14 DAY TRIAL // Borderlands 2 was confirmed last month but already its developer, Gearbox Software, has started revealing lots of important details about the title and how it's going to improve on the quite popular original, especially through smarter enemies or a better design of the user interface on the PC.
Borderlands delighted quite a lot of gamers back in 2009 with its huge variety of weapons, lots of areas that could be explored, not to mention its solid cooperative-focused gameplay.
Now, Gearbox Software is working on a follow-up, which was confirmed back in August, and wants to improve on a variety of attributes from the original, with a larger open world that isn't divided into separate areas, smoother handling vehicles as well as a more dynamic quest system.
Speaking with Kotaku, Gearbox art director Jeramy Cooke confirmed that the Artificial Intelligence of enemies has been improved to better handle the environment and act more as a team in order to challenge players.
"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."
What's more, Cooke admits that Borderlands 1 on the PC wasn't the best experience the studio hoped for, but with the sequel, things are improved, especially in terms of the user interface that is customized for the platform.
"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."
Borderlands 2 is scheduled to appear sometime next year, for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.