Internal teams, assembled to give Gearbox's projects a critical review, started cautioning the team that at this stage, as they felt "Borderlands" was begin to look much closer to the then-recent "Fallout 3" or "Rage" games. The realistic look, which gave much of the visuals a brown, muted color palette, clashed with some of the more fantastical elements they had included at that point, such as extraordinary jump heights and the vehicle systems. By this point, the game was 75% complete and there was a target release window they wanted to reach, so scrapping major elements of the game was not an option for the studio. According to chief creative officer Brian Martel, they opted to try to find their "", some visual element that would make the game stand out and gain sales. Martel and a small team spent some time in secret to create prototype of the game using an art style similar to cel shading, fearing that if they had said anything to the other team members, there may have been discontentment among the staff. Pitchford would later acknowledge that this new style was not wholly original to Gearbox and was partially inspired by Ben Hibon's short film "Codehunters". Hibon has stated that while he was contacted by Gearbox to possibly work on artwork for "Borderlands", nothing ever came of the talks. The style itself appears as cel-shaded comic book artwork, but is rendered using a combination of hand-drawn textures with engine modifications to outline major features, creating the comic book appearance.