Borderlands 2 Previews

I’d wager that, since the title the third most pre-ordered title for Take Two, some of our readers might be interested in reading a preview or two about the title, and we have them served on the front.

First, EDGE offers a write-up:

Nothing could prepare us for the spiral into comic absurdity that commences with our arrival at Tiny Tina’s workshop. Roland’s contact turns out to be a psychotic, slang-talking 13-year-old orphan who has precisely as many screws loose as she had screws to begin with. Just in case we hadn’t already picked up on the macabre twist on Alice In Wonderland (Wasteland?) à la American McGee’s Alice, writer Anthony Burch underlines the reference by having Tina hosting a tea party. Once the introductions have been dispensed with, she solicits our help in rounding up the guests.

First, we’ll need to retrieve her date, Sir Reginald Von Bartlesby, who’s being held captive by his mother on a nearby hilltop insect mound. Sir Reginald is himself a Varkid bug trapped in a glass jar, which Tina has festooned with a top hat, monocle and moustache. The gag is a delightful nod to Edmund McMillen’s Dr Fetus.

Arriving at the mound, we find Madame Von Bartlesby, who isn’t all that keen to relinquish her son. She fires toxic projectile pods at us as we circle the pillar in the centre of the mound in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to stay in cover. With no meds in our inventory, and the additional complication of multiple attack helicopters called Buzzards bombarding us with missiles from the air, despatching Madame Bartlesby takes a laborious number of respawns. It’s just our luck that there’s a Buzzard training academy located beside the mound.

And then there’s some new info on the Mechromancer DLC from IGN, directly from Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford. Since most of it is in very broad strokes as the DLC is being developed right now, I’m going to quote this part on their future DLC plans:

Borderlands 2’s DLC isn’t about add-on missions. It’s about incorporating a new class into the chaos of Pandora. Pitchford says, (It’s not like some games, where you create a couple of chapters where I can play as this character. We’re making a character class so it works for the whole game. You can go and play the entire game as this character, and you can play with any of the other characters in co-op. It has to be balanced. There’s a lot of design complexity to do that. But we really wanted to try it, we wanted to push ourselves, because if we can figure that out, we think that’s awesome.)

This points towards the whole DLC plan. (We’ll probably want to be adding more characters,) he says. (With Borderlands 1, we did four DLCs, and they killed. We had a lot of fun making them. Right now, we have a lot of momentum. There’s still a lot of energy and love from a development and talent point of view. There’s a lot of folks who want to do stuff and have ideas about things we can do, having finished the game.

(We created hooks in the game that allow us to add characters as patches, as DLC. There’s no technical reason why we couldn’t do more.)