Borderlands 2 Previews and Interviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on July 14th, 2012

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What was also explained before the demo started was the idea of badass experience points, which work on a meta level beyond any one character or game save. The idea is that your build up these points so you can instantly buff up any character you subsequently play as, even if it's brand new. There's no level cap for this so Gearbox are hoping it will reward those fans that put in the most hours.

For now though we had to meet up with Tiny Tina, a crazy-in-the-coconut nine year old who also happens to be a demolitions expert. As well as the parts for her bomb she also wanted us to retrieve some guests for her tea party (and optionally some crumpets). These guests turned out to be bug in a jar (with a top hat on the top and a face drawn on the side), a mouldy old doll, and a marauder bandit.

The latter was so she could torture him to death for killing her parents (we think, Tina's voiceover was a bit hard to follow and we were too busy not dying to read the subtitles). Either way the finale of Tina's mission involved protecting a generator from waves of bandits as it built up enough power to electrocute her only living party guest.

So much of what makes me optimistic about Borderlands 2 is how it simply builds upon and improves on all the aspects that made the first game so memorable, but that doesn't mean there wouldn't be room for a practical overhaul in a specific feature. In Borderlands 2's case, it's all about the new abilities in the skill tree. This isn't that unusual.

While the character classes are familiar, it appears that Gearbox has enjoyed the challenge in coming up with new upgrades and power-ups to make this new cast feel fresh, along with 50 percent more skills than the original game. Moreover, whereas the upgrades in Borderlands were just stat modifiers, the character improvements in Borderlands 2 actually change the gameplay.

Much of the combat system in this game rewards great performance. There's a battle component called Kill Skill where every time you make a kill, your critical percentage and reload speed are improved for a few seconds; and this can stack with consecutive kills. Another stackable upgrade I'm excited about is called Critical Ascension, which gives a critical bonus every time you get a critical hit; and you can keep stacking it until you miss.

That was perhaps the most surprising thing about my few hours with Borderlands 2, that in a matter of minutes experimenting with Zero's skills I had created an offensive powerhouse who could rush in unafraid and hold his own. He wasn't shoehorned into being a support-role character, and I not only made it work, but I reveled in my success.

I found the same to be true when checking out Axton. While significant strides have been made to make his turret the main skill of the soldier class introduced with Roland in the first Borderlands as ridiculous as possible, his support and complementary skills offered the same opportunities to completely customize the character I wanted. But dat turret.

Upon leaving town I was reminded that in most ways, Borderlands 2 is simply more Borderlands. It has a very similar look and feel, and though the character classes have been redone from the ground up to allow for some interesting new builds, they're fundamentally pretty similar. My Commando, Axton, had a lot in common with the Borderlands' Soldier, Roland: they're both very fond of deploying turrets. But, through what Varnell calls "game-changer" skill unlocks, Axton's turret becomes almost absurdly powerful around level 20, making Roland's look like a toy.

Each of the Commando's three skill trees include at least a couple of these. I chose an upgrade that attached a rocket launcher to my turret, turning it into an explosive death-dealer, but also on the table was one that allows you to teleport-deploy the turret to anywhere you can see, or have it double as a shield generator. I also liked how I could pick up a turret before its timer expired in order to speed up the deploy ability's recharge rate.

To describe the sequel as a check-list of enhancements over the original would be both accurate yet slightly unfair. The nucleus of the first Borderlands has not been tampered; it is still an open(ish)-world FPS with an immense capacity for character customisation. It still appears to work with a slow-burning, almost novel-length reward structure, where a sense of accomplishment is still gradually reinforced late into the campaign.

At the top level, these skills start to get truly wild. The Commando character, Axton, is able to drop turrets as his Active Skill. Many of the unlocks in each of his three trees are built around boosting those turrets in various ways. The top level in one tree, for example, allows him to put down two turrets at a time instead of just one. In another tree, the top-tier skill triggers a nuclear blast whenever the turret goes down. Combine that with an earlier skill which allows you to teleport a turret as you deploy it to a designated location, and you're left with a potent grenade-like special that also handles the job of picking off any remaining stragglers. I'm told that hitting the game's level cap will unlock enough skill points to boost yourself through roughly one and a half skill trees, though raised level caps through DLC are certainly a post-release consideration.

Then, of course, there was the reason I was playing the game in the first place, the loot drops, which have been streamlined to a degree. Players no longer need to target money or ammunition; these items simply fly into their hands if they stand near them. The only items that require a targeted grab are the guns and the mods, and it pays to be rather discerning because the ordnance players select will define how they play Borderlands 2 almost as much as the character class they choose right at the beginning of the game.

This mission takes place in the land of Tundra Express. This area is able to accommodate different sceneries such as a barren dessert or snow covered mountains. What is so impressive about it is how it allows the player to wander around without constantly placing restrictions. Funnily enough, one of the goals in Borderlands 2, is that if players can see it, then they can explore it. This is true to a certain extent, given the fact that it will take a while to even just explore a fraction of the Tundra Express area. There are some limitations to where the player can go, but it's not like there is any use to falling off the border of the map.

The diverse scenery means that there is plenty to look at in Tundra Express. The day and night cycle does wonders for ensuring that each trip to Tundra Express feels different. It certainly doesn't hurt that it has some stylish visuals too. The way-point system has been revamped, so that it is now much easier to find an objective location. It's not as minimal as the way-point system employed in the first Borderlands, but it does a much better job of guiding players.

You've taken a couple of years to produce the sequel. Was there anything that you wanted to do but couldn't quite because of time restrictions?

"There are always little things here and there. Nothing from the top of my head really stands out. There were instances where we had a certain creature type that we thought would have been good, but we ended up not doing because we either didn't have the resources for it or, in some respects, didn't have room for them.

"The team who works on the creatures make really amazing stuff. They were really able to flesh all of these. Typically, one creature maybe has 12 variations or more - small ones, big ones, fire ones and so on. And it got to the point where we asked the head of level design, 'Here are these other ones. Do you want us to go ahead and do these?' We just didn't have room for them. There's only so much space that you can have all of this stuff.

"I think we've got a really wonderful diversity, but that was one of the areas where we thought we didn't need these extra creatures. Maybe they'll make an appearance someday in a future DLC or future sequel."

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