14 DAY TRIAL // Gearbox Software, the maker of the acclaimed first-person shooter Borderlands 2, is currently working on what they call a "hero shooter," a sort of multiplayer online battle arena where you spend your time hitting people in the face with bullets, as opposed to axes and spells.
The company has so far shown a 5-on-5 competitive mode titled Incursion that plays out similarly to how Dota 2 or League of Legends does, but the team is working on something much bigger than just a futuristic version of the competitive, fantasy-infused fun of those games.
What Gearbox aims to do
Gearbox is aiming to offer a variety of different play modes and a universe which players will be able to explore, with a lot of potential for replayability.
"With Borderlands, it was really fun to have all these different guns, so we can say, 'Hey, any gun that's ever been in any first-person shooter, you can find something like that in Borderlands.' We're doing that with characters in Battleborn," Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software, said during a press event in New York last week, as quoted by Polygon.
"So that's why we call it a hero-shooter, right? Every kind of character trope you've imagined in an FPS, we want a representation of that in Battleborn," he continued.
For the time being, the developer has only revealed a handful of characters, and each and every one of them is designed to bring a unique aspect of gameplay into focus.
"I hope every character in this game is the main character of a game that hasn't come out yet," Battleborn Art Director Scott Kester teased.
About the game
Battleborn takes place sometime in the distant future, following catastrophic events that see entire star systems being destroyed, with all remaining living organism retreating to a single location. Divided between five different factions based on their belief regarding the end of existence, they start battling, probably proving the ones thinking that they would destroy themselves right.
However, amid the constant quarreling and infighting, the common enemy is revealed, in the form of a devouring race, the Varelsi, the culprit behind the destruction of the universe, and the five factions decide to send their very best agents, the Battleborn, to deal with the threat.
"This is a story that's about resource scarcity. It's about people with very, very, very different ideals and beliefs fighting over what little there is left to fight over," said Aaron Linde, Battleborn's lead writer.
Randy Varnell, the game's creative director, described the Varelsi as a race of creatures who "anthropomorphize entropy" and are unnaturally accelerating the end of the universe.
The team intends to reveal the story of the game through battle banter, with each character having 500 to 700 lines of dialogue, in order to offer a more subtle way of conveying motivations and attitudes, and enabling players to gradually gain a better understanding of the events at hand.
