Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4522
November 2009 16 ■ ■ ■ ■ Gaming for us internally that people were disap- pointed when we fi nished," says Cozzens. "It is nice to see that art can still have such a signifi cant impact on developers as well as players. ese days, we are becoming jaded when it comes to super-realistic, high-tech visuals; everyone expects them. "But here, we were able to come up with this spectac- ular imagery without having to rely com- pletely on frame-rate killing technology, and all these crazy bells and whistles." Indeed, the new aesthetic diff erentiates the game and suits the gameplay well. But there was also a desire to hark back to games from the 1990s. "Today, a lot of games are trying to be an embellishment of reality. Whereas when you look at games from the '90s, such as Grim Fandango, you are enter- ing this world that is very diff erent from your own—rich, vibrant," adds Cozzens. "You experience things you don't expect because when you begin to have a wild tongue-in- cheek aesthetic, there are all these things you can do in that universe, and it becomes its own thing. We wanted players to remember the magic and mystique from when they fi rst opened games like Full rottle and saw this amazing, unique world." Nevertheless, change can be a daunting and scary proposition. But instead of open- ing a Pandora's box, the transformation unleashed a new level of creative thinking that set the artists on an exciting path that resulted in a game that Gearbox hopes oth- ers will look back upon just as fondly a de- cade or so from now. ■ Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor for Computer Graphics World. November 2009 16 It's hard to believe that, with the high cost of game develop- ment, a studio would risk it all by doing a 180 after spending almost three years in development and completely changing the look of all its game assets. Even harder to believe is that a major publisher would go along with that decision. Well, it happened, and no doubt both Gearbox and 2K Games will benefi t greatly from that decision, as the redirected Borderlands began hitting store shelves recently. So how did such a radical change happen? Three years into development, art director Brian Martel put a team together and did some R&D on the art style, which "is about 50 percent from what we have today due to so many people contributing to it," he says. "The style just began to grow and evolve as we found solu- tions to crafting all this art. It was a huge collaboration between our artists and our outsourcing companies." Borderlands development began like most games. Artists generated concept art to imagine the world. As is typical, the concept art, done mainly by hand, was exaggerated because the artists wanted to bring forth certain character personalities. Then, when it came time to build the game, the team focused on making the world feel real. "It was nice, but that is what everyone else does," says Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox and executive producer of the game. "After a while, all the titles start to look similar." In 2008, Pitchford says the group began to notice that its ef- forts to create a blended RPG/FPS was paying off from a game design point. "The game was fun, and it was working," he adds. "So, we made the decision to invest more in the game—to make it bigger and fully realize the potential of what we were doing." About the same time, Martel led what Pitchford jokingly re- fers to as "an insurgency," wherein Martel decided to try and make a real-time rendering of what looked like concept art. Mar- tel asked for a few weeks to build a prototype. "I trust him. So I said, 'OK.' When it came time to show me the prototype, he knew I was nervous. I didn't know what they were doing exactly, other than they were changing the art style and that we would have to redo all the art if we went with it." Complicating things was the fact that Gearbox had already publicly shown its earlier work. A lot was riding on such a deci- sion—not the least of which was time and money for the devel- oper and the publisher. "They turned on the prototype, and it was amazing," Pitch- ford says of his fi rst glance at the new aesthetic. "I never saw a game quite like it. On one level, it was Borderlands com- ing through, but there was all this attitude, this personality and charm. It is a horribly ugly, violent world, and they instantly made it beautiful with their artwork." –KM Changing Gears Gearbox was already well into production when it changed the game aesthetic from that of a photoreal look (left) to one that is more like concept art (right).