Next-gen Borderlands waarschijnlijk met maximaal vier spelers

Hoewel het niet bekend is of er überhaupt een nieuwe Borderlands in ontwikkeling is, vertelt een belangrijk persoon binnen het ontwikkelingsteam van Borderlands dat hoewel de nieuwe consoles veel meer kracht hebben dan de huidige, dit niet betekent dat de co-op van Borderlands straks met meer personen tegelijk te spelen is.

Bij PAX Australië vertelt Borderlands 2 creative director en lead designer Paul Hellquist hoe de studio denkt over co-op: “I think that we were a little bit ahead of the curve, in terms of understanding what a fun and social experience co-op gaming can be, and I think we were one of the earlier ones that people really latched onto — in this console-cycle anyway.”

Toen Hellquist gevraagd werd of Gearbox ambities heeft om de co-opmodus uit te breiden tot meer dan vier spelers, gaf hij niet meteen een duidelijk antwoord: “We’re always thinking about all kinds of different things, but we don’t really have anything to talk about today."

Vervolgens reageerde Hellquist op de nieuwe consoles: “Oh yeah, of course. The new hardware is going to provide a lot of opportunities for new and interesting experiences, so yeah, we’re excited about that.”

In Borderlands 2 is co-op met maximaal vier spelers te spelen en dat is voornamelijk te wijten aan de hardware. “It’s mostly for performance, to keep the network bandwidth down low enough that everyone can have a rich and fast-paced experience. Because Borderlands is a very fast-paced game. So if we went further than that, frame rates and all that kind of stuff would suffer.”

Overigens betekent dit niet dat op nieuwe, krachtigere, consoles de limiet automatisch omhoog gaat. “There’s obviously more power, so some of those performance things will diminish, but we are always filling up all of the performance we are given by the hardware manufacturers, so I’m sure we’ll have different challenges."

"But there is also a thing we’ve talked a lot about internally with going more than four, where we think that if we go too much more than four, the experience will actually start to break down; that four is kind of a nice sweet spot, in terms of enough craziness, and of all of these different personalities and character classes and everything, but you can still kind of keep track of what’s happening."

“We do have a little bit of a worry that if we go to eight or sixteen or something crazy, that everyone will spread out, and you’ll kind of actually lose that more intimate “We’re working together” kind of experience. So there’s an interesting balance there that we’ll need to investigate.”

Onlangs werd bekend dat Borderlands 2 weer nieuwe DLC krijgt, die overigens niet onder de season pass valt. Zo zul je onder andere weer een hoger level kunnen bereiken met je characters.