Thread: Borderlands 2! 96.5% AWIMAWEHAWIMAWEH    

larger versions of Qal pics;

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6201/...454770de_o.jpg
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Those pictures look so tasty and delicious.

Dat Marcus statue

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/08/19/bo...w-with-online/

Borderlands 2 will allow you to take you couch co-op companion online. Gearbox's Steve Gibson told Joystiq at the Gamescom reveal of the game that those playing split-screen will be able to go online and connect with two other players.

"The only situation you can not do is split-screen plus split-screen because you need a host," Gibson said. "And a split-screen guy uses a lot of CPU, so he can not be the host."

Another improvement for the sequel concerns the user interface, which has been reworked for split-screen. Now you can easily manage the upgrades menu without all that awkward scrolling around.

Intro of Gunzerker

While the vault hunters of the first Borderlands may not have featured much in the way of narration, it definitely mattered which of them you picked. Each class came with a different play-style and skill tree, from the proficient sniper Mordecai to the heavy weaponry and brutal melee attacks of Brick. Borderlands 2 will place players in the shoes of four new characters, and Gearbox revealed one of them to us during our recent cover trip. Salvador belongs to the new Gunzerker class, and all signs point to him being a versatile and entertaining character selection. Read on to see what you can expect from this new addition to the franchise.

As you might surmise from the name, the Gunzerker differs from the Berserker in that he focuses his abilities more on shooting than melee attacks. Whereas Brick would toss the guns and go into a timed rage of brutal punches, Salvador’s timed ability grants him an additional firearm. Once you’re double-fisting two of Pandora’s varied weapons, each will be fired independently with the left and right triggers. “What inspired some of the original ideas behind him was The Punisher,” says art director Jeramy Cooke. “He was happy to dual-wield AKs and M16s and everything under the sun. He just had this whole ‘grit his teeth and blast the crap out of everything’ vibe”.

Any of the guns in Borderlands 2 can be dual-wielded during this time, meaning Salvador can simultaneously shoot a rocket launcher and a sniper rifle, an incendiary SMG and an electric pistol, or go all-out with two giant miniguns. Thanks to the new "amp" elemental, you can work some strategy into your weapon selection. Amp-based weapons coat enemies in a goo that intensifies elemental damage, so dual-wielding one along with a fire/electric/corrosive gun will cause it to be much more effective.

Read on to learn details about Salvador’s skill tree.

Like in the first game, each character will feature a unique skill tree that allows for more play-style customization. Salvador’s tree splits into three paths - Wrath, Brawn, and Gun Lust. Wrath features stat bonuses and new abilities tied to his dual-wielding ability, Brawn is focused on physical toughness, and Gun Lust increases weapon stats and grants new abilities like Salvador’s aggro turret. Here are some other bonuses on the skill tree that you can funnel your points into:

Divergent Likeness - If you’re dual-wielding two weapons of the same type, you’ll deal bonus damage. Dual-wield weapons of differing types, and your accuracy goes up.

Notes from Paul Hellquist, Gearbox’s game design director: This skill is great because it interacts so well with not only the action skill but also with your gear choices. Which pairing of weapons makes me the most effective when using this skill? Should I use low-accuracy, high-damage weapons of different types to get accuracy bonuses? Or should I double-fist some revolvers for max damage but low fire rate? This skill changes the way you think about what you are dual-wielding and which gear will work best together to maximize your power during your action skill.

Down, Not Out - In the first Borderlands, no action ability was able to be used when you were on the brink of death. If you have this bonus activated in Salvador’s skill tree, however, he can dual-wield in his final moments.

Notes from Paul Hellquist: This skill breaks the rules of Borderlands. The general rule is no action skills while fighting for your life. This rule is to increase tension and limit a player’s power while fighting for their life. But in game design, the reason you make a rule is so you can occasionally break it. This skill breaks that rule and changes the way you think about your action skill. Your strategic options for when to use it are very different after purchasing this skill.

Overheat - No matter what gun you’re using, its rate of fire will continue to increase as long as you hold down the trigger.

Notes from Paul Hellquist: This skill is awesome because it can result in the most ludicrous fire rates on your weapons. Your low fire rate high-damage weapons become god-like. Your high rate-of-fire weapons fire all of their rounds in the blink of an eye. It’s just great fun.

From our early look at Salvador, he appears to be an absolute blast to play. Dual-wielding has been done before in tons of FPS titles, but the amount of weapons in Borderlands 2 should ensure a more strategic and varied experience.

I think my favorite thing about those screenshots is it telling us we're visiting parts of this world that aren't brown and garbage infested... and brown

shakycam footage from a closed presentation
http://blip.tv/file/5479298

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http://kotaku.com/5837080/new-leaked...exploding-guns
can't embed, but it has a new leaked video

"Sexual Tyrannosaurus" lolwut

new siren named Maya (I assume spelled that way)

been playing the first over steam with a buddy of mine and completely love this game. Hugely excited for 2 now.

I gotta say I'm loving the new gun models a lot more than I should. As much as I loved the first it was pretty lame having only a handful of barrels for each weapon and all the manufacturers being aesthetically identical just with different colors.

^like my buddy was saying, more than likely as you level up you'll just spam-throw the guns like grenades instead of firing em.

http://kotaku.com/5837677/borderland...is-time-around


Borderlands 2 Dev Talks New Art, Improved AI, and Why PC Gamers Won’t Get a Port This Time Around

By now, you've probably seen the leaked footage of the most recent Borderlands 2 demo, and read our own Michael McWhertor's impressions of the game from Gamescom. Last weekend at PAX, I caught up with Gearbox's art director Jeramy Cooke to chat with him about the new characters, guns, and art tech in Borderlands 2, as well as why PC players will be getting a much more customized version this time around.
For starters, there will be an entirely new cast of characters in Borderlands 2, but Roland, Lilith, Mordecai, and the rest of the gang from Borderlands will still make the occasional appearance. "We decided to bring back all the original playable characters as NPCs in the new game," Cooke told me, "because everyone is so connected to them. I keep doing interviews where people tell me, 'Oh, I played the game for 300 hours.' These people spend so much time with these characters, but then, they don't really know who they are. This game is five years after the vault was opened, and we wanted to show what's happened since then."

The new demo has the player raiding an enemy compound to free Roland, the soldier from the first game; one would imagine this means that afterwards, Roland will be around for players to interact with, theoretically getting to know him beyond "This is the guy with the healing bullets."

"We're also trying to put a lot more variety into the actual zones themselves," Cooke continued. "There was a lot of repetition of the same brown rocks last time, and we said, 'We're not doing this again.' We want people to see the whole rest of Pandora. We had made a map a long time ago for Borderlands one, and it had grasslands, it had volcanic areas, it had icy areas, and we just never really got to build them all. So for Borderlands 2 I said, 'We are going to go see the rest of Pandora.'"

One of Borderlands's most distinctive aspects was its huge and varied arsenal. It's not a huge surprise that there will be even more weapons in the sequel. "There are a lot more guns this time," Cooke told me, "like, several orders of magnitude more. Our core gun system that we had last time we revamped the base code system for that to make it more efficient so that we could add more parts. So, in the past game we might've only had like five or six parts for a gun, now there can be more like twelve, fourteen parts in a gun. We paramaterized the scope views as well—before, it was all static art, so you might've only seen one of six scopes, but now you're going to see eighty-seven bazillion scopes, because they're all paramaterized. Guns dropped by bosses are going to have much more personality."

Cooke said that the various gun manufacturers would be much more distinctive, as well. Bandits' guns would be all about ammo, while other manufacturers would focus on rate-of-fire, ammunition type, and more. (And of course, the hilarious exploding disposable Tediore gun from the demo.)

The team has also been hard at work updating the game's art style. "I think I've helped evolve the art style for Borderlands 2", Cooke said. "We've added a lot more shader work. We've always seen ourselves as concept-art style instead of cartoony or anime or any of those things, because we do a lot more rendering. If you look at some of the ice, it's not just a 2D texture with lots of lines in it, it has pretty complex shader stuff, depending on how something catches the light." He went on to describe how when light catches various objects in the world, they each react differently—in essence, he and his team at Gearbox are building a world of living concept art.

I mentioned to Cooke how often, I find that I prefer a game's promotional concept-art to the way the game eventually looks. "That was how we made the switch. We were like, 'We're doing this high-realism thing, but the game has this crazy zany fun aspect to it, and it doesn't make any sense.' And we had all this awesome concept-art and we looked at it and said, 'Why don't we make it look like this? This is so cool.'"

"[Changing the art style for Borderlands] helped us find our voice, it helped us realize what kind of game we were making. There was a connection between the art and the game design, and suddenly they started riffing off of each other, and we ended up with crazy midgets strapped to shields… we realized that yeah, we're badass, but we like to have fun, too.'"

One of the chief criticisms of Borderlands was the repetitive enemies and somewhat simplistic AI—most enemies would simply charge at the character headlong, and combat frequently became an exercise in backpedaling and blasting. The AI was fairly easy to exploit in the first game, and Cooke says the team has addressed that, as well. "We saw people in the first game exploiting the AI," he said, "hiding around a building, getting the AI stuck and stuff like that, so now AI can completely navigate where players can navigate. They can jump from rooftop to rooftop, climb ladders, they can kick barrels down stairs... they have a much better sense of what's going on in the world. There's a whole new layer of communication, there's a whole new layer of states—we have wounded states, all these awesome buff states where guys hulk out. The AI is totally new from the original game."

"The other big area is user interface," Cooke continued. "We had a ton of fans who played the game on PC, but they honestly got a port of the console game. We heard a lot of fans say, 'Hey, you didn't really take care of us here.' So, we completely ripped out the UI - there's a completely new UI for PC, it's mouse-driven, supports drag-and-drop, all of the things that you would expect in a PC title. It'll be a lot more fun for people."

The first Borderlands managed to go from "oddity" to "obsession" to "dark horse GOTY candidate" - it was a flawed title that still managed to create an enjoyable experience simply by way of its strong mechanics and unique look. Listening to Cooke talk about the sequel gave me the impression that the dev team has listened hard to player feedback and is methodically addressing their concerns one by one. Very promising, to be sure.

http://kotaku.com/5838572/borderland...ition-premiums

What would you like to see in a Borderlands 2 Collector's Edition? A box that opens up like a Crimson Lance chest? A psycho mask? Fake skaggy poo? A life-size rakk hive?

That last one might be a little tough, but Gearbox Software is taking suggestions for what premiums Borderlands diehards would like to see in a collector's edition when Borderlands 2 releases in 2012. They've opened an official thread on the Gearbox forums, so go in there and sound off. It's a studio that's very well known for its fan service, so maybe your idea will fly.

http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/sh...d.php?t=129937