Borderlands 2 Blog Update and Rewind Theater

The new Borderlands 2 release date trailer has not only spurred IGN to offer up one of their Rewind Theater preview videos, but it's also brought Gearbox community manager Chris Faylor out to pen a new entry for the official PlayStation Blog that covers some of the sequel's big changes and what we should expect from the game's four characters. An excerpt from the latter:
[The trailer] barely scratches the surface of some of the underlying changes, especially when it comes to the way that characters grow and become more powerful throughout the game. Each character has their own unique Action Skill at the root of their multi-tiered Skill Trees, and as you complete more quests and kill more enemies and gain the necessary experience to start working down those Skill Trees, you'll come across skills that do more than just add passive stats and perks they change the way that character plays.

Let's talk about Salvador the Gunzerker, for example. When you trigger his Action Skill, he's able to temporarily dual wield any weapons in the game. And if you just want to run and gun and blow everything up and cause as much chaos and destruction as possible, there's a Skill Tree for that. Or if you want to make him more of a tactician and focus on nailing that one perfect shot for ridiculous damage and money, there's a Skill Tree for that as well.

And the same goes for the other characters. Maya's Skill Trees and the way they alter her Phaselock Action Skill likewise enable players to customize the way she plays and the role she takes in battle, as do those of Axton and Zero.

As our Game Designer Jonathan Hemingway puts it, Borderlands 2 isn't just about making a few big changes and improvements, it's about making thousands of little ones as well. Everything is being tuned, refined, improved and reworked, and in the coming months we'll be talking much more about, well, all of that.