14 DAY TRIAL // Borderlands 2 might still be some time away but the developers at Gearbox are saying that they have plans to take the loot system that defined the first title in the series and mix it with an equally complex set of mechanics built around player skill and development.
Jon Hemingway, who is the lead designer working on Borderlands 2 at Gearbox, told IGN that, “The skills and the loot really have interesting kinds of interplay. We were talking about the Brawn Tree earlier, and you can min/max the Gunzerker to just be the ultimate health machine if you find the right kind of shield.”
He added, “There's some shields that have a low amount of actual shield but they increase your overall health and if you want to spec for those then you can just be a walking tank that will never ever, ever die.
“Your damage won't be as spectacular as someone who is going in the Gun Lust or Rampage tree but you can just be the agro sponge for your team. All the skills and all the loot have been sort of designed in such a way that you can combine them in these crazy ways.”
To make sure that players feel that they have choices, each of the character classes, two of which have been revealed so far, will have three skill trees that create very different gameplay experience.
We already know that Pandora will be a very different game world, dominated by a corporation that is able to call assaults from the planet’s moon against the player at any moment.
Gearbox also says that the new game will refine the overall combat mechanics of the original in order to make it more varied and emphasize teamwork when gamers engage in coop play.
Borderlands 2 will be launched on the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the PC during 2012.