We Have A Borderlands Release Date!

You finally have a date to circle on your calendar.

Borderlands publisher 2K Games announced today they will launch the title in North America on October 20th. A release in  the UK, mainland Europe, Australia, and elsewhere will follow on October 23.

Gamespot first first broke the story . (Thanks to forum poster BorderGuard for pointing this out.) The date was then confirmed on Gearbox's Twitter page.

2k Confident

2K Games president Christoph Hartmann shrugged off the competition Borderlands will face upon its release. Heavy hitter Uncharted 2 comes out October 13.

"I don't think we have to be afraid of competition or shy of what's out there," he told the game site. "I think this holiday season is a little bit lighter in triple-A games than last year. It's actually a good holiday to put something out."

"There's always risk and opportunity. The risk is you have a hard time standing out against established IP. The opportunity is you have a lot of traffic here and it can be a much bigger product at retail than it would be otherwise."

A Long Wait

Long-time readers of this site know that fans of the game have been waiting for this day for a while. Borderlands was originally slated for a late 2008 release. When Borderlands Guide made its first post in August 2008, we suspected the game was only a few months away.

Once source of delay was a radical overhaul of the game's graphics. Developer Gearbox retooled the look from gritty realism to a more stylized "concept art" style sometimes mistaken for cel-shaded graphics.

The change was at first controversial but eventually won over many converts. I've said before that I like the shift. I think its a fresh look and really helps the game stand out. It's one thing to say a game's is different, it's another to actually look different.

What's Next

Borderlands Guide started over a year before the actual release date of the game. That meant a lot of weeks we had very little to write about Borderlands.

I'm pretty confident that will change.

Gearbox and 2k have already started to swing into marketing mode and that's only going to ramp up in the coming weeks. We already had a pretty good preview of Borderlands on G4 today.

The delay of Bioshock 2 should also help in this category. 2K is also publishing the heavily anticipated sequel which was originally supposed to come out at the start of November. This should mean that Borderlands will get more TLC from the marketing department at 2K.