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With its fine fusion of stylised visuals, accomplished shooting gameplay, superb co-op elements and MMO-style character building, Borderlands should deliver developer Gearbox plenty of success. Gifted with an impressive 8/10 review score on Eurogamer, it's clearly a highly desirable game, but out of the three SKUs available, which is the most worthy of your investment?
Back in days of yore, cross-platform projects from PC-centric developers like Gearbox would follow a predictable pattern: the computer version could be seen as the "master game", from which the console versions would be derived, with varying levels of compromise attached to each of the latter. However, there has been a fundamental shift in recent times to developers concentrating mostly on the console renditions, with only minor technical improvements made on the PC side of things. This is perhaps most noteworthy in terms of texture quality; art assets that target 720p look a little lacklustre at 1080p, as the additional texture definition required to really make an impression simply isn't there.
This new approach also "works" in that the baseline enthusiast PC is likely to contain more processing muscle and, crucially, memory than the Xbox 360 and PS3. The consoles have defined the baseline, and even a relatively modest entry-spec PC with an £80 graphics card can easily surpass that general performance level, hence we see fairly basic ports with frightening regularity.
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With its fine fusion of stylised visuals, accomplished shooting gameplay, superb co-op elements and MMO-style character building, Borderlands should deliver developer Gearbox plenty of success. Gifted with an impressive 8/10 review score on Eurogamer, it's clearly a highly desirable game, but out of the three SKUs available, which is the most worthy of your investment?
Back in days of yore, cross-platform projects from PC-centric developers like Gearbox would follow a predictable pattern: the computer version could be seen as the "master game", from which the console versions would be derived, with varying levels of compromise attached to each of the latter. However, there has been a fundamental shift in recent times to developers concentrating mostly on the console renditions, with only minor technical improvements made on the PC side of things. This is perhaps most noteworthy in terms of texture quality; art assets that target 720p look a little lacklustre at 1080p, as the additional texture definition required to really make an impression simply isn't there.
This new approach also "works" in that the baseline enthusiast PC is likely to contain more processing muscle and, crucially, memory than the Xbox 360 and PS3. The consoles have defined the baseline, and even a relatively modest entry-spec PC with an £80 graphics card can easily surpass that general performance level, hence we see fairly basic ports with frightening regularity.
Read more...
More...