The resulting game is far from meritless, despite the shrieking dialogue which, like Borderlands, leans much too hard on idioms to get cheap laughs. The intent was to do for MOBAs what Borderlands had for action-RPGs-folding the highly tactical mess of cooldown abilities, teamfights and friendly minions into the form of a first-person shooter. Gearbox's most fascinating failure, in a competitive field, has been Battleborn. It was as if one part of Gearbox's personality had swallowed the other. Meanwhile, the Borderlands games enjoyed critical acclaim. Yet when the studio won the licence for Aliens: Colonial Marines, the perfect opportunity to follow a squad through an Opposing Force-style gibfest, it failed to rise to the occasion.
Gearbox still retained enough nostalgia for the '90s to buy up Duke Nukem Forever, taking on its attendant baggage and inevitable disappointment.
Such was the backlash against this new vision for Brothers in Arms that Furious 4 simply never came out. When a new Brothers in Arms sequel was announced at E3 in 2011, it more closely resembled Borderlands than its parent series, eschewing historical authenticity for “tall tales”.įour player characters, including a Texan with a cattle prod and an Irishman with a penchant for tasering Nazis in the balls, would clear levels punctuated by silly set-pieces, like a runaway ferris wheel. It also seemed to close off a part of Gearbox's identity, to the frustration of long-term fans. Tactics were something you coordinated over voice chat, rather than with a right click on the mouse.īorderlands proved itself to be incredibly forward-thinking, predicting the direction of shooters over the next decade, and opening up a money seam that has sustained the studio to this day. Like the Marines, Borderlands' four characters each had distinct roles, but now they came from the realm of fantasy RPGs: tank, mage, ranger, and berserker. The AI teammates that had made Opposing Force and Brothers in Arms memorable became co-op partners. The idea, at the time, was new: to apply the RNG, levelling and loot cycle of Diablo to an FPS, without losing the immediate and dynamic feedback players had felt in Half-Life.