Borderlands is a new game coming out this October from Gearbox Software.  From information available, the game is going to be a combination of the role-playing (RPG) and shooter (FPS) genres.  Some games have done this before–some successfully (Mass Effect) and some not so successfully (Fallout 3).  Borderlands, unlike most other FPS-RPG games, will have multiplayer ability available.  The game will combine the single player and multiplayer campaigns in much the way Gears of War did.  The campaigns will be the same for both single and multiplayer co-op, with players having the ability to join a friend’s game in progress.

The story is set on a remote, sparsely settled planet Pandora.  The player plays the role of treasure hunter, looking for some alien vault said to contain, well, treasure.  You get to fight your way past or ally yourself with bandits, settlers and indigenous alien lifeforms in your efforts to find this vault.  The four characters (yep, four player co-op) you can play are Mordecai, Roland, Lilith and Brick.

From wikipedia:

• Mordecai – Mordecai came to Pandora in search of a man from his past named Demosthenes. Upon learning that Demosthenes has died, Mordecai sets off to learn how he died and what he was carrying. Mordecai’s play style is that of a lone ranger, preferring to snipe enemies from afar. Some of his special abilities can augment the party’s damage from headshots or give accuracy boosts and is a hunter class. Later in the game, he will befriend a bird-like creature named Bloodwing that will assist in combat.

• Roland – Roland is a former soldier of the Crimson Lance, a sort of highly trained private military that disregards law and order. A decade-old vendetta is rekindled when Roland learns that the leader of the Brigadiers has a suspiciously similar name to a man he has sworn to kill. Some of Roland’s abilities are meant to supplement and support the party. His Leadership skill can boost the party’s experience gains, while his Medical skill will increase health regeneration, and Support will increase weapon damage or regenerate ammunition for the party, Roland is a soldier class and the only class that doesn’t have to worry about ammo as a special backpack produces an infinite supply.

• Lilith – Once a human, Lilith at one point was turned into a siren. One of only six Sirens, they are a group of people with unbelievable powers, but no way to control them. She comes to Pandora in search of another Siren, in an effort to find out more about herself. Lilith is essentially the mage of the group, using her Siren powers to support the group and attack the enemy. Some of her powers include the ability to increase the group’s rate of fire, as well as the power to create temporal bubbles, which she can manipulate to slow down enemies and hostile projectiles or speed up allies.

• Brick – A massive specimen of a man who likes to use his fists to smash the enemy above all else. He wears a necklace adorned with the paw of his beloved deceased dog. He fills in the tank niche and can take quite a beating as well having the ability to chug berserker-state inducing pills for short bursts of power.

Gearbox incorporates a lot of good features from other games into Borderlands.  The game will have a myriad of weapon combinations, which will be very familiar to a lot of RPG gamers.  Gearbox says there will be over 3 million possible weapons to use in the game due to their content generation system.  Most FPS campaigns are pretty static.  Gearbox is implementing a Diablo-like system of randomization into the game so that each time you play it will be a different experience with the maps never being exactly the same.

Borderlands appears very different from a graphics perspective when you first see the artwork.  Instead of using polygons and pixel shaders as most other games do, Borderlands features a combination of hand-drawn textures with traditional rendering to give a very comic book feel to the graphics.

The game releases on October 20, 2009 on the Xbox 360, PC, & Playstation 3.