Borderlands 2 Art Director Talks About Color, Exploration

The announcement that Gearbox was working on Borderlands 2 so close after the launch of the first game was somewhat of a surprise for the industry and the fan base has reacted with some distrust, prompting the developers to offer more information on how they plan to make the sequel more than just a cash grab.

Jeremy Cooke, who is the art director at Gearbox working on Borderlands 3, has spoken to Gamasutra about the game and its art style, saying, “we really wanted to just widen that and give you this sense of a huge space, which is why you can see the other maps from the maps you’re in. You look over there, and you see this dam off in the distance, and you know ‘Oh, that’s where I was,’ and vice-versa when you’re on top of the dam and you look down into Zone 1 and see all of the ice spread out. It’s about that sort of large-scale, large-scope experience.”

Exploration will become almost as important as fighting off waves of enemies in Borderlands 2 and will offer the development team a way of changing pace and delivering some new experiences.

Cooke added, “Borderlands is not a rail shooter, it’s not a corridor shooter. The world’s job is to be enticing, to convince you to go out there and find cool stuff, to dig around in the corner and find cool loot or a miniboss you didn’t know who was there or whatever.”

The entire game world in Borderlands 2 will feel more organic and players will be better able to say where they are and where they need to go just by looking at the area around them and checking for major landmarks.

The art director also says that the User Interface will be tweaked to make it more useful and also more accommodating for the split screen section of the game.