Borderlands 2 will be Bigger, Better, More Badass

Many of you moaned that Borderlands was a dull, uninteresting experience. I’m not going to cast judgement on you (except in my head) – because, despite the disappointing ending, I found Borderlands (especially played with 3 other people) to be a heck of a fun ride. Of course, that doesn;t mean it didn’t have problems.

For all it’s openworldedness (that’s totally a real word, right?), its aesthetic was a little on the samey side, wasn’t it? That’ll be changing for the sequel.

Speaking to Gamasutra, Borderlands 2’s art director Jeramy Cooke said that Gearbox’ aim was to create a more open, more vibrant world – and stick in a bunch of new, interesting enemies to kill.

“It felt like you were seeing the same enemies too often [in Borderlands],” he said, “I mean, that’s my personal experience. And we really wanted to just widen that and give you this sense of a huge space, which is why you can see the other maps from the maps you’re in. You look over there, and you see this dam off in the distance, and you know ‘Oh, that’s where I was,’ and vice-versa when you’re on top of the dam and you look down into Zone 1 and see all of the ice spread out. It’s about that sort of large-scale, large-scope experience.”

He said that the team wanted to create a game that would entice players to explore the world.

“Borderlands is not a rail shooter, it’s not a corridor shooter,” he said. “The world’s job is to be enticing, to convince you to go out there and find cool stuff, to dig around in the corner and find cool loot or a miniboss you didn’t know who was there or whatever. We felt like in a lot of maps [in Borderlands], even inside of a map, it wasn’t necessarily clear where you were a lot of the time because you’d see the same brown rocks. We’re working really hard to have these really great landmarks as you go through the space. Changing the color values, if you’re heading into a miniboss lair let’s bring the saturation down and increase the contrast and pull out the reds or something like that. Really try to have a distinct emotional flavor inside every area.”

“As you go through the ice world, it’s not just ice everywhere. There’s hot springs, there’s open rolling hills and stuff. And that was part of our mission for every map.”

As a bonus for PC players, the PC version will also include split-screen – something that doesn’t happen nearly often enough on PC games.

Borderlands 2 will hit PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 next year, with a bazillion or so more guns.

Last Updated: September 21, 2011