I admit, I did a bit of a double take myself when I heard that Borderlands (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC) has hundreds of thousands of weapons. Of course, most of these weapons will likely be variations that only have a tiny bit of difference from one another, but still, that’s a heck of a lot of guns

What’s even more impressive is that according to Gearbox president Randy Pitchford, they’ve actually increased the number to well past the half-million mark. Right now, there are about 650,000 guns in the game, the 150,000 new ones being the result of the addition of alien technology to the game world.

Gearbox won’t be showing any of the guns off (apart from what we see in screenshots and videos, I guess), so it’ll be up to the players to try and look for them. Pitchford did, however, give a quick explanation for the certifiably insane gun count in an interview with 1Up:

When you have a system that can procedurally generate this stuff, you just want to go nuts with it. The costs are totally different. All the development teams in the world added together can’t physically craft what the software we’ve made is building for us.

You can take all the guns in every game that’s been launched on the PS3 and Xbox 360 — add them all together, and Borderlands still has more guns. It’s not fair, because we built the software that’s making them for us. We’re not actually making them. But it’s really cool, because I haven’t even seen them all. [Laughs] It’s really neat.

Borderlands is currently being prepped by Gearbox for alpha testing. The game has no level cap yet, but it’ll be added once the leveling system has been fine tuned to let players just go through the main campaign without doing the sidequests. The game’s release has been set for 2009.

• Borderlands: hundreds of thousands of weapons, more details, screens
• Borderlands delayed to fiscal 2009

Buy: [Borderlands (PS3)]
Buy: [Borderlands (Xbox 360)]