Gearbox’s Borderlands is perhaps one of the best cartoon-ish games. Borderlands uses a different technique for its cartoon-ish like visuals than cel-shading, but the final result is pretty close to it in our opinion. Needless to say that we don’t think there is something wrong calling Borderlands a cel-shaded game (as that term is used metaphorically to describe all cartoon-ish games with outlines), but that’s just us. Did you know, however, that the game had – originally – a more realistic look to it? Well, time to witness some of the early screenshots (as well as a target trailer) of it before it got ‘cel-ified.’
Gearbox changed the game’s art style when the game was at its late development stages. Little do we know about the reasons behind this decision, however the company had previously released a couple of screenshots – and a reveal trailer – that showcased what Borderlands was originally meant to look like.
It also seems that Gearbox was inspired by a short film called Codehunters. Codehunters was produced by Bart Yates / BlinkInk and tells the story of a band of misfit warriors, vowed to protect a world under seige. The intro of this short film is almost identical to the one of Borderlands, as well as the whole art style. Quite frankly, this could easily pass as a Borderlands inspired film, though this film was released way before Borderlands got out.
Enjoy everyone!
Special thanks to Reddit’s user ‘benjamindawg’ for sharing the screenshots
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I honestly love that they changed the style. It’s unique(i couldnt imagine it any other way) something the fps genre completely lacks. dont even get me started on why they need to bring back timesplitters instead of all this other junk crytek is working on, granted the new” homefront” sounds great in theory, and crysis was a great one time play through.
And i just realized this article is from years ago. 😐
at least you weren’t 7 years late like me (and 4 years late for this comment)
what a pity. i might have played the game for more than 2 hours if it didn’t have such god awful cartoony graphics. It just completely put me off.
I know some people like it, but… yuck.