The new Borderlands takes place once again on hazardous planet Pandora, and features all-new characters, classes, weapons and environments, plus an improved mission system.
13 things interesting about Borderlands 2
Borderlands 2 Dev Talks New Art, Improved AI, and Why PC Gamers Will Get More Love This Time Around
Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku caught up with Gearbox's art director Jeramy Cooke to chat with him about the new characters, guns, and art tech in Borderlands 2, as well as why PC players will be getting a much more customized version this time around.Cooke talks about PC interface. "We had a ton of fans who played the game on PC, but they honestly got a port of the console game. We heard a lot of fans say, 'Hey, you didn't really take care of us here.' So, we completely ripped out the UI - there's a completely new UI for PC, it's mouse-driven, supports drag-and-drop, all of the things that you would expect in a PC title. It'll be a lot more fun for people."
The first Borderlands managed to go from "oddity" to "obsession" to "dark horse GOTY candidate" - it was a flawed title that still managed to create an enjoyable experience simply by way of its strong mechanics and unique look. Listening to Cooke talk about the sequel gave me the impression that the dev team has listened hard to player feedback and is methodically addressing their concerns one by one. Very promising, to be sure.-Kotaku
1. It's got the same art style
OK, you probably could have deduced that one from the logo alone, but it's worth dwelling on the sheer opulence of the Borderlands aesthetic. In a world where gun-metal realism is the norm, we're pleased beyond measure that at least one hardcore action franchise has a taste for bright colours.
The team has also been hard at work updating the game's art style. "I think I've helped evolve the art style for Borderlands 2", Cooke said. "We've added a lot more shader work. We've always seen ourselves as concept-art style instead of cartoony or anime or any of those things, because we do a lot more rendering. If you look at some of the ice, it's not just a 2D texture with lots of lines in it, it has pretty complex shader stuff, depending on how something catches the light." He went on to describe how when light catches various objects in the world, they each react differently—in essence, he and his team at Gearbox are building a world of living concept art.
I mentioned to Cooke how often, I find that I prefer a game's promotional concept-art to the way the game eventually looks. "That was how we made the switch. We were like, 'We're doing this high-realism thing, but the game has this crazy zany fun aspect to it, and it doesn't make any sense.' And we had all this awesome concept-art and we looked at it and said, 'Why don't we make it look like this? This is so cool.'"
"[Changing the art style for Borderlands] helped us find our voice, it helped us realize what kind of game we were making. There was a connection between the art and the game design, and suddenly they started riffing off of each other, and we ended up with crazy midgets strapped to shields… we realized that yeah, we're badass, but we like to have fun, too."-Kotaku
2. The original cast will return
In some form, anyway. The 'A Dam Fine Rescue' mission shown at Gamescom this week challenges you to rescue soldier dude Roland from a bandit camp, navigating a warren of bolted-together scrap-metal while enemies rocket down from orbit. Here's hoping Lilith, Brick and Mordecai get their own cameos, if not playable appearances.
For starters, there will be an entirely new cast of characters in Borderlands 2, but Roland, Lilith, Mordecai, and the rest of the gang from Borderlands will still make the occasional appearance. "We decided to bring back all the original playable characters as NPCs in the new game," Cooke told me, "because everyone is so connected to them. I keep doing interviews where people tell me, 'Oh, I played the game for 300 hours.' These people spend so much time with these characters, but then, they don't really know who they are. This game is five years after the vault was opened, and we wanted to show what's happened since then."
The new demo has the player raiding an enemy compound to free Roland, the soldier from the first game; one would imagine this means that afterwards, Roland will be around for players to interact with, theoretically getting to know him beyond "This is the guy with the healing bullets."-Kotaku
3. Vehicles are bigger and better
The handling has been tinkered with - there are now powerslides - and you can expect four seater rides for the ultimate co-op road trip. The physics system has been dialled down a few notches to smooth over the first game's "Warthog on springs" feel. No longer will stray specks of grit send you flying into a ditch.
4. Almost every in-game asset is new
Here's a little snippet from CVG's recent interview with concept designer Scott Kester: "Very few components from the last game are being reused. We have some staples for certain enemies that we put in for familiarity but it was really important for us to just do more of what we did better, with as many things as we can put in there to keep players interested."
5. Even empty guns are weapons
Short on bullets? Guns aren't just for shooting with, providing they're manufactured by Tediore - they're also for hurling at people's heads. Result: a stun effect that can be amplified by leaving ammo in the clip. The best part is that your gun re-materialises in your hand after you throw it. It doesn't make sense, but then again nor does strapping a midget to your shield.
6. Bosses strap midgets to their shields
And why stop at shields and midgets? Borderlands is a customisation-driven game. I should be able to strap anything I damn well please to anything else I damn well please. Palm-tree/humvee, for instance. Or chainsaw/bathtub. Incidentally, if you shoot that midget's restraints away he'll be more than happy to fight on your side.
7. Bandits manufacture their own weapons
No longer will all the guns you'll grab be mass-produced. Bandits have cobbled together their own, unique hybrids with hugely exaggerated features, like super-sized magazines.
Bandits' guns would be all about ammo, while other manufacturers would focus on rate-of-fire, ammunition type, and more. (And of course, the hilarious exploding disposable Tediore gun from the demo.)-Kotaku
8. There are crazy new enemy types
See those giant snowbeasts in the trailer? They're Bullymongs, and when they're not chewing your head open they'll rip up and throw huge lumps of scenery your way. Also on the cards: a new bandit type, the Marauder, who's intelligent enough to seek cover when injured, floating healer robots named Surveyors, and exploding suicidal Terminator wannabes.
9. The AI packs a punch
The baddies aren't just a posse of yelping bullet-sponges any more. Wound certain varieties and they'll limp away, firing back at you; down others and they'll pull themselves up on one elbow for a last ditch salvo. Smarter foes will try their hands at flanking tactics, and if there's high ground available, expect them to seize it. Both inside and outside combat, NPCs will be far more talkative.
One of the chief criticisms of Borderlands was the repetitive enemies and somewhat simplistic AI—most enemies would simply charge at the character headlong, and combat frequently became an exercise in backpedaling and blasting. The AI was fairly easy to exploit in the first game, and Cooke says the team has addressed that, as well. "We saw people in the first game exploiting the AI," he said, "hiding around a building, getting the AI stuck and stuff like that, so now AI can completely navigate where players can navigate. They can jump from rooftop to rooftop, climb ladders, they can kick barrels down stairs... they have a much better sense of what's going on in the world. There's a whole new layer of communication, there's a whole new layer of states—we have wounded states, all these awesome buff states where guys hulk out. The AI is totally new from the original game."-Kotaku
10. None of the old guns return
Gearbox hasn't just overhauled Borderlands' gun roster, but gutted it completely. The weapon manufacturers have knocked out a slew of new toys, including realistic offerings from Dahl, AK47 homages with mandatory minigun barrel attachments from Ruskie outfit Vladof, and more explosive overkill from Torgue. Jakobs is still your first port of call for Wild Westy damage dealers.
"One of Borderlands's most distinctive aspects was its huge and varied arsenal. It's not a huge surprise that there will be even more weapons in the sequel. "There are a lot more guns this time," Cooke told me, "like, several orders of magnitude more. Our core gun system that we had last time we revamped the base code system for that to make it more efficient so that we could add more parts. So, in the past game we might've only had like five or six parts for a gun, now there can be more like twelve, fourteen parts in a gun. We paramaterized the scope views as well—before, it was all static art, so you might've only seen one of six scopes, but now you're going to see eighty-seven bazillion scopes, because they're all paramaterized. Guns dropped by bosses are going to have much more personality." Cooke said that the various gun manufacturers would be much more distinctive, as well.-Kotaku
11. Story missions are three times as big
You heard. Borderlands 2's campaign packs triple the fun, so bring a packed lunch. What's more, the storyline is now a dynamic affair, after the example of Mass Effect and its ilk. Fail to rescue Roland on time in the mission described above, for example, and you'll splinter off into a different plot thread. We're still trying to ascertain how drastic said splintering will be, but fans of replay-value should be delighted.
12. There's a mini-map
Because an open world game without an on-screen map is like a submarine without a periscope.
13. There's a wider variety of environments
There's more to Pandora than deserts. Borderlands 2 will reach beyond the original's unalleviated wasteland backdrop to embrace ice floes, mountains and forests, among other terrain types.
"We're also trying to put a lot more variety into the actual zones themselves," Cooke continued. "There was a lot of repetition of the same brown rocks last time, and we said, 'We're not doing this again.' We want people to see the whole rest of Pandora. We had made a map a long time ago for Borderlands one, and it had grasslands, it had volcanic areas, it had icy areas, and we just never really got to build them all. So for Borderlands 2 I said, 'We are going to go see the rest of Pandora.'"-Kotaku
To read about the different characters in Borderlands 2 visit the character page.
Here is Borderlands 2 interview with Scott Kester from GamesCon 2011
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