Borderlands 2 Interview

N4G offers a brief interview with Gearbox Software’s art director Jeramy Cooke on their loot-heavy FPS/RPG hybrid Borderlands 2, which deals, among other things, with the game’s art direction and the circumstances that led to the developer releasing the PC port in its substandard state. Here’s a snippet:

Cat: Looking back, what did you want to ditch or revamp from Borderlands?

JC: Well, I don’t think we really ditched a whole heck of a lot, but we did revamp almost everything. I mean, the gun system was rebuilt from scratch, the UI was rebuilt from scratch, we were really disappointed with how the UI turned out on PC, and consoles for split screen and low-def. So we’re doing custom UI for every platform and you’ll see the main UI is all vertical format so that when do side split screen you can still see everything on your screen and still use it properly. On PC you’re going to have drag-and-drop, like a full mouse-driven interface. We had a ton of PC users and we feel like we didn’t take care of them very well, so this time we want to make sure that they get an awesome experience.

Cat: How did it happen that the PC gamers got the short end last time…

JC: Well, you know, it was an unfortunate thing. We really wanted to give them that UI, it just came down to time, you know, it was one of those things.

Cat: What do you say to gamers that skipped the first game?

JC: I think what I’d say is we really know who we are at this time. We switched visual styles in the middle of development of Borderlands 1, and a lot of stuff had to be really quickly retrofitted to the new style, and we kind of hadn’t found our voice yet. Little bits of it here and there that we thought were cool, but this time it’s all right there, we know who we are, we know what it’s all about, the game’s gonna be badass, it’s gonna be like dual-wield 87 bazillion guns or whatever, it’s a huge, huge experience.)