Borderlands 2 Interview

Computer and Videogames had the chance to quiz Borderlands 2’s concept designer Scott Kester at GamesCom about the title’s environments, weapons, the balance between role-playing and combat and more. Here’s a snippet:

In a genre that’s dominated by Call of Duty a lot of developers are now trying to create shooters that are a bit different such as Brink, Bulletstorm etc, but yours is one of the few that’s seen success. Why is that?

In regards to us I really do feel it was that we didn’t want to go overly RPG and we didn’t want to go overly shooter . There was always a constant struggle over how may stats we showed and we tried really hard to make that balance palatable to a player who plays a more standard shooter. We tried to cater to those guys. That was really important to us, it wasn’t just like ‘oh I saw this feature in another game, let’s put it in’.

There was a lot of effort behind those decisions. I also feel the co-op nature of the game really kept people coming back. From the single-player experience to the multiplayer experience it was just something that we really felt… there was just something about getting together with your friends. If you’re grinding, doing a quest or whatever there’s just this constant conversation. I think that kept people coming back.

And we really tried to support the game when we thought about the DLC. We really wanted to try and do our best, to create quality DLC and show support to the people that bought the game. I would say the multiplayer at the time and the old idea of what we were trying to put together… some of the titles out there do what they do great but we wanted to carve out our own area.

How have you balanced role-playing and combat for the sequel? Did you discover fans enjoyed one side more than the other?

It’s relatively unchanged as far as the balance of that goes. There are certain aspects of things where we’re looking at the player that’s maybe a little more adept or hardcore about ‘this is my character, this is my attributes’. We put a lot of depth into the skill tree of this one. If you don’t care that’s totally fine, but for the RPG player there’s a lot of things to fiddle with in this game.

For the person that just wants to shoot things it’s very easily spelled out, but the more that you start to dig the gear and how the characters interact with eachother… there’s a lot of depth there. It gives everybody a little something I feel.