Got a new HDR television? Borderlands 3 might be the game to play on it.
Borderlands has never really been a benchmark game when it came to visual fidelity. That cell-shaded art style might be great for keeping system requirements low, and even protected the game’s graphics from the ravages of age, but nobody has ever given the Borderlands franchise an award for best visuals.
However, that might be about to change with Borderlands 3. According to the game’s multiplayer producer, BL3 will look great on an HDR-compatible TV.
“I mean, HDR? This is a game that I think would probably move HDR monitors and TVs, because it’s something else,” told VG247 in a recent interview. “If you see it side by side, it’s like, ‘Oh my god.’”
If you haven’t heard of HDR, it stands for High Dynamic Range. Where 4K makes the resolution so high you can barely see the pixels, High Dynamic Range improves the colors that are displayed. Bright colors appear brighter, darks appear darker, and everything in between suddenly looks as good as real life.
HDR is a standard feature on most mid-to-high-end monitors and TVs these days, and is almost always paired with 4K compatibility.
Even though Borderlands still has that classic art style, the vibrancy and depths of colors in Borderlands 3 will really make the game pop.
On top of that, Borderlands 3 also revamped its lighting. According to Brock, the game uses PBR (Physics-Based Rendering) to make light behave exactly as it does in real life. This basically means that when light strikes a certain surface it will reflect based on what sort of surface it is. Mirrors will reflect all that light, while lighter surfaces will just reflect some of it.
"I think that, honestly, the lighting in this game is really, really beautiful," Brock said.
Borderlands 3 arrives on September 13th for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC via the Epic Games Store. PC players not into Epic will have to wait six months for a Steam release.