I am personally a huge fan of the Borderlands franchise. Given it has some obvious flaws, like many enemies being nothing but glorified bullet sponges (not all, but enough for me to call it out) and the infamous glitchy patches of ground (and some more small issues here and there) but I have nothing but great memories from this series overall.
The game has practically invented the Looter-Shooter genre with a plethora of guns to choose from. Different manufacturers, rarity, elemental effects, scopes and plenty of other customizations make the game-play never feel too repetitive and the choices always seem infinite, making use of that FOMO over which gun is better for me...
Your load-out changes constantly and thus your approach and experience in combat. So, the question is how did Borderlands design this amazing system? Lets explore a bit.
1) Emergent Game System:
The gazillion gun system is an excellent example of emergence in games. In a nutshell, it means combining two or more previously known systems, mechanics or features in games to create a completely new thing.
In Borderlands, they combined the procedural content generation [used mainly for infinite level generations in games like TBOI (The Binding of Issac) ] with a much simpler weapon spawn/inventory serving as loot for winning a battle.
These two features had been seen many times before independently but working in tandem....they gave us something totally new and incredible. They gave us The First Goddamn Looter-Shooter.
There were a few tweaks done on the procedural gun generation system over the course of the series (like adding the Grinder in Presequel ), but going into that is another rabbit hole of why it works/does not work as a Game Design System.
2) Gun Classifications:
The weapons are classified in various ways. Namely:
Gun Manufacturers: Vladof, Maliwan, Atlas, Dahl, Torgue, Hyperion, Jakobs (my personal favourite) are a few of the many weapon manufacturers in the game. Each manufacturer provides guns with different qualities. For example: Maliwan guns are always Elemental, Torgue guns have dipping projectile motion and are always explosive. I will cover this (hopefully) in a separate post.
Gun Types: This one is pretty basic. The game offers guns of different types like pistols, shotguns, launchers, SMGs, assaults and sniper rifles. Different manufactures also specialize in different gun types.
Gun Rarity: Guns are also classified in terms of their rarity. Will go deeper into this (in tandem with the manufacturers) in the later posts.
3) Gun Generation:
In a 2019 IGN first interview, the creators working on Borderlands revealed how creating this massive inventory of guns was possible from a design and also a visual perspective.
In Borderlands 3, each gun is made up of 35 swap-able weapon parts and a separate inventory of these weapon parts is around 15-1700, so effectively the combination yields an unimaginable number. Yes, after a hypothetical set of combinations is achieved, they probably put in a lot of filters to flesh out redundant combinations.....but are we sure this combination of 35 parts, chosen from an inventory 1500 will yield more than a billion guns?
Well, I tried to do the math:
This is the number I got for 35 customizable parts and an inventory of 1500.....a number totally unfathomable, pretty sure even after applying hardcore filters that slash through unwanted combinations....we'd still have a number wayy over Billions.
A combination of all three aspects as discussed above gives us a stable and effective system allowing us access to this seemingly neverending arsenal of badass weapons!
Hope you guys liked this. To know more check out the following links (References):
If you like the post, want to discuss it further, argue about the bullet-sponge comment (change my mind!) or just wanna chat. You can reach out to me on:
IG: ace5160 (also posting game design summary and artworks)
Thanks and Take care! :D
GG