According to Cooke, “It is definitely a bigger world this time around. I’d say we built about a third more space than we had in the last game.”
Cookie discussed some of the new features in Borderlands 2 as well, such as a persistent mini map featuring blips to help players find their through the varied landscapes. Cooke explained, “To me, when you see that little blip on the distant mountain peak, I gotta get over there now! There’s gonna be a gun there for me. That’s what I want.”
The other major change is the lack of a hub. “It’s all very seamless and we worked very hard to connect each space to the others in a logical way,” detailed Cooke, ”For instance when you’re seeing the top of the dam in the demo, you’re looking off into the deserts in the South, and if you look to the other side you’re gonna see the frozen wastelands on the other side. It’s all totally connected.”
Cooke continued, “We just decided okay well we need to go out and explore the rest of Pandora. So you get grass, you get ice, you get volcanoes…You were basically in the mid-West of Pandora before, and now you’re gonna head North, and also South-east a little bit. We actually worked really hard on the world map, the level design really loves this stuff, really takes care of it. So we locate every map in a real spot on the continent of Pandora.”
Borderlands 2 will be released on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012.