Borderlands 2 Previews

Two new previews are in for the loot-driven FPS/RPG hybrid Borderlands 2, the first being a piece from IGN which focuses on the playable character of Maya, and includes quotes from the developers:

While every class uses guns to burn, shock and blow up enemies, every class does so with the aid of a unique primary action skill. This skill essentially defines the class, and can be modified in dramatic ways. The phasewalking of the original Siren has been replaced with something that sounds similar but really isn’t: phaselocking. The phaselock ability is the first earned in the Siren’s skill tree, allowing her to bind an enemy from range in a kind of energy bubble. At its most basic level that has a few advantages. First, it takes an enemy out of a fight, providing a degree of crowd control. If there’s an especially irritating monster that you or your co-op group would rather freeze in time in order to clean up the rest of the battlefield first, phaselock it and return to shooting it after the enemy horde has been thinned out. Second, it locks the enemy in place, useful for turning fast-moving creatures into easy targets.

By leveling Maya and earning more skill points, you can customize the advantages of phaselocking. Paul Hellquist, creative director at Gearbox, explained more. “She’s got support trees so she’s also kind of a mystical healer and she uses her ability to grant health bonuses to herself as well as the team. If the team or yourself kills the person who has been phaselocked then it grants health to the party. She can use her phaselock ability to revive another player, which is an exciting one so you don’t even have to be near somebody to get them up she can revive people from across the battlefield. Then in some of the other trees she has things that allow phaselock to affect more people. She has an ability that the phaselock sphere shoots out these additional projectiles that then lock those characters in their places as well so she can go into a more control-oriented role.”

Though she’ll have options for healing, support and crowd control roles, she’ll also be able to deal out plenty of direct damage by investing skill points in the Cataclysm tree. “She has a skill called Helios,” said Jeramy Cooke, art director at Gearbox, “and what happens there is, when a target gets phaselocked you get a huge [area of effect] explosion and targets in that radius can get set on fire.” Hellquist added that the decisions you make with skill point allocation also affect the visual appearance of the phaselock ability, so if you were to join someone else’s game and observe their phaselock, you’d have an idea about their skill build, like how armor sets in some MMOs give away class specializations.

And the second being a less in-depth look coming from the Chicago Tribune:

While this may some familiar, Gearbox has implemented some excellent changes for the sequel. The inclusion of dynamic quests – and whether you complete them or not – can actually leave a change on how your character progresses. For example, if someone takes too long completing a mission and someone dies as a result, this could leave a morbid feeling of dread hanging over them, making them angrier and progress in their skill tree in a different way. The inclusion of a new weapons system is also very cool, as you can modify everything from secondary gear to firing power to how much ammo it can carry, depending on which one of the “bazillion” guns you pick up. (No, we’re not kidding, that’s how many guns Gearbox says is in the game.) Finally, the AI is reworked, so don’t expect enemies to simply line up in your sights and take damage. They mean business since they come straight from Handsome Jack’s army.