Shiny New Borderlands 2 Trailer, Release Date Revealed
First the big news: Borderlands 2 finally has an official release date of September 18th 2012.
As someone who still regularly plays the original Borderlands,, I’ve been following the development of Borderlands 2 rather closely and with quite a bit of drooling. Before yesterday, the only official teaser certainly lived up to the name “teaser.” It consisted of a little over fifteen seconds of the new “Gunzerker” class dual wielding and blowing away some bipedal robots and wendigo-looking creatures. You can see the teaser here. (Full trailer available further down.)
There’s been plenty of drool-worthy gameplay demo leaks, and lots of juicy tidbits scattered across the gaming media, but on February 21st, we finally got a new official trailer. It’s packed full of big reveals. Breakdown after the video.
What we knew so far:
BL2 will feature four entirely new character classes. The characters from the original will be intimately involved in the story progression of the sequel, and will act as NPC allies at times. Nearly every system in the game has been rebuilt from the ground up, including: new UI and menu system; inclusion of a minimap; brand new skill trees, more skills than the original; new vehicles and vehicle physics; new world with a new aesthetic, all visible terrain is explorable (and it’s not 80% brown this time!); a ton of new enemies and enemy AI, including better teamwork among enemy groups and new bandit factions that will fight against each other. There’s more, but that’s most of the big stuff. (If there’s interest I’ll write a column pulling together everything we know so far about Borderlands 2.)
The new shit:
On to the big reveals, lots of new stuff going on in this video. First, we’ve got a cast of returning characters—Scooter, Moxxi, Markus, Tannis, and the good Dr. Zed—as well as a few new characters including the primary villain, Handsome Jack. This is our first (official) look at the three character classes besides Salvador the Gunzerker.
First we’ve got Maya, with her glowing tattoos and psychic attack she is clearly taking the Siren role. On the other hand—considering what we see of Zero later on—the Siren role might have a significantly different emphasis than in the original. We can only speculate (based on the Mass Effect Singularity-esque ability she’s seen using) that psychic abilities may take a more prominent role for Maya than it did for Lilith.
Next up Anton, who clearly looks the part to be taking over the Soldier spot on the roster. We can pretty safely assume that six-foot tall turret is his, which makes me think that turret customization will take more prominent position in the new Soldier’s skill set. Other than that, we don’t get much to go on regarding Anton.
Zero’s short reveal definitely leaves us with a lot of questions. Sure, he’s inherited Mordecai’s lithe frame, but it’s not made very apparent if he’s going to be the long-range specialist that the Hunter was. Later in the video we see him rocking a revolver and then a sniper, but in his dramatic entrance, it certainly looks like he’s emerging from a Siren-esque phasewalk. Given his ninja appearance and katana it looks like he might be a Siren type as far as getting right up in the enemies’ faces then disappearing. The original Hunter definitely had his share of run-and-gun-and-slice skills, so maybe Zero’s skill set just allows you to emphasize one or the otherr.
Also we can safely expect 870 gajillion more guns.
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