I'm playing Battleborn, trying to bash away at the giant metal leg of this giant metal spider, and I think it's doing something. I also think my team is doing something behind me, but I'm right next to a giant metal leg (on a giant metal spider), so I can't really be sure. Or see, for that matter. Then I throw my axe to see if I can do a bit more damage, and suddenly realise I can't pick it back up—there's a giant metal leg in the way. I die.

Suffice to say, my very first impression of Battleborn was not what you would call positive.

Half a dozen matches later, though, and I think I've found a groove. This isn't a hack-and-slash first-person game; it's not a pure shooter; it has MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) elements but isn't a MOBA; and I can hand-on-heart say it even has some RTS-y parts to it. It sounds confusing, but Battleborn does make sense.

There's plenty recognisable about Battleborn. Each match sees two teams of five being enjoyed in battle (unless it's co-op, in which case it's one to five players battling against AI waves). Some matches require capture points to be held, some ask teams to shepherd robotic minions to a goal, mixing RTS and tower defence into the recipe, and it's all backed up with first-person combat.

This combat—not just shooting—differs thanks to the game's array of 25 different characters. My choice, the axe-wielding dwarf, acted as a melee attacker: a tank made to rush to the front lines while being buffed by a support unit and covered from distance by a defence character. It was our first game, so that didn't happen, and I didn't have fun.

Taking on the role of one of the many other characters, though, it all started to fall into place. Guns, magic, swords, buffs, super-powered sniper blasts of doom—it all comes together in a bunch of almighty dust-ups.

Randy Varnell is creative director on Battleborn, and we recently sat down to discuss his difficult-to-define game. One thing really shone through: he was very enthusiastic. Not in that way you sometimes see people, when they're almost trained to try and fool you into thinking they care; Varnell makes Battleborn sound very much like it's his baby, like it's the team at Gearbox's baby. And the genesis of the game backs that up.

"We had a lot of fun with Borderlands, playing with the talent trees," Vernell told me. "With our developer cheats we could just push a button and reset them, trying something different every time, going through that cycle dozens of times. It was a fun little game between the designers to see who could come up with the best talent build."















"At the same time we were watching what League of Legends, DOTA and the other MOBAs were doing: they were incorporating that rapid RPG growth into a match. We thought it would be cool to take a breadth of characters, pull in that rapid growth—the MOBA concept to it—then match two or three other things to it and come up with a game... and that's Battleborn! It's the heart of how we were at the start."

But ever since Battleborn has been in the public eye, it's been an uphill battle to get across to the press and players what the game actually is. "It's been a big challenge," Varnell admitted. "There was a point really early on when we were talking to the press just saying 'not a MOBA, not a MOBA, not a MOBA', then when Game Informer did the original cover they went with 'it's a MOBA!' And... [laughs] guys, come on!"

This is a problem Gearbox has had to contend with before. Lest we forget, back in 2009 there wasn't much comparable to Borderlands, and most descriptions of it went with something along the lines of "Diablo with guns." We always need an easy, go-to descriptor for our games. If anything it's Gearbox's fault for not just sticking to the established genres we know and love.

One thing the studio has stuck with over the past few years is a consistent vision for the game, even if it is hard to pigeonhole. "Everything changes—we pride ourselves on iterative development," Varnell explained. "That's a fancy way of saying 'it might not be better or worse, but almost every day the game's different.' But the core of the game is very close to what we wanted to do, it's very close to what we wanted it to be. There are a lot of subtleties that have changed—early on we took a lot more influence from the MOBAs, then we realised that didn't translate as well to the first-person experience, so we've simplified and streamlined and hybridised a lot of the systems while making sure it all plays very well. It's stronger for that."

From what I played, I'd agree—if Battleborn just aped MOBAs, it would fall flat. If it were just another online shooter, it would bore me half to death. If it were a pure RTS, it would be really weird and hard to play. But instead of being one of these things, Battleborn is a unique mix of—admittedly derivative—elements.