Borderlands 4 boss Randy Pitchford says Gearbox doesn't have "good competitors" in the looter-shooter genre because other developers don't spend enough time thinking about the mechanics of the loot grind.
Speaking to the BBC, Pitchford argued that the Borderlands series' core mechanic - the choice about whether to stick with your current piece of loot or swap for a new one - "is a very compelling, fundamental, both need and skill that our brains have."
Gearbox, he says, has "reduced" that need "to this simple moment with this interface in this system. It's a gratifying loop. It's a gratifying decision. Our brains need to do it, and our brains like doing it."
Pitchford's neuroscientific explanation continues: "The more we exercise that muscle, not just in the video game but literally in life - this is what separates our species from a lot of others, and how we developed language and how we developed all kinds of high levels of consciousness and cognition that allow us to analyze the world. Most of what our prefrontal cortex is for - why that adaptation exists and what it's used for - is that skill, or versions of it."
Working out whether your existing tool is better than your new tool, "and managing the cognition between the objective, almost scientific analysis of that choice, versus the emotional impact on that choice, is very interesting, and dare I say it addictive," Pitchford posits. But he also suggests that other developers don't really think about the loot grind with this kind of attention.
"If other game designers that were trying to get in on the action" understood the neuroscience behind Gearbox's decision making, Pitchford claims "we'd have more competitors, or we'd have good competitors. But we haven't so far. It's weird. The kinds of people that just want to go after it, they're not thinking about it on that level. They're just putting into motion something because of market analysis. It's not a designer or creator's drive that's doing it. It's either a business drive or a wishing to be something that you're not kind of drive."
Pitchford says that he "fully expected" a whole wave "of other games imitating and aping" Borderlands after the release of the first game. If that had happened, he says, "we'd be dead, because we [couldn't] compete with a lot of other folks, especially back then."
Given that Borderlands 4 is likely to push the Borderlands franchise over 100 million sales, it is admittedly strange that so few meaningful competitors have attempted to muscle in on the genre. Destiny remains the only major loot-shooter alternative, although games like Mycopunk have, more recently, made their own attempts. And while I don't entirely follow Pitchford's suggestion that playing Borderlands is good for developing your frontal lobe, his claim that simply chasing trends without thinking about good design is a bad business strategy does hold significantly more water. It probably also helps if you've got someone to take away your Twitter account occasionally, too.
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