Borderlands 2 Interview
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GamesBeat: Especially with my Commando, there's all these skill tree combinations that I want to do that I just need a few more skill points to get to.
Pitchford: That's by design. Some of those things start to become game-breaking. This has actually created a huge problem for us. We designed the skills really well this time, but we did, for better or for worse, make a lot of the decisions with the knowledge that there will be no more skill points available to put into any trees after you reach level 50. We knew the impossible configurations. Some of the design exploits that. Some of the impossible configurations, if they were possible, would break the game. Sometimes very literally. (Oh, that's gonna blow memory. Your Xbox will crash.)
So now we're in a world where . . We, as customers and gamers ourselves, hear the fans. People want to level up more. It makes sense. We totally get it. We did it in Borderlands 1, so we have the precedent. And we're gonna break our fucking game if we change the math. If we change it up, who knows what the balance will do? People don't want to just level up. They also want the game to level up with them. If I'm level 55 and everybody else is level 50, it's a walkover. I want to get level 55 gear if I'm level 55. I want to fight level 55 enemies. Then we have to make the whole game over again.
It becomes this really . (oh, shit, have we painted ourselves into a corner here?) Yes, the Achievement indicates that some of us, somewhere, wrote that Achievement and anticipated it, just as many customers do, because of the last game. But we're now in this world where we're confronting the reality of what it means to do that work, and it's terrifying and challenging. It's easy to imagine, when we're playing the game, (We could just change the number, and everything would be fine.) No, dude, there's a lot . . This is the most fundamental thing about the game. It's a big deal.
GamesBeat: Are you saying that . you used the word (anticipated.) But you didn't map it out much ahead of time?
Pitchford: No. When we finished Borderlands 2, everything that we imagined was in Borderlands 2. Once that was finished, OK, now what do we do? We had just started asking ourselves, (OK, do we want to level up some more?) All of us do. A lot of us have level 50s as well. It's time to tackle that. We dug in, and we were like, (Oh, shit. This is really hard. This is going to take a lot of time. It's going to be really expensive. Oh, my God.) And we've got all these other priorities and all these other things to do. So we're in the middle of that. That's the world we're living in right now. We're excited about the goal, both as gamers and as creators. But . I mean, I'm not gonna lie. It's a big challenge. It's a big undertaking. It's not going to just turn on. It's a thing we have to work ourselves through.
