colorize, and a ridiculously robust extensible system that gives our designers incredible freedoms in modifying the look and feel of our assets.”