Combining first-person shooter gameplay with the habit-forming looting and leveling mechanics of Diablo, Gearbox's Borderlands quickly became a favorite around the IGN offices when it was released in 2009. It only got better with the downloadable content expansions, specifically the third titled The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. It wasn't until then that Borderlands felt fully-realized, with a story filled with goofy, memorable characters, making extended kill fests on the planet of Pandora feel more purposeful instead of random. Building on lessons learned from Borderlands and its downloadable content, Borderlands 2 is introducing a new villain, Handsome Jack. Based on what lead writer Anthony Burch and lead designer Jon Hemmingway have to say, it sounds like the team is taking story development and delivery in Borderlands 2 a lot more seriously, but also not seriously at all.IGN: How would you say story differs as a focus in Borderlands 2 as compared to the role that story played in Borderlands 1? Anthony Burch: Story is going to be a much more essential component of the experience. When you're going on an average mission you're going to be constantly getting objectives told to you by the [non-player characters]. The vault hunters from the first game are going to be guiding you through the world of Pandora. Let's take an average mission in the first Borderlands. Most of the story is just in the text before and after the mission. If you want to sit there and read all the sections you'll get a cool story but there's a fairly good chance that if you're like me you won't. In an average mission in Borderlands 2 you're going to have people constantly telling you not only what you're going to be doing but why you want to do it. Things are going to be happening in front of you as a part of the world. You're going to see Roland getting captured and you're going to have to actually chase him down while the guys from Hyperion and the bandits that you're fighting are yelling at you. The scale of everything is much bigger and your involvement in it is more a part of the actual gameplay rather than something just relegated to mission text. Jon Hemmingway: The best part about it is that it's really seamless. The story is told as you're playing the game. Keep looting stuff, keep killing things and the story just unfolds as you're doing it. Anthony Burch: We never wanted to make a game where the story is getting in the way of your gameplay. Borderlands is a game first and it's all about making sure that you can have the pacing you want in your experience while we feed story to you rather than sit and listen to this twenty minute cut-scene that I promise is totally awesome.IGN: I guess that's the main difficulty in trying to make people care about story in a game that is mostly about shooting people in the face and then taking their stuff. Anthony Burch: Right. The cool thing about it is that if you don't want to hear about the story the game never forces you to. We're never actually forcing anything down your throat. We'll have people tell it and try to convince you hey, maybe interesting things are happening here, but we're never going to actually rip control away from you for more than like three seconds at a time to get some sort of story point across because that's not what Borderlands is about. It's about having fun with your buddies and shooting midgets in the face. IGN: In terms of the overall tone of the story, would it be more like the main story in Borderlands 1, more serious? Or is it a little more humorous along the lines of what we saw in the downloadable content that came out for Borderlands 1? Anthony Burch: It's a little bit of both to be completely honest. There are moments where [expletive] gets pretty heavy but there is always this sort of undercurrent of humor, you know? A lot of the stuff in General Knoxx has been a place to touch base for tone and stuff like that, nothing ever gets so goofy that you can't really take it seriously. Borderlands is nothing without its levity, I think. IGN: And Handsome Jack specifically, can you talk about how that character was created and where the idea came from? Anthony Burch: When Paul Hellquist the creative director and myself were bubbling over the story, the games that we always really loved were the games with the really, really strong antagonist. Games like System Shock 2, Portal, BioShock. We thought that having a really strong antagonist who was constantly needling you much in the same way that General Knoxx in the Secret Army of General Knoxx DLC was helped bring the whole story together and give it this one focal point. You want to kill this guy and that's your thread through the plot. We went from there and thought what would be a fun sort of villain to have chiding you throughout your missions, who would fit on Pandora and who you could hate but also would be entertaining enough that you'd actually want to hear what they're going to say. IGN: Can you talk about the types of things that he would be saying or doing to make you hate and/or endear him? Anthony Burch: He has kind of a GLaDOS mode of interacting with the player. I'm not comparing them in terms of quality because I don't have an ego that big. You're not going to be constantly getting into confrontations with him but he gets help and we go into cut scene and he disappears. He's mostly going to be communicating with you over the radio and mocking you from a distant place. There's something a little bit more powerful about an enemy that you don't see that often, that you don't interact with that often, but whose presence is constantly felt.
Para mim jogo co-op desta geração, quando o comprei, eu e mais colegas ficamos agarrados, uma surpresa, infelizmente só deve vir lá para 2013...uma eternidade à espera deste jogão 
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