It’s also to the credit of both Gearbox and 2K that so fundamental a change, made so late in development, was embraced wholeheartedly.īut if there’s one disappointment that arose from this eleventh-hour change of visual identity it’s that there was little time for the new art style to do much to inform game design. The results speak for themselves and the fact that Borderlands is recognisable from almost any screenshot is a testament to this experimentation and creative vision. As the story goes, a handful artists and coders were at a loose end a couple of years into the development of Gearbox’s new IP and so took it upon themselves to prototype an entirely different visual style for the multi-million-pound project one that moved away from the photo-real and toward the realm of comic-books.

It’s a curio of game design that, for much its development, Borderlands looked nothing like Borderlands. Gearbox Easter Egg: Whilst acknowledging the difficulty of taking on development of last year’s Duke Nukem Forever part way through its gestation, a Gearbox rep suggested that the team are now in a position to make any future games in the series “much more our own”.

Gearbox describes Borderlands as one of the most successful new IPs of this console generation, having sold over 4m of the original game. Now, players further along in the story can reset their mission status to enable them to hook up with friends that are lagging behind. The ineligibility problem of Borderlands multiplayer that meant players that had completed missions couldn’t play co-op with those that hadn’t, has been fixed. Mission structure has been overhauled to eliminate the original game’s mandatory “checking-in” of missions, reducing back-tracking. Ever seen a siren in action? Here's your chance.įeatures online and split-screen drop-in co-op. Here you have seven minutes of new Borderlands 2 gameplay in HD, a hands-on with multiplayer and a chat with Gearbox about quirky visuals and RoboCop.

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