Yesterday, we got a new look at Borderlands 2, that shoot ‘n loot FPS RPG, thanks to a trailer with staggering amounts of wub wub. There’s going to be new classes available to use for vault hunters on Pandora, new areas to explore and newer, deadlier enemies to fight.
But most importantly, there’s going to be new guns available to collect. Lots of guns. Bazillions, tons of handheld death-dealers and rocket launchers with shiny new features, fast reload speeds, elemental damage options – I’m drifting again, aren’t I?
A minor gun fetish aside, it’s these very weapons which made Borderlands so addictive in the first place, although the much-touted variety of weapons wasn’t always present, with the majority of gamers opting for weapons that higher kill-stats instead of a tool that could complement their class.
It’s something that developer Gearbox is aware of, with the studio emphasising how the numerous guns on Pandora have been completely overhauled.
“This time around we want players to really explore our new guns, which have a staggering amount of variety,” creative director Paul Hellquist told IGN, while also talking about the new and overhauled options for the Siren class.
We want the player to have the fun RPG experience of determining, you know, the min/max area of the best weapons for this class with this build are these types, whether it’s this brand of pistols or this brand of assault rifles or whatever. We really want that to be something that players explore instead of sort of saying ‘hey, go use the assault rifles all the time.’
Art director Jeramy Cooke chimed in as well, explaining how the original Borderlands had actually made the weapons restrictive instead of accessible. “We sort of backpedalled on that from the first game. We found that people really just wanted to be able to use the weapons they wanted to use,” he said.
We tried to be a little less like ‘you really want to use this type of gun,’ because inevitably someone would just take Brick and go get a sniper rifle and they just wanted to play that way. So we’ve opened the skill trees up a lot more so that people can access weapons that they want.
Now there may be weapons that just harmonize better with certain skills but we’re not really kind of forcing that whereas like, you know, here’s a buff to this very specific class of weapon. We typically don’t do a lot of that.
Borderlands 2 will be launched on September 18, for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Last Updated: February 24, 2012
