Borderlands 2 to be less picky about which weapon you use

In the sequel to Borderlands, Gearbox wants players to be better placed to take advantage of the staggering variety of weaponry at their disposal.

"This time around we want players to really explore our new guns, which have a staggering amount of variety," creative director Paul Hellquist told IGN.

"We want the player to have the fun RPG experience of determining, you know, the min/max area of the best weapons for this class with this build are these types, whether it's this brand of pistols or this brand of assault rifles or whatever. We really want that to be something that players explore instead of sort of saying 'hey, go use the assault rifles all the time.'"

Art director Jeramy Cooke said the first Borderlands was too restrictive in that regard.

"We sort of backpedalled on that from the first game. We found that people really just wanted to be able to use the weapons they wanted to use," he said.

"We tried to be a little less like 'you really want to use this type of gun,' because inevitably someone would just take Brick and go get a sniper rifle and they just wanted to play that way. So we've opened the skill trees up a lot more so that people can access weapons that they want.

"Now there may be weapons that just harmonize better with certain skills but we're not really kind of forcing that whereas like, you know, here's a buff to this very specific class of weapon. We typically don't do a lot of that."

The discussion came as part of a wider feature detailing the Siren class, which has undergone reinvention since the first game.

Borderlands 2 is expected on September 18, on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Thanks, Gamespy.