Borderlands 2 Interview

PAX Prime must have been a fairly busy time for the developers at Gearbox Software, as, aside from demoing Borderlands 2 to the press, they also had to answer many journalists’ questions, including the ones coming from Complex, who offers yet another interview about the cel-shaded FPS/RPG. Here’s on co-op:

One of the things I loved about Borderlands was the co-op. It’s one of the more fun games to play with friends. Is there anything you’ve done to facilitate that? Or maybe even switch it up with competitive play?

Well, one of the main pillars of the last game was definitely the co-op side of it. We wanted to make sure to reinforce that as much as we can and make that experience as good as we could.

Sometimes there are eligibility issues with quests, and we’re working really hard to ensure that that’s as seamless as possible, still making sure that split screen co-op is there. Now you can take that experience online so two people can sit and play with people online. That’s something we’re pretty proud of.

We’re further supporting co-op play by making sure the UI works better on split-screen. We’ve redesigned that all to be scalable and to be a much easier experience. We want to make that experience – whether you’re on PC or console – as seamless as possible. As far as talking about anything on the competitive side, it’s something we’re interested in, but we’re sticking true to the core of what Borderlands is and we’ll see where things go from there.

(…)

Why is split-screen important to Gearbox?

Split-screen is important to us for a number of reasons. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people who have sent fan-mail or people who have said, “I never really knew about this game until I was at my friend’s house and he was like, ‘˜Hey, let’s try this.'”

It’s one of those things that a lot of developers don’t want to support anymore, because it’s kind of a pain. It’s hard to develop for.

It’s something that if you want to have in the game to allow people to try it out with others we want to give them that. We had a lot of customers that really responded well to it. A lot more people ended up getting the game because they were at a friend’s house and they really had a good time with that experience. And also, not everybody has a bunch of a friends or extra copies of the game. It’s just one of those things that we felt really strongly about, and we wish more people would do that in the industry.

The UI is hard to do in it – particularly in our style of game. So is the performance in making it run. That’s why we are so happy that now we can do that and bring it online and you can still co-op on one screen. That’s one thing that was really important to us.