Gearbox Software’s CEO Randy Pitchford was here in Singapore recently to promote Borderlands 2, sequel to the first-person-shooter slash role-playing hybrid that won the Guinness World Record for having the most weapons in a video game.

On top of talking to us about the new features in Borderlands 2, Randy – who’s extremely open and transparent in media interviews – also shared with us his thoughts on exploits in the original game (weapons duping, “Armoury” glitch), as well as the thought process behind some of the crazy stuff (crazy awesome, that is) included in the game, such as Axton the Gunzerker’s double-middle-finger taunt.

This is gonna be long, so it might be a good idea to go and grab some popcorn.

—The original Borderlands had characters who weren’t like your typical NPCs/bosses in other RPGs or quest-based games – Dr Zed, T.K. Baha,, Nine-Toes, to name a few – that really established a wicked tone for the game right from the get-go.

And in Borderlands 2 we’re getting folks like Tiny Tina, Handsome Jack. and Ellie (who PC Gamer described as “the opposite of how most females tend to be represented in games”).

How does Gearbox come up with these characters? What do you guys do in the office, when not making games, to generate that kind of creative culture? The sort that would take a word written down on the whiteboard – Mechromancer – and turn it into wicked character class in the game?

There are so many creative and inventive people I have the pleasure of working with every day that character creation emerges organically as a team experience. Any given thought comes from somewhere – an individual – and the stickiest or most interesting thoughts tend to be iterated upon and built upon by the other people on the team. It tends to go around and around until a character almost develops a life of its own. When you get to a point with a character where you can imagine “What would Tiny Tina do here?” and you can actually imagine the answer to that question for any given situation, you know you’re there – you’ve created a character.

Whether the character is memorable or not, or believable or not, is really just a function of who has created it, what their goals are and how inventive they are capable of being. At Gearbox, we tend to try to amplify and explore creativity very freely, so you can get some pretty interesting things that come from that.

—Vault hunters Roland, Lillith, Brick, and Morecai, were silent brooding protagonists in the first Borderlands. You never really got a sense of who these characters are, apart from a quick cutscene that introduced them at the beginning of the game.

In Borderlands 2, these original vault hunters return as non-player-characters, each with their own personalities and motivations.

How was the process of re-imagining these classic Borderlands 1 player characters as NPCs like?

One of the most exciting aspects of the decision to bring the Vault Hunters from the original game back in Borderlands 2 as non-player characters, aside from the inherent awesomeness of getting to introduce a new set of vault hunters will all new skills and abilities, is that we can explore the identities of these characters in a way that was never possible when they were playable characters.

“Who is Roland? What would Lilith do with decision X or Y?” We feel intimate with the characters if we played the first game because we became them, yet we never really got to know them. Borderlands 2 offers us that experience: to get to know these characters.

We did start to explore the characters in making the first game, but couldn’t rightly justify acting much on those explorations without taking control or identity away from the players.

Borderlands 2 gives us that opportunity and it’s been a fun experience. I like to think of it as reading a book that later becomes a movie. Usually, the movie version of the character is a little different (or a lot different) from the image I had in my head. But, if the film makers do a good job of entertaining me and if I believe it, then the new image they create for me takes over and fills in all the visual blanks.

This is an odd experience for anyone who loves the content they expose themselves to. I like the experience – thinking about how my mind’s eye version is different from what the creators show me is really enlightening.

In the case of books to films, rarely does the author have such a command over the character in the film. Casting, script writing, costume design and film direction are almost never the same person as the original author. In the case of Borderlands, it’s us through and through, so it’s authentic in a whole new way that is interesting.

—Each character now has a new type of skill called the “Melee Override” that replaces their default melee attack with a special technique (Zer0 gets a lunge attack at enemies up to 5-feet awa, Maya can shoot out an orb slag that damages enemies around it).

How did the Melee Override skills in Borderlands 2 come about? What gave the team the inspiration to create these skills?

For Borderlands 2 we had a general goal of making more varied, interesting and meaningful skill possibilities than in the original game. So, some of the invention came from that general goal.

We also have amongst us arbitrary and often unpredictable inspiration that can happen from anywhere within the team. I think the orb slag (known as Scorn) was derived from an idea to allow Maya to cast her Phaselock ability (which traps your target in an orb) at enemies. In practice, it was simply more fun for this to be on a different cool-down than her standard Phaselock ability and it was more fun for this to be an instantly accessible feature.

So, doing the orb slag as an addition to the melee attack became a natural solution to that design puzzle. With Zer0, I think it really was as you imagine – between Paul Hellquist (Creative Director, Borderlands 2) and Jonathan Hemmingway [Lead Designer, Borderlands 2 – responsible for most of the implementation of the character skills] they just talked it through and decided they wanted to do it.

There was a moment where I even tried to kill it because I didn’t think it was going to work. Originally, they wanted to build the entire active ability around it!

I was wrong, thankfully, and not only did they get it to work but it became extremely fun. One of my favorite skill trees in the game is built around the function.

But, I guess my influence helped too because I think we ended up with a much more suitable active ability and a much more varied skill tree. It’s interesting how that happens – how the interests and influences of the different talent on the project will morph and shape ideas in an almost chicken-and-egg kind of process where the resulting collectively-inspired material is often better than what any single individual would’ve offered and delivered on their own.

—Right. What about Zer0’s ability to throw kunai knives, or Salvador the Gunzerker’s double-bird taunt (flipping middle-fingers up on both hands), which are activated by hitting the “class skill activation” button, after your character’s class skill is already activated (Zero’s Decoy or Salvador’s “Gunzerking” dual-wielding ability)? Effectively you’re mapping two active abilities to the same button, which I thought was pretty clever.

The Gunzerker skill “Come At Me Bro”, which allows him to hit the active ability button to flip a double bird while Gunzerking [dual-wielding], was actually derived from our first demonstration of the game.

At PAX Prime 2011 and at the GameStop manager’s event around the same time, we presented Borderlands 2 for the first time and played as the Gunzerker in a mission to rescue Roland from the Hyperion prison bot that had kidnapped him from the Bloodshot Bandits who had previously captured Roland.

We ended that demonstration with a little dramatic flair: a giant Hyperion constructor bot nuking the Gunzerker off the edge of a giant dam. As the Gunzerker was flying backwards off the dam, someone thought it would be funny if he flipped off the constructor bot that knocked him back with a big, first person double bird.

Once others at Gearbox saw the animation, well, that just had to become a skill! There was already a lot of intent and design at the time for the Gunzerker’s tanking tree (his “Brawn” tree), so the idea of the double bird serving as a taunt was a natural fit.

I think elsewhere in the game there already were explorations of follow-on effects using the active ability button, so it was a pretty naturally designed and implemented feature at that point.

The kunai is another one of those “wouldn’t –it-be-cool-if” discussions that not only gets out of hand, but becomes a thing. It’s one of the things I love most about working with the team at Gearbox – just so many passionate and clever people that creativity can come from anywhere and everywhere and everyone is just so excited to allow this thing we created to be the vehicle for everyone’s passion and capability to produce entertainment for our customers. It’s a blast!

—The last time we played a build of Borderlands 2, we noticed that a jackpot weapons vending machine was added to this sequel.

How useful will players find the jackpot machine? Is it possible to get a Legendary (Orange) or Pearlescent weapons in an end-game scenario? Since the loot you get is typically scaled to your character level.

The slot machines were added because they’re fun and there are some areas in the game where it felt natural. The guys that worked on them decided that the slot machines could be more than just cash generators – that they could open up to share loot in a cool way, like the best of the chests in the game.

I asked Paul Hellquist (Creative Director, Borderlands 2), who personally engineered the reward logic, what the odds were of getting a three-vault-icon jackpot and he said he couldn’t remember the exact probability, but the odds were around one in a thousand. In Borderlands 2, you can get some really unique stuff from the slot machines – even custom skins and heads for your character, or vehicle customizations if you’re lucky – but it ultimately turns out to be a bit of a currency sink, just like a real life slot machine.

—Bosses in Borderlands 1 never really gave you any good loot. All the good stuff came from chests that you can access after beating a boss fight.

In fact, the only boss in the game that dropped really good loot was the Crawmerax – which you can’t kill unless you’re literally at the maximum level.

Does Borderlands 2 handle boss-loot differently?

Crawmerax was our first attempt at a raid boss. We learned a lot from that, and from the way loot was handled in the first game. Borderlands 2 reflects all of those lessons learned. There are some great chests and some great farming opportunities. There are also some amazing bosses, some of which will drop the best loot in the game.

Borderlands 2 is all about iteration and perfection of the systems we invented all brought together in an entirely new experience of adventures, environments, enemies and loot.

—New in Borderlands 2: quest objectives aren’t just simple affairs of killing bad guy A, collect dropped item B, bringing it to NPC C now.

In this sequel some of the mission objectives will actually require you to do specific actions, such as purposely leaving three robot enemies in a stunned, critical state (but not killing them), lighting a Vorkid on fire with an elemental weapon, and luring an enemy into a trap – objectives that threw me for a loop because I was so focused on killing stuff I hadn’t realised that the game would not let me proceed if I just went on a killing spree.

So I suppose this is another example of that iteration of the first game’s systems that you talked about? What’s your favorite quest or quest objective so far?

I think you got it – it’s about variety of experience and about memorable adventures. It’s about fun. The first Borderlands game only scratched the surface of what is possible and we really applied the lessons and experience we had to bring things to a whole new level in Borderlands 2.

To answer your question about my favorite – and I don’t want to spoil anything here so I’ll be a bit vague – but among my favorite missions are the ones with mutually exclusive turn-ins.

To explain, imagine a character who is important to you needs something that you can provide. Imagine it’s a unique thing. One of a kind. Now imagine that as you are ready to provide that unique item, another character for a totally different, but interestingly conflicting reason, begs for the same thing. It’s entirely unique and you can only help one of the two characters. You can choose to help one or help neither, but you cannot resolve the mutual exclusivity of the conflict. The choice isn’t about branching paths or anything, the choice is about you as a player.

The choices we all make in such situations teach us something about ourselves. It’s a really interesting construct we’re exploring in a few different ways in the objectives and missions of Borderlands 2 and I’m really interested and excited to discover what, if any, impact these kinds of missions have.

—In the original Borderlands, it was possible to dupe weapons in multi-player games by having one player drop his entire inventory onto the ground, and quit the multi-player session without saving.

This turned out to be a godsend for many Borderlands players, as friends didn’t need to bicker over who gets which legendary weapons in a co-op playthrough. It also made money a non-issue in the game – which was great because people could focus on playing it, rather than grind for money or weapons.

Was this intentional design, or was it something you guys didn’t realise was possible until the game had launched? If it had been the latter, could you talk about why you ultimately decided not to patch the game to remove the exploit (which for the most part did not negatively impact players’ game experience)? And more important, will players be able to do this in Borderlands 2?

We realized that duping was possible. There are a lot of things that are possible that are, at their roots, a form of cheating. We could’ve stopped it, but we would’ve had to do some nasty things under the hood or require an always-on experience [like in Diablo 3], which we’re not really motivated to enforce since there are so many users who have offline use cases that we do not want to interrupt.

Also, it would’ve taken a lot of resource and attention to stop that kind of behavior, and for what? We think it’s kind of fun for some people to exploit systems. We don’t like it when players purposefully try to ruin the experience for others and we have taken pains to do a better job of making that harder to do, but we think players who are having fun with the systems are still having fun. There’s a fuzzy line there that is difficult to see, but I’m pretty certain our philosophies are right on the matter and we do our best to try to make our software and our priorities fit with our philosophies. There are always limits in time and space and human capability, but I think if I focus on our intent the right solutions tend to naturally follow.

In the Secret Armoury of General Knoxx DLC, there is a quest (Armoury Assault) where you can infiltrate the armoury and loot dozens and dozens of rare weapon chests under a three-minute countdown. You were supposed to be able to do it only three times per playthrough (after which, the quest is activated only on a second playthrough), but players have since found an exploit that made use of a hole in the entrance to drop in, loot nearly the entire armouy without triggering the countdown, and do it over and over.

Again, was this something intentional?

After all, you did say that the General Knoxx DLC was really meant as a way to give players their “vault treasure” that was promised to them throughout the game’s storyline (in the end, the vault was just a prison for an ancient monster). Did someone on the team decide to just sneak it in and leave it there for players who want to get more guns to play with? If not, when did you first realise this was in the game, and why did you decide not to remove it?

This is a great question. I’ve seen this one debated on-line quite a lot. I’m pretty sure none of us have ever gone on record to answer this question and there is a reason for that.

I’m going to maintain status quo and invoke magician rules here: “A magician never reveals his secrets as that would destroy the illusion.” Hopefully, if you enjoy the reality of the situation you have on your hands, you’ll appreciate that answer in the same way as a magician’s audience that has just experienced the joy of wonder from witnessing something that they know is impossible would not *really* want that feeling of wonder spoiled by being told how it was done without any magic at all.

The intellectual side of each of us knows that there is no magic, but the illusion lets us all feel like children again for just a moment. I like that feeling and I love that we’re sometimes able to create that feeling for others. It’s why we do what we do. So, thanks in advance for letting us keep some of the wonder safe.

—I love that you guys didn’t want to ruin the fun for folks who enjoyed doing that.

Speaking of weapons, so in Borderlands 2, each weapons manufacturer now has its own signature trait for all their wares. For instance, Tediore weapons are disposable – instead of reloading, when it’s out of ammo you just throw it at your enemies and it’ll explode like a grenade, and a new piece of the same weapon would appear back in your hands.

How is the damage for Tediore weapons’ explosions calculated? Will the discarded weapons do more damage if it were a rocket launcher, versus if it were a pee-wee pistol?

That is a geeky technical question! I’ll give you a solid answer: the damage done by a thrown, exploding Tediore weapon is a function of the weapon’s capabilities and stats and the amount of ammunition that remains inside the weapon that is thrown, modified by other player stats of course. There are some pretty cool follow-on effects of the thrown Tediore that are a joy to discover, so I won’t spoil all of those follow-on mechanics here.

—Finally, do you have any examples of how powerful characters can eventually get? In the original game, building a “gold class” character was a matter of finding the best class mods, and smart stat pumping so that you had a “8/5” instead of “5/5” skill points for the skills you need. But now that Bad-ass ranks are also in the mix, did anybody in the development team tried to mess around and see just how ridiculously powerful they could become?

(Bad-ass ranks and class modes are explained from 4:38 in the following video)

We have some end-game raid-type encounters that demand some pretty well built characters. The QA team has had a LOT of time to develop and iterate some pretty high end characters and we’ve been collecting an absurd amount of telemetry during this game’s development.

We know a lot about optimal builds for throughput. We know a lot about best support builds. We know about best builds for keeping up rate of fire. We know a lot about burst damage. We know a lot about a lot with this game.

Having said that, given the nature of the procedural weapons generation system and how big and complex the game is, it is impossible for us to know everything. We’ve included the ability to inspect weapons from the menu. On the PC, one can take a screenshot that includes a picture of the weapon and the item card with its stats.

I imagine that some industry folks out there will be using this feature to populate online databases that, coupled with skill tree builders and other bits and pieces of information, can let one really min-max the hell out of this game if one is so inclined.

There are some unbelievably difficult optional or end-game encounters in the game that even the best of us have a difficult time beating in near perfect raid-team configurations, but I imagine through good data and cleverness, some players will be able to discover ways to solo the same content. It’s one of the things that is exciting about making a game like this. We cannot imagine all of the possibilities and we have learned never to underestimate the power of a hard-core gamer!

Borderlands 2 for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 will be released on September 21 in Singapore.

For pre-order details, read our previous story here.

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