We’re very proud of Borderlands, but we’re also aware that is has a lot of rough edges. And that’s where a lot of our focus is going with Borderlands 2. I wish there was just 1 or 2 things I could talk about to easily answer your question, but Borderlands 2 is going to be a much more meaningful experience because of 10,000 little things that are improved in addition to a few big things. We’re improving the enemy AI, the UI, the guns are getting more variety, there are more skills, characters have more personality, missions are better, the plot is stronger, the animations are smoother, vehicles have better handling, and so on and so forth. If we do our jobs right it’ll mean that everything just runs smooth and there is nothing bothering you that takes you out of the “shooter looter” experience.

Audio has absolutely influenced development in Aliens: Colonial Marines. We have entire gameplay mechanics built around the iconic sound effects you remember from the films. We definitely want players to recognize them.

One audio-centric concept we’re playing around with involves the “ping” of the motion tracker. The idea is that sound chimes once, very noticeably, as soon as an enemy enters the detection radius, regardless of whether or not your tracker is already out. There’d also be an on-screen notification that your tracker is picking up enemies, so that we’re not relying purely on audio. At that point, you’d be able to take out the tracker and get a full read-out of what’s going on, in the same style as the movie.

- Chris Brock, Associate Producer

The founders of the studio, myself included, sat around my dining room table and brainstormed the identity of the studio we wanted to form – including its name.

We liked the beauty and creativity that comes through when you look into a real gearbox, but we also appreciated how the thing is a very precise piece of machinery with many cogs working together in a ballet of technology and engineering to get the most out of the energy that is put into it.

A gearbox invokes feelings of performance and the nexus of design and engineering and simple parts working together to make a complex thing operate with efficiency. These are all great thoughts when compared against the culture and approach we wanted our studio to take.

The text component of the logo was first typed out on an old manual typewriter that Brian Martel (one of the Gearbox founders) had. That original treatment has been thickened up a bit to make it more readable in different printed configurations, but I think we’ll likely want to keep that font for the text logo as it speaks to this nice sort of balance between the mechanical precision of something like a typewriter juxtaposed against the art of a unique font and the natural organic kind of result when ink is pressed onto paper via a stamp and the ink bleeds a bit and imperfections in the paper affect the transmission of the more pristine font that sits on the stamp.

The Gearbox icon was developed by Brian Martel who was exploring a simple way for the concept of a box to be blended with the concept of a gear. We have had some fun doing various treatments with the icon – replacing the hole in the center of the cog with different shapes that reflect the context of the use-case or manipulating the color or texture of the icon. It’s a little thing, but it’s meaningful to us and becomes more meaningful every day we spend with it.

- Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software CEO and President

 

Here, take a look inside one of our snack rooms: