Gearbox's Borderlands a lot more attention, but it's also doing a lot to the gameplay. Like the first game, you'll choose to play as one of four character classes. So far we know of two, which includes the Gunzerker.

Every class can shoot guns, but they're distinguished by their primary action skills. The Gunzerker, for instance, can temporarily wield two guns at once. Build around these primary skills are elaborate trees that modify how the primary skill works. Gearbox's lead writer Anthony Burch and lead designer Jon Hemingway explain how.So what does dual mean aside from being able to output more damage? According to Anthony Burch, "I can combine a shock machine gun and a fire shotgun and charge with my machine gun firing to drop [enemy] shields and then light them on fire with the shotgun at close range and melt their face."The Gunzerker gets three skill trees, each of which represent a different style of play. "We certainly added more skills. We wanted the trees to be more unique," said Burch, who went on to explain the Gunzerker's backstory. "Everybody in the first game was implied to have just come to Pandora looking for the vault. Salvador [the Gunzerker] is actually a native of Pandora and the idea is that he sort of protected a town wherever he lived out in the sticks. Once Hyperion came to the planet they've been on this quest to eradicate all the 'bandits' from Pandora, but in their mind that's everybody who is not part of the Hyperion corporate family."His rampage skill tree is "about being a whirlwind of destruction." According to Burch, "A lot of skills are actually based off of movie quotes. With the skill Yippe Ki Yay, "while you're gunzerking [dual-wielding], any time you kill an enemy it increases the duration of gunzerking. What happens is that a really large encounter with lots of enemies becomes exciting. You immediately enter your gunzerking mode and every time you kill them you get bigger and stronger and badder and just completely go on a rampage throughout the fight. As long as you can keep killing things you can just keep on gunzerking forever."There's also the Brawn skill tree, where you can learn the Come at Me, Bro skill. With this, "while gunzerking you can let out a taunt and get enemies to focus on you," said Hemingway. "But then for the next several seconds you get a ton of damage reduction. But also the moment you taunt you instantly go to full health -- and so it's actually fantastic. You're in the middle of a fight, you're not doing so well, so rather than die you just start taunting, go to full health and then proceed to kill them all as they all focus on you. It's a fantastic moment, and a great example of something you do in the Brawn skill tree." While that could be useful while playing alone, it seems especially well-tuned for a multiplayer situation if a teammate is getting beat up and near death.You won't be locked into a skill tree, you can distribute points across multiple trees like in the first game. You can't learn every skill, though, and can reorganize your build if you're unhappy with your initial decisions. "We won't talk specifically about how you do respec-ing," said Hemingway, "but our philosophy has always been that it should be very, very easy and very cheap. You know in the first game respec-ing was ridiculously cheap to do and you could do it whenever you wanted. We do everything we can to encourage experimentation so the players can try out the different things."The third skill tree is called Gun Lust, which according to Burch is "all about just doing crazy or interesting things with guns. There's one skill called No Kill Like Overkill and anytime you kill an enemy, any excessive amount of damage you dealt is converted into health for you. Once you have this skill [...] you really want a gun to finish off enemies that does a ton of damage in one shot, so it's not uncommon for us to see gunzerkers go in with SMGs or something -- some, fast, high fire rate but low damage weapon -- because you get a guy's health low and then swap to a sniper riper or revolver and get a ton of health back."Gearbox wants players to use these skills together as well, like using the Money Shot skill in conjunction with No Kill Like Overkill. "Money Shot makes it so that the last bullet fired from any clip does massive damage. So imagine you have a revolver, you're going 'bang, bang, bang, kaboom,' and all of a sudden the guy explodes and you reload and go do it again," said Burch. Hemingway elaborated on the combinations possibilities, "So you have a Money Shot, the last shot in your chamber is super powerful, and then you have No Kill Like Overkill. You can just go from almost no health to completely full health if you just use your skills accurately and are a good shot."Skill trees aren't the only way to alter how the Gunzerker fights. Like in the original, you'll get grenade types and more to equip for varying effects. A skill called Double Your Fun, for instance, ties into the grenade system. "If you throw a grenade while gunzerking you actually end up throwing two grenades, but the second grenade doesn't cost you ammo. And so what we're really seeing people do is they will collect a grenade mod which explodes and then throws out additional grenades when those all explode. When you combine that with this it's like it's a room clearer. Just very quickly 'boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.' Everything dies," said Burch."The skills and the loot really have interesting kinds of interplay," said Hemingway. "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. 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."There will be more ways to modify your character as well, but Gearbox isn't talking about all the details just yet. The team also isn't talking much about the other classes. So far we know about Maya, a Siren. The Siren class was in the original game, but Maya will not have the Phasewalking skill that Lilith did in Borderlands. Burch promises her gameplay style will be, "very, very different and very, very new."Though we haven't yet had a chance to play, Gearbox is saying all the right things about Borderlands 2 so far. It's expected to be released in 2012 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.