Borderlands 2 Proves Gearbox’s “Renewed Commitment” to PC Gaming

Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford recently said during a developer session at Rezzed that the studio was, and has always been, thinking lovingly of PC gamers. Their work on Borderlands 2 reaffirms that.

According to Pitchford, when Gearbox develops a game, it’s always done on PCs with PS3 and Xbox 360 dev kits “plugged into” the system.

“We develop on the PC, it’s how we make games,” said Pitchford (via VG 247). “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.”

Well okay, that love letter by Claptrap was…actually kind of creepy, but it definitely outlined the problems present in the first Borderlands game and the steps Gearbox is taking to make up for it in the second title. On top of achievement support, cloud save support, and control pad support, there’s going to be a lot of other perks given to PC gamers like remappable keybindings for both the keyboard and mouse, higher resolution support, LAN support, and friends list support.

“It’s a miracle we did what we did with Borderlands 1 — it’s a big risk to build a new IP,” said Pitchford. “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 is expected to release on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 this coming September.

Via VG 247.