Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford has confirmed the studio’s commitment to delivering a stellar gaming experience to PC users with Borderlands 2. As if Claptrap’s love letter wasn’t enough to confirm this already.
Speaking during a developer’s session at Rezzed, Pitchford said when Gearbox develops a game, it’s always developed on PC because even the PS3 and Xbox 360 development kits are “plugged into” the system.
“We develop on the PC, it’s how we make games,” he said. “Even our development kits for console are plugged into PCs. However, we are developers and we take a lot of things for granted as most of us aren’t worried about dealing with our network configurations and things like that. So, we’ll do it and not worry about the consoles. But what we learned after shipping Borderlands 1, was customers who play on the PC expect better treatment within the game itself.
“If you look up that Claptrap love letter you’ll see some of the things we’re doing. It shows a renewed commitment to not just ourselves, but the customer side of the PC game.
“With both BL1 and BL2, the PC version is the best looking, highest fidelity version of the game, but what we’ve learned, is that the details are important to you on the PC and we made a strong effort to improve those details in the product.”
The efforts made to create a better PC game, which Claptrap outlined, are as follows:
- 100% mouse usable menus/mouse wheel scrolling.
- Achievement support
- Cloud save support
- Control pad support
- FOV slider
- Friends list support
- Integrated V-sync option
- LAN support (including offline mode)
- Logitech keyboard support
- Mouse smoothing options (can be disabled completely)
- Native multiplayer matchmaking
- No port forwarding required
- PC-specific UI
- Push to talk
- Remappable keybindings for keyboard/mouse
- Support for higher resolutions
“It’s a miracle we did what we did with Borderlands 1 – it’s a big risk to build a new IP, Pitchford continued. “We spent every dollar we had on that game, and while we had a nice budget, it still had us confined to being rational and responsible of what is expected to happen.
“Fortunately BL1 was a tremendous success, millions and millions of units sold. We’re at 6 million units sold right now, and that is exciting for a new IP -its unprecedented really.
“That means, we were able to put the budget into BL2 that it deserves – a budget I wish we’d had for the first game – and as such we can up some of our priorities.”
Borderlands 2 releases on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in September.
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