Borderlands 2 Interview

If you’re in the mood to read a Borderlands 2 interview, NowGamer is offering a chat with Gearbox’s creative director Paul Hellquist and level designer Jason Reiss which touches upon subjects such as the title’s current stage of development, how Gearbox isn’t trying to compete with Bethesda and BioWare in the dialogue department, the balance between its RPG elements and player skill and more. Here’s a sampling:

Some people might hear about skills that make getting a Second Wind easier and assume that Borderlands 2 is easier than the first game. It’d be fair to say that the original Borderlands got insanely tough towards the latter DLC packs, but just how difficult is Borderlands 2 by comparison?

PH: We want the difficulty curve to be similar to Borderlands, because we want people to get through the game, experience our story, build their characters and explore a lot of the skills.

Where we do plan on increasing the challenge similar to the first game, but we want to make sure we nail it is in your second play through. So after you’ve finished the Borderlands 2 story, you can play through again in order to reach the level cap.

We’ve spoke about second play through a lot in design meetings and decided that this is where we really want to separate the men from the boys.

Players really have to dig down, understand the systems and have a maximised character with the best gear to survive a second play through. So that’s where we’ll crank up the challenge for all of our hardcore fans.

When you say (Understand the systems), there are many role-playing games coming out today that sacrifice RPG staples like dice rolls and stat crunching in favour of all out action. Are you mindful of shifting away from the balance between the two struck in the first Borderlands?

PH: Borderlands has always been more so than something like Skyrim more action focused and skill based because of the whole first-person shooter aspect. We didn’t to lose that, so if you want bonus damage per critical hit, you still have to aim for the head, or whatever the critical location of a creature may be.

We didn’t want to remove any of that, so we haven’t added dice rolls to the system. What I meant by (Dig down) earlier, is that you really have to get inside how the systems work, and how the elemental weapons are effective against different creatures.

Have you ramped up the location-targeting mechanic at all such as aiming for the head or shooting a Skag in the mouth for example? PH: Yeah, our creature department are the guys who make our enemies, and they’ve just gone really above and beyond when compared to the first Borderlands.

We’ve got all kinds of interesting things like, you still have your classic headshots, but sometimes you’re fighting things that may not have a head, so that department has gotten very creative as to where those critical hit locations are.

This means that players have to use different tactics in order to expose those locations, and we’ve got skills that relate to identifying critical areas and more. So yeah, we’re really improved on that mechanic in Borderlands 2.