Games

[MjFrancis]

http://www.borderlandsthegame.com/

Borderlands™ sends up to four co-op players to the harsh frontier planet Pandora in search of a mysterious Alien Vault legend. Featuring a unique First Person Roleplaying Shooter gameplay, you'll customize your character as you explore and battle enemies in frantic FPS combat. And what would a Roleplaying Shooter be without loot?

Borderlands'™ groundbreaking content generation system creates a near-endless variety of weapon and items to customize your character! Players can join and leave other players' games at any time, or choose to face the challenges of Borderlands™ alone. All these features combine with a deep, rich fiction and a bold art style to create a breathtaking experience that challenges the conventions of modern shooters...

Ignore the nescient RPG ramblings, Gearbox Software's Borderlands is a co-op FPS (with XP and some PvP). Gametrailers has a decent in-game preview that they posted on September 17th.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/preview-hd-borderlands/56124

[icycalm]

I like everything about it except the numbers-flashing deal. Reminds me of Battle Fantasia -- that shit has no place in action games. It messes with your concentration, however interesting it may be to be able to gauge immediately the effect of your new skill/hardware upgrades.

The graphics remind of XIII and Crackdown -- they are somewhere in between the two in terms of stylization; less than the former but quite a bit more than the latter. Character design could be better, but overall it looks great and most importantly different.

Have there been any other stat-heavy FPSes apart from the Deus Ex games? I can't think of any right now. It's a big gaping void, and this game seems on track to fill it. Four-player co-op is merely the cherry on top.

[Worm]

There's Fallout 3. It's got skills and perks similar to Deus Ex's skills and augs. Most of them are adapted from the earlier turn-based Fallout games, but modified to fit into FPS mechanics.

Speaking of: here's an overview of the skill trees for each character in Borderlands (light spoilers, I suppose, but I expect most of this information will be in the manual anyway).

[prankenstein]

Have there been any other stat-heavy FPSes apart from the Deus Ex games?

Tron 2.0 Killer App [PC] [Xbox]

[A.Wrench]

Pardon my pessimism, but this interview with the executive producer kind of killed my enthusiasm for this game. He makes a point of saying that they're making this game more "accessible" than Fallout 3. I'm also skeptical of the "seven gazillion different guns" boast as I'm sure they're procedurally generated from a mass of parts, some of which are just linear stat upgrades.

It'll probably still be somewhat enjoyable as a novelty, but I don't expect it to live up to the hype it's getting.

[icycalm]

procedurally generated

Read this before you attempt to use that term here again:

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=3022

[Pedestrian]

Have there been any other stat-heavy FPSes apart from the Deus Ex games? I can't think of any right now. It's a big gaping void, and this game seems on track to fill it. Four-player co-op is merely the cherry on top.

There have been a few. The ones I have played that I can remember off the top of my head are: Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Arx Fatalis, System Shock 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic: Dark Messiah. Arx Fatalis is really more along the lines of Morrowind or Oblivion, but it has archery and spells that are manually aimed, and has a lot of design elements in common with Deus Ex. Bioshock might count as well, although it doesn't really have stats so much as sets of traits that can be purchased and equipped like weapons and armor, even if some of them have effects like 'hacking is easier' or 'wrench attacks do more damage'.

I want to include the Stalker games (Shadow of Chernobyl et al.) but the aspects of Deus Ex they borrow are primarily character interaction and inventory management, not stats.

Stat-based FPSes I haven't played are (maybe) Oblivion, Morrowind, and the aforementioned Fallout 3, but if you go too far down that road you have to start counting things like Daggerfall and Ultima Underworld. They're still first-person games with action elements, but they aren't really shooters.

FPS/RPG hybrids are one of my favorite sub-genres, but I'm not really interested in Borderlands. It looks to me like it has the potential to degrade into a difficulty-free killfest, grinding for experience points and phat lewt in the form of random cool new guns.

I think there's a lot of potential for party-based first-person action games, shooter or otherwise, to be excellent, and I'd like to be wrong in my prediction that this won't be very good. I just realized that the last FPS with class-based co-op I've seen was a Quake 1 mod. Huh.

[icycalm]

Stat-based FPSes I haven't played are (maybe) Oblivion, Morrowind

Oblivion and Morrowind are FPSes... :(

Goodbye.