And that’s only one playthrough with one character according to Gearbox’s Steve Gibson.
In an exclusive interview with GamerZines, Gearbox’s VP of Marketing Steve Gibson has revealed that a recent playthrough of Borderland 2′s campaign took around 58 hours. For any kind of shooter that running time is impressive, especially when you consider that run was only with one of the game’s five different character classes.
We imagine those 58 hours will be much more enjoyable, if you have a bunch of friends to roll with.
“What we like to think about it is, Borderlands is a hobby. Some guide guys just did a playthrough of Borderlands 2 and they reported back to us that it takes 58 hours to play through the campaign – and that’s just one playthrough with one character,” Steve revealed to us proudly.
“So the depth with which people can get into that…Yeah we look at it as a hobby, and that isn’t even counting the new Badass Points system and how that’ll affect every character you do. We want it to feel like you get more for your money, we’re happy for people to pay their money once and feel that they get ongoing value.”
First person shooters have become notorious for having short campaigns, with the running time of many releases barely passing the 10 hour barrier – we’re looking at you Call of Duty. Obviously the nature of Gearbox’s big looter shooter sequel does allow the developer to extend the game’s running time with quirky quests and activities designed to get you to go the extra mile for more loot, nevertheless it still boasts an abundence of content for a big modern blockbuster release.
No PvP? No problem, as long as we get more inspired original creations like Tiny Tina.
What’s even more impressive about that running time tally is that all of Borderland 2′s gameplay will be PvE orientated, with Gearbox electing to drop the previous game’s PvP element simply because it wasn’t popular enough.
We asked Steve why Arena mode was dropped:
“It was hardly used, so what we invested in instead was the co-op stuff. The Badass Ranking System is kind of a measure stick which says, ‘Look how awesome I’m doing in this world.’ So what we’ve invested in rather than Arena stuff is drop-in/drop-out split-screen co-op, and being able to re-adjust your questline a little bit to match up with other players.”
The Badass Ranking system allocates players tokens when they perform feats in Borderlands 2, which can then be spent on increasing fire rate, damage dished out, special abilities and other buffs. However what makes this system interesting is that these abilities can be stacked and are persistent across all player characters, so it’ll reward combatents for their time invested in the game even if they’re starting a class they’ve never played as before. Neat right?
Borderlands 2 will be released for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on 21st September. You can read more of this exclusive interview with Gearbox’s charismatic Steve Gibson by following this link.
Tags: Borderlands 2
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Comments
58 hours isn’t too bad. but I would like it to be compared to borderlands 1… my friends and I beat border lands 1 all missions in less then 30 hours.
im going to be doing a playthrough check out part 1 if you want!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfhmPSZpQ7U
I loved Borderlands 2, It was one of the most enjoyable games of 2012