Borderlands 2 Interview

During this year's GamesCom, the editors at AusGamers had the opportunity to chat with Borderlands 2 concept artist Scott Kester about the direction they're taking the sequel's art style, why the storyline has greater depth this time around, the possibility of cross-platform play, and more.
AusGamers: Now, again one of the other gripes I had with the first game was that the solo experience felt a little... empty I guess. And not everybody always has someone to play with -- and I quite like that you can still quest with your friends even after your friends have gone away and come back and yada, yada, yada -- but from a solo-playing perspective, has that been broached?

Scott: Yeah, that's the thing. The co-operative nature is the thing that I think a lot of people have gravitated towards, but we're really trying to cater to the single-player as well. This time around, the story itself is much more interwoven through the actual missions.

Some of the earlier missions -- just due to the limitations we had with the system -- were more of a (go from A to B fetch-quest (. Now this time, not only is there more variety in the way the missions work -- they can branch; they can take directions that we couldn't have done before just from the limitations of what we had at the time.

And using that with just all of the variety inside the environments and the creatures, we're really looking at that playthrough and making sure that after this amount of time, you're in a new area; you're fighting something new; you're getting the new weapons, but also, you're being delivered an experience that is... you know, we still don't want to dominate the player -- we're not forcing you to watch cut-scenes -- but we're really trying to use that... as you see in the demo, there's this trouble happening between the Bloodshot Bandits and the Hyperion.

Using a lot more of that in the game to make sure the storytelling is... it's one of those things like (this is happening without you even being there).

AusGamers: Emergent storytelling.

Scott: Yeah, so we're really just trying to make the world feel alive and as a single player going through that, there's a lot of twists and turns. And we're trying to make events that are a little more epic, that sort of keep you guessing (what are they going to do next?). And that's a really big focus for us for sure.