Borderlands 2 Interview

Gearbox Software’s art director Jeramy Cooke has revealed himself to be one of the most talkative members on Borderlands 2 team so far, as he has already been interviewed by a fair number of publications, to which we today have to add Gamasutra, that put out this interesting piece which, unsurprisingly, mostly focuses on the title’s art direction. Here’s a snippet from the interview:

Run us through some of the high-level approaches you’re taking with the art direction in this sequel.

I wanted it to have a richer, larger world. I felt like we were stuck in the desert a lot, and it got monotonous. It felt like you were seeing the same enemies too often. I mean, that’s my personal experience. And we really wanted to just widen that and give you this sense of a huge space, which is why you can see the other maps from the maps you’re in.

You look over there, and you see this dam off in the distance, and you know “Oh, that’s where I was,” and vice-versa when you’re on top of the dam and you look down into zone 1 and see all of the ice spread out. It’s about that sort of large-scale, large-scope experience.

Borderlands is not a rail shooter, it’s not a corridor shooter. We want you to explore and have fun and go where you want and do what you want. The world’s job is to be enticing, to convince you to go out there and find cool stuff, to dig around in the corner and find cool loot or a miniboss you didn’t know who was there or whatever.

We felt like in a lot of maps, even inside of a map, it wasn’t necessarily clear where you were a lot of the time because you’d see the same brown rocks. We’re working really hard to have these really great landmarks as you go through the space. Changing the color values, if you’re heading into a miniboss lair let’s bring the saturation down and increase the contrast and pull out the reds or something like that. Really try to have a distinct emotional flavor inside every area. As you go through the ice world, it’s not just ice everywhere. There’s hot springs, there’s open rolling hills and stuff. And that was part of our mission for every map.