Borderlands 2 PS Vita Preview

IGN has published a new hands-on preview for the PS Vita port of Borderlands 2, which gives us a more precise idea of how the game plays on the handheld console, and what kind of concessions had to be made to fit it onto it:

Borderlands 2 on Vita is a port of the PlayStation 3 iteration, and though PS3 isn’t much more powerful than Vita, concessions had to be made to get Gearbox’s eight and a half million-seller onto the handheld. When you play, you may notice that distant objects — like far-off mountain ranges — have been removed. More noticeable is the fact that defeated enemies no longer ragdoll and fall to the ground, instead exploding in a pool of blood (which frees up system resources). Enemy density has also been lessened in some areas with a huge amount of foes, but only slightly. The example given to me in this regard was that a location with 12 adversaries on PlayStation 3 might only have 10 on Vita.

These concessions were made to make Borderlands 2 run better. Corsi noted that the game runs stably at 30 frames-per-second, though it can drop down to about 28 frames and go up to about 33. This build of the game definitely seemed to run better than the previous one I played, though there was still occasional frame stuttering, some control delay issues, and quite a bit of texture pop-in. Load times between sections of the map are excessive, though Corsi and the team at Iron Galaxy are trying to trim precious seconds off of it between now and release. But he wanted to be clear that this is a PlayStation 3 port, and not a port of the slickest version of them all: the PC release.