Borderlands 2 Preview and Video Interview

We have yet to see any gameplay footage of Gearbox’s Borderlands 2, so for now all that we have are the previews and interviews coming out GamesCom, like this piece from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, who witnessed a hands-off demo:

This spirit of stupidity extends beyond the player. In a evolving (rather than static in its destination) quest to try and rescue Roland, the first game’s Soldier class now made a major NPC (as are the other three BL1 characters), you’re chasing a giant energy-prison on legs which is busily spawning smaller attack droids around a dense industrial area while engineers and miners in the employ of the sinister Hyperion Corporation try and pick you off. All around, Surveyor droids are trying to fix up the robo-prison and its minions, meaning you’ll have to make judgement calls about what to kill first. Meanwhile, the moon is launching robots at you. (We wanted robots to come in from the moon. More games should have this,) deadpans Gibson. He’s so right.

It’s big and noisy and messy and colourful. The look’s a little more consistent now Borderlands has found its aesthetic groove, with even the UI now taking the form of comicky smears. Enemy shields, meanwhile, are not longer just an abstracted blue bar instead, you’ll see them visibly shatter when shot away, so you can get a measure of how the fight’s going and when to switch weapons from the game world, not from its overlay.

Speaking of the game world, it’s apparently a whole lot less dependent on smoke and mirrors now: (It’s frustrating to see a cool looking place that you can’t actually get to. So stuff you can see in distance, you can get to these places,) explains Gibson while gesturing at distant valleys. (It’s all geographically correct, what you see to the West and East is actually there now.) This will include snowy (which I saw a bit of) and grassy (which I didn’t) climes, meaning Borderlands is escaping the wasteland game ghetto it was til now a major member of.

Meanwhile, PlayStation Blog Europe offers a 5-minutes video interview with writer Anthony Burch, who talks about the efforts made to make the story and quests better, the improvements done on the enemies’ AI and more.