Gearboxity, the official Gearbox Software blog, has been updated with news that Borderlands has Gone Gold. Borderlands is due on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 20th and on the PC on October 26th.
Quote:
Borderlands has gone gold! Gearbox Software has now wrapped up the final versions of the game including the PC build to join the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions that have already gone off to the presses. We've done it!
"Huge Game: Explore, gather loot, complete tons of side quests and challenges, finish the main story and continue on to a second playthrough (with tougher enemies and better loot), or even challenge your friends to combat!"
Nice This game's gonna be like Chrono Trigger all over again.
When something's got a simultaneous release, 'port' isn't necessarily the right word. And, I'm not sure it's perfectly accurate to call anything produced for the 360 and the PC a port! They're basically sister platforms! If anything, the PS3 version is the port, as that's the one that would require the most work, and tweaking--being a completely different computing architecture. And I'm sure they used someone's porting technology to go to PS3 because otherwise it's a gigantic pain to port anything to the PS3. Never forget the 360 is composed of largely off-the-shelf PC parts.
When something's got a simultaneous release, 'port' isn't necessarily the right word. And, I'm not sure it's perfectly accurate to call anything produced for the 360 and the PC a port! They're basically sister platforms! If anything, the PS3 version is the port, as that's the one that would require the most work, and tweaking--being a completely different computing architecture. And I'm sure they used someone's porting technology to go to PS3 because otherwise it's a gigantic pain to port anything to the PS3. Never forget the 360 is composed of largely off-the-shelf PC parts.
My biggest concern long term is that MS in all its kill the PC wisdom will use a different architecture for 720 making these simultaneous "ports" much less likely (you notice this doesn't happen with MS published titles). Still that's a long way off and with digital distribution starting to hit its stride, PC has a way of continuing to thrive. Ironically this one I will be getting for 360 since that's where most of my gaming friends play.
I'm actually not worried about that at all, Idi. The Xbox approach of using lightly modified PC hardware is not only successful, it's efficient, and thus all designs will tend towards it. Even Nintendo stopped trying to commission totally custom hardware and went to the pros, starting back with the 'Cube which featured a mass-market modified ATI GPU. Made dev'ing for the cube very easy and cheap for producers.
No, the future of console gaming is actually to move closer and closer to the PC as the primary gaming device. Notice how PC prices are inching closer to the price of a console, $300 netbooks? Won't be long when a netbook has all the processing power you'd want for gaming. Won't be tomorrow, but the march of technology makes it inevitable soon enough.
At the same time, TV's have become flatscreen LCD monitors, so that product convergence is already complete. In fact, as I type this, I'm writing on an LCD TV that was originally purchased only to watch tv. Then, my regular old computer only LCD went dark and I realized this one had computer-input capability. Bam, been my primary monitor ever since and works absolutely perfectly. Costs the same as that old LCD did too...
As for MS titles, why don't they port to PC, that's a good question actually. Well, it's not exactly true though is it, since Halo was ported to PC, so perhaps it just gonna take awhile? Dunno. I'm sure someone has a rationale that will illuminate the answer for us.
Hardly, they're all ports. Not saying they're bad, but it's not PC love when the games are designed for consoles first and PC second.
Games like the Witcher qualify as PC love imo.
- Usually when people say 'port' it's with a sneer and bad taste in their mouth :P I know, I feel the same way. We've all been burned before.
But, there's been a recent trend of companies really truly nailing ports. A port is losing its negative connotations.
First time I really noticed the change is when Silicon Knights was charged with doing the Metal Gear Solid II port to the Gamecube. That version was better than the original, many said. It was the definitive version.
Then you had this phenomena arise where companies started doing multiple console releases at once.
At first this took the form of making the game for one console and hiring another company to translate art assets into the other guy's proprietary format and then finish the programming for the port. This almost always went bad in some way. The consoles were just too different. Look at how bad Earthworm Jim looks on the Genesis compared to the lush, smoothly blended colors on the SNES. Even then, they often didn't feel the same.
But in the modern age, starting I suppose with about the Xbox generation, you had companies producing more and more advanced middleware with the capability to automatically translate art assets between consoles. You could build a game for both platforms simultaneously without effectively twice the dev cost. You had the Quake engine; and the Unreal engine I remember being especially awesome in this respect.
And now, if a company does their job right, a simultaneous release isn't the burden it once was--except for the inevitable tweaking the PS3 will require, I assume, since you're gonna have to tweak them little SPU nipples to get the Cell to squeal in any case :P
- Usually when people say 'port' it's with a sneer and bad taste in their mouth :P I know, I feel the same way. We've all been burned before.
But, there's been a recent trend of companies really truly nailing ports. A port is losing its negative connotations.
First time I really noticed the change is when Silicon Knights was charged with doing the Metal Gear Solid II port to the Gamecube. That version was better than the original, many said. It was the definitive version.
Then you had this phenomena arise where companies started doing multiple console releases at once.
At first this took the form of making the game for one console and hiring another company to translate art assets into the other guy's proprietary format and then finish the programming for the port. This almost always went bad in some way. The consoles were just too different. Look at how bad Earthworm Jim looks on the Genesis compared to the lush, smoothly blended colors on the SNES. Even then, they often didn't feel the same.
But in the modern age, starting I suppose with about the Xbox generation, you had companies producing more and more advanced middleware with the capability to automatically translate art assets between consoles. You could build a game for both platforms simultaneously without effectively twice the dev cost. You had the Quake engine; and the Unreal engine I remember being especially awesome in this respect.
And now, if a company does their job right, a simultaneous release isn't the burden it once was--except for the inevitable tweaking the PS3 will require, I assume, since you're gonna have to tweak them little SPU nipples to get the Cell to squeal in any case :P
Speaking as a PC gamer, for the time being, I agree that ports are much improved these days.
Even though there have been some very bad console to PC ports, GTA IV for example, I think the overall quality has been better than ever over the last couple of years.
Games like Mirror's Edge, LEGO Batman, Dead Space (besides the vsynch mouse lag stumble), Assassin's Creed, GRID, Battlestations: Pacific and Mass Effect are all examples of very good ports. Two games I've played recently, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Resident Evil 5, are excellent ports.
There's a couple of reasons behind it; like others have mentioned, it's easier to port games from similar hardware, like the Xbox 360, than it was porting games from the dominate platform of the last generation, the PS2. The second is emerging markets.
I read an article in PC Gamer a while back about how several Japanese publishers, including Capcom, were looking at the PC as a platform with tremendous growth potential. According to the article the publishers were not looking at the traditional markets (North America, Europe, Japan) for said growth. They were looking around the globe at places where the cost of consoles/console games are prohibitive and PCs are becoming more common in the average household.
As far as Microsoft goes I think the company wants to remain the dominate platform for PC gaming, with DirectX and GFWL, because that's the one thing that the competition has very little chance of gaining ground on. But its focus is clearly on building the Xbox brand, so I doubt we'll see any of its exclusive titles coming to the PC.
This game's gonna be like Chrono Trigger all over again.
