It ”got monotonous” to always be in the desert, he lamented, and we saw the ”same enemies too often.” The world must be ”enticing, to convince you” to explore.
”I wanted it to have a richer, larger world. I felt like we were stuck in the desert a lot, and it got monotonous. It felt like you were seeing the same enemies too often. I mean, that’s my personal experience,” said Jeramy Cooke on his approach to Borderlands 2.
”And we really wanted to just widen that and give you this sense of a huge space, which is why you can see the other maps from the maps you’re in.”
”You look over there, and you see this dam off in the distance, and you know “Oh, that’s where I was,” and vice-versa when you’re on top of the dam and you look down into zone 1 and see all of the ice spread out. It’s about that sort of large-scale, large-scope experience,” he went on. They want us to go off exploring and not be stuck on a path.
”Borderlands is not a rail shooter, it’s not a corridor shooter. We want you to explore and have fun and go where you want and do what you want.”
”The world’s job is to be enticing, to convince you to go out there and find cool stuff, to dig around in the corner and find cool loot or a miniboss you didn’t know who was there or whatever.” The original made it hard to distinguish were you were in some maps.
”…it wasn’t necessarily clear where you were a lot of the time because you’d see the same brown rocks. We’re working really hard to have these really great landmarks as you go through the space.”
”Changing the color values, if you’re heading into a miniboss lair let’s bring the saturation down and increase the contrast and pull out the reds or something like that. Really try to have a distinct emotional flavor inside every area,” said Cooke.
”As you go through the ice world, it’s not just ice everywhere. There’s hot springs, there’s open rolling hills and stuff. And that was part of our mission for every map.”
Another major change is the game’s UI. ”Yeah, we completely scrapped the old UI. There are a lot of concepts there that carried over, but PC and splitscreen were like a huge focus for us. So we wanted to make sure that those users got the same awesome experience.”
”We’re building an entire custom UI for PC, and the whole UI supports splitscreen. So we redesigned all the screens to be vertical and narrow so you don’t have to do that weird pan-around thing from the first game.”
”Nobody like that, including us, and we knew we wanted to do better. We knew we could. We kind of ran out of time last time, but this time we’re going to hit it hard.”
Check out the full interview between Jeramy Cooke and Gamasutra. Borderlands 2 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC next year. Are you eager for more Pandora?
