Borderlands 2 experience like Diablo 3: Randy Pitchford

Borderlands 2 is a lot like Diablo 3 when it comes to the varying experience offered by different classes, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford reckons.

Speaking to IGN, Pitchford said players of the original Borderlands liked to experiment with different classes, much as he's doing right now with Diablo 3.

“I’m playing as a Mage but I’m definitely going to also play as a Barbarian so I can chop dudes up with melee weapons instead of casting fireballs," Pitchford said of his Diablo 3 habit.

"That changes the whole nature of the experience. There’s a lot of people that play Borderlands like that, as a hobby. Adding characters is more for those kinds of gamers."

Gearbox has wrapped development on Borderlands 2 and is now working on a substantial piece of DLC - a whole new class, the Mechromancer - which involves a lot of work.

“It's not like some games, where you create a couple of chapters where I can play as this character. We're making a character class so it works for the whole game. You can go and play the entire game as this character, and you can play with any of the other characters in co-op. It has to be balanced," he said.

"There's a lot of design complexity to do that. But we really wanted to try it, we wanted to push ourselves, because if we can figure that out, we think that's awesome.”

Pitchford said adding a second female character gives players who prefer women avatars a choice, and Gearbox my even add further characters beyond that.

"We'll probably want to be adding more characters. With Borderlands 1, we did four DLCs, and they killed. We had a lot of fun making them," he said.

"Right now, we have a lot of momentum. There's still a lot of energy and love from a development and talent point of view. There's a lot of folks who want to do stuff and have ideas about things we can do, having finished the game. We created hooks in the game that allow us to add characters as patches, as DLC. There's no technical reason why we couldn't do more.”

The Mechromancer DLC will be free to those who pre-order Borderlands 2, which arrives on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.