Gearbox surprised fans with a press conference this past Thursday and PAX East showing off what’s going on in the studio. Showcasing their new projects and some things that left long term fans surprised.
The main show was a mess, but it was a happy mess with small mistakes that made the big company seem so human with technical difficulties and then a magic show. It all kicked off with a teaser trailer for an upcoming project and the president of Gearbox and creative design talking about the trailer and pointing out to certain parts of the trailer and generating hype for the end of the conference big reveal.
Gearbox then decided to go into what is in store for the future of the company. After all this, they got to the main event and announced a bunch of upcoming mainline projects from the company.
Big projects such as a new remaster of the game that started the loot and shoot craze Borderlands with new 4k visuals and a complete overhaul in some of the game mechanics adding features not originally available in the first game.
New features like skins and head a minimap outside of the menu golden keys along with golden chest this means that there is support for shift codes a staple in later installments allowing the user to interact with the developers and claim skins and exclusive content by being on the lookout for these codes on their social media. This will be for the nextgen consoles and be completely free if you own the first one for PC users.
But the main event was the Borderlands 3 reveal at the end of the show. The long seven years wait since Borderlands 2 came out is coming to an end with an announcement of the third installment of the beloved series. It was quite the reveal with the first glimpse of the game there was so much to decipher seeing new a familiar faces alike the old heroes and new heroes all in one trailer and then we got our first game preview of the new villain.
In the action-packed trailer, we also got a tease at some of the new gameplay elements that are being implemented such as other worlds for the first time in the series we are getting off the border planet Pandora and heading elsewhere. Also, we got to see the series staple of its unique random gun generator with some new, never before seen features like have you ever seen a gun walk on it’s on two legs. Well, Borderlands 3 has got you covered.
The trailer continued on and had fun bits such as Brick a playable character from the first game having a sax solo. And just showing off the action-packed adventure to ride the gamer is going to be and ended with a notice saying more information will be available on April 3rd at Borderlands.com
Risk of Rain 2 a sequel no one saw coming.
Keeping in the same conference Gearbox took to announce its publishing of the newly released game of Risk of Rain 2 a complete overall of the original the biggest change being the game is no longer a pixel Metroid roguelike, but now completely changed its course and is now a fully fleshed out 3d third-person shooter roguelike
Fans of the original will be able to see the characters from the first game be brought to life in 3d and witness their play space in new handcrafted level designs that may seem familiar in visually, but be a completly new experince as well as enemies battled on a 2d platformer transformed to the new 3d world. The transition from 2d to 3d is wild change, but Hopoo games managed to take the formula of the first and translate it into a masterpiece of a 3d person survival shooter one, unlike the genre as seen a four-player co-op rouge like where each run goes a little different.
Grabbing items to make you stronger vs an endless horde of enemies to survive as many stages as you can’t each with their own stage boss. The game launched on Thursday and comes with a total of 6 different characters to play from 5 of those being locked behind certain task you have to complete, but each sport a completely different play style, the first and character you unlock by default the commando is a dual wielding soldier whose play style is rooted in the fundamentals, not very flashy gameplay.
The game comes with 3 difficulties that change the way the game is played slightly the biggest difference in them is the way the enemies scale as time goes on easy it slow how fast enemies’ progress in difficulty and on the hardest speed them up. There is also a special mode where every player is timed to compete for the best time along with a single player and multiplayer game mode. The game was a sequel that came out of nowhere and it’s pretty great that it did its a wonderful game that deserves the recognition it got at PAX
About The Author
Thomas Riley
Student - Spring 2019
