Borderlands 2 Interview
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IG: Loot is a massive part of Borderlands. How do you expand on that? Increasing the number from however-many-million to however-many-million-plus-a-million isn't really going to cut it...
SG: There were a couple of goals in terms of loot.
One was that we wanted to improve the visual communication of loot. Whenever you pick up a weapon we want you to be able to immediately identify who the manufacturer is, what kind of effects it may have and also what class of weapon it is - i.e. is it a shotgun, a sub-machine gun etc.
Each manufacturer has a unique look. Jakobs has an old-world Western vibe with plenty of wood graining and detailing on the metal sections. A Maliwan, on the other hand, has a very sci-fi and futuristic feel. Those manufacturers concentrate on different results for their weapons so you should be able to know what you're getting just by looking at it.
The other thing is that we took the procedural generation of weapons idea and applied that to other items such as shields, grenades and relics. So there's now millions of possibilities with those kinds of items as well.
IG: More loot, different characters, new enemies... how do you balance of all that?
SG: It's a lot of really boring math [laughs].
Still, a lot of it still comes down to simple play testing. Sometimes combinations pop-up in play testing that we've just never anticipated, and that's going to happen when you've got so much stuff in your game. It's a ridiculous job to get it right.
We have tons of guys sitting in rooms and looking over spreadsheets trying to figure it all out, it's a monstrous task. It's still ongoing.
