You've gone loot crazy with World of Warcraft, Champions of Norrath, Diablo, Phantasy Star Online, and more. Our own Jason Wilson's even called his wife ugly names over her greedy ways in Sacred 2. Searching for treasure, leveling up your characters, and getting that just-slightly-better weapon can get awfully addicting, and soon we'll get to experience all that in the mother of all genres.

2K Games and developer Gearbox call it a role-playing shooter. Loot addicts can call it trouble. Borderlands -- due out this October 20 for the 360, PS3, and PC -- combines simple RPG elements with a first-person shooter set in a Mad Max-style badlands world.

A lot of gamers have already experienced the allure of incremental upgrading. Good thing, because it's hard to explain to an outsider the appeal of finding an assault rifle in Borderlands that does an extra two points of damage with slightly less recoil. But this game also brings new, smart ideas to this "co-op looter" genre that's going to make it really hard for addicts to stay away....

Sharing

Similar to Resident Evil 5, whenever one player picks up any money or ammo, all the other players automatically get the same amount, thus limiting the amount of death threats or wife-name-calling in Borderlands' four-player co-op games.

Seen it

Little color-coded beams of light shoot out from fallen loot, so you can see what type they are (medicinal, ammo, weapons, etc.) from a distance away -- helpful for seeking out insta-heal pickups in the middle of a firefight. Also, a small window with relevant stats pops up when you look at any item, so you can see whether you even want to pick it up in the first place.

According to 2K Games, Borderlands will contain more than 15 million weapons.
Of course, most of those are just slight variations of each other. But still...15 million!

"Fight for your life"

If you're down (but not out, a la Gears of War) and no one's around to heal you, you can kill an enemy to revive yourself before bleeding out and respawning back at the last checkpoint.

Suck it

Just hold down a button to automatically suck up all nearby items instead of having to pick them all up individually. Brilliant!

Faceoff

Need a break from all this Mr. Rogers cooperative gameplay? Just melee attack another player. If he slaps you back, then you'll go into a one-on-one duel mode, just for fun.

Mission complete

Unlike in some co-op games (ahem, Mercenaries 2), everything you earn in co-op carries back over to your single-player game, including mission progress (unless you're playing with a host who is further into the story than you are).

Friendly fire

This doesn't really fall into the "smart idea" category, but it's silly and worth mentioning. Roland, the soldier of the four available characters/classes, can eventually upgrade to "healing bullets" that he fires at teammates to fix 'em up. Why do we get a feeling that a lot of Roland's teammates in future online sessions will get "healed" via the head or ass?

Borderlands recently went through a graphical facelift to look more colorful and cartoony.
Although no one we talked to who's involved with the game will confirm it,
we suspect it's so Borderlands looks more visually distinct from Fallout 3.