One of my favorite things about the holidays is seeing all of the creative ways video game developers and publishers find to celebrate.

The many holiday cards we receive each year, are a great example of that.

Take, for instance, this fantastic Borderlands 2 card I received yesterday from 2K Games and Gearbox.

Thanks for thinking of us!

Perhaps you are a female. Perhaps you are a female who resembles Lilith from Borderlands. Or perhaps you know someone who does. If so, the game's developer, Gearbox Sofware, has a deal for you.

From the developer's website:

Do you want to be a character in a video game? We're looking for someone to become Lilith from Borderlands. If hired, you will appear in the game, Borderlands 2, as the live action version of the character. Additionally, you may be invited to participate in promotional events and trade shows.

Lilith is a siren—a female character with amazing powers. Borderlands 2, the upcoming sequel to Borderlands 1, features Lilith as a non-playable character.

"In the Borderlands universe, a Siren can project a live-action image of herself into the minds of those she wishes to communicate with," the site continued. "Your look need not be exact, but expressive of Lilith in the mind's eye—similar to how the Guardian Angel was portrayed in the original Borderlands."

There are a couple of stipulations. For one, you must be in the Dallas, Texas area for the first three weeks of December—which I should be! You also must be a female (rats) and between the ages of 18 and 30 (what is this shit?).

While no previous modeling or acting experience is needed, you should be able to follow direction and express character emotion.

Gearbox is careful to note that this isn't a contest. Rather, this is a "job opportunity". The selected individual will be paid US$1,000 per day of shooting, with a minimum one-day guarantee.

There are two ways to apply for the gig: one online, and the other is an open casting call in Dallas. More details in the link below.

Above, that's Kotaku columnist Lisa Foiles doing her best Lilith.

Casting [Gearbox Software]

Borderlands has a novel due for release on Tuesday, entitled Borderlands: The Fallen. It'll track the story of Roland, who represents the soldier class in the original game.

From the writeup on Amazon:

His name's Roland. Soldier class, a former mercenary, he's on a full-time mission to scrape a living out of the most dangerous planet in the galaxy.

Is he qualified? He's well armed, he's ruthless, and he's tougher than skag hide. And, oh yeah-he's strapped with some of the most exotic weaponry this side of the Vault, not to mention possessing fists like chunks of steel.

Zac Finn and his wife and young son had better get on the right side of Roland, because a stopover in orbit has turned into a nightmarish fall to the unforgiving landscape of the Borderlands. Zac hopes to find a strange new alien treasure in the Borderlands to turn his down-spiraling life around. But his wife, Marla, and his son, Cal, just want to survive, and reunite, because catastrophe has left them separated by hundreds of klicks. Their chances aren't good ... and Roland is all that stands between them and the planet's kill-crazed Psychos and murderous bandits—not to mention the grotesque primals, giant wyrm squids, insane tunnel rats, voracious skags, brutal bruisers, and ruthless mercs.

You can pick up a 40-page excerpt free, through Gearbox Software, at the link below.

Borderlands: The Fallen (Excerpt, pdf) [Gearbox]

Michael John Mamaril sadly passed away last month at the age of just 22. Being a big Borderlands fan, Michael's friend Carlo thought a nice way to remember him would be to have the game somehow pay tribute. Borderlands developers Gearbox did this and then some.

The game's loud-mouthed robot assistant, Claptrap, has recorded a short eulogy for Michael, which while a little strange to hear is still a touching gesture.

A more public showing is the fact Michael will be included in the game as an NPC.

You can hear the eulogy below.

Gearbox to honor late fan as an NPC in Borderlands 2 [Destructoid]

What would you like to see in a Borderlands 2 Collector's Edition? A box that opens up like a Crimson Lance chest? A psycho mask? Fake skaggy poo? A life-size rakk hive?

That last one might be a little tough, but Gearbox Software is taking suggestions for what premiums Borderlands diehards would like to see in a collector's edition when Borderlands 2 releases in 2012. They've opened an official thread on the Gearbox forums, so go in there and sound off. It's a studio that's very well known for its fan service, so maybe your idea will fly.

As someone who pumped at least 60 hours into that game, let me weigh in with my preferences. Realistically, they need to give a code for a truly balls-out in game weapon, as that's been one of the franchise's creative calling cards. Unrealistically, I want a See-n-Say Claptrap. Pull the string, and a Claptrap spins in the center, coming to rest on one of the game's many catchphrases, or Claptrap saying "The Skag goes ... 'Hlarglrbrfrgh.'"

Borderlands Collectors Edition Suggestions [Gearbox]

By now, you've probably seen the leaked footage of the most recent Borderlands 2 demo, and read our own Michael McWhertor's impressions of the game from Gamescom. Last weekend at PAX, I caught up with Gearbox's art director Jeramy Cooke to chat with him about the new characters, guns, and art tech in Borderlands 2, as well as why PC players will be getting a much more customized version this time around.

For starters, there will be an entirely new cast of characters in Borderlands 2, but Roland, Lilith, Mordecai, and the rest of the gang from Borderlands will still make the occasional appearance. "We decided to bring back all the original playable characters as NPCs in the new game," Cooke told me, "because everyone is so connected to them. I keep doing interviews where people tell me, 'Oh, I played the game for 300 hours.' These people spend so much time with these characters, but then, they don't really know who they are. This game is five years after the vault was opened, and we wanted to show what's happened since then."

The new demo has the player raiding an enemy compound to free Roland, the soldier from the first game; one would imagine this means that afterwards, Roland will be around for players to interact with, theoretically getting to know him beyond "This is the guy with the healing bullets."

"We're also trying to put a lot more variety into the actual zones themselves," Cooke continued. "There was a lot of repetition of the same brown rocks last time, and we said, 'We're not doing this again.' We want people to see the whole rest of Pandora. We had made a map a long time ago for Borderlands one, and it had grasslands, it had volcanic areas, it had icy areas, and we just never really got to build them all. So for Borderlands 2 I said, 'We are going to go see the rest of Pandora.'"

One of Borderlands's most distinctive aspects was its huge and varied arsenal. It's not a huge surprise that there will be even more weapons in the sequel. "There are a lot more guns this time," Cooke told me, "like, several orders of magnitude more. Our core gun system that we had last time we revamped the base code system for that to make it more efficient so that we could add more parts. So, in the past game we might've only had like five or six parts for a gun, now there can be more like twelve, fourteen parts in a gun. We paramaterized the scope views as well—before, it was all static art, so you might've only seen one of six scopes, but now you're going to see eighty-seven bazillion scopes, because they're all paramaterized. Guns dropped by bosses are going to have much more personality."

Cooke said that the various gun manufacturers would be much more distinctive, as well. Bandits' guns would be all about ammo, while other manufacturers would focus on rate-of-fire, ammunition type, and more. (And of course, the hilarious exploding disposable Tediore gun from the demo.)

The team has also been hard at work updating the game's art style. "I think I've helped evolve the art style for Borderlands 2", Cooke said. "We've added a lot more shader work. We've always seen ourselves as concept-art style instead of cartoony or anime or any of those things, because we do a lot more rendering. If you look at some of the ice, it's not just a 2D texture with lots of lines in it, it has pretty complex shader stuff, depending on how something catches the light." He went on to describe how when light catches various objects in the world, they each react differently—in essence, he and his team at Gearbox are building a world of living concept art.

I mentioned to Cooke how often, I find that I prefer a game's promotional concept-art to the way the game eventually looks. "That was how we made the switch. We were like, 'We're doing this high-realism thing, but the game has this crazy zany fun aspect to it, and it doesn't make any sense.' And we had all this awesome concept-art and we looked at it and said, 'Why don't we make it look like this? This is so cool.'"

"[Changing the art style for Borderlands] helped us find our voice, it helped us realize what kind of game we were making. There was a connection between the art and the game design, and suddenly they started riffing off of each other, and we ended up with crazy midgets strapped to shields… we realized that yeah, we're badass, but we like to have fun, too.'"

One of the chief criticisms of Borderlands was the repetitive enemies and somewhat simplistic AI—most enemies would simply charge at the character headlong, and combat frequently became an exercise in backpedaling and blasting. The AI was fairly easy to exploit in the first game, and Cooke says the team has addressed that, as well. "We saw people in the first game exploiting the AI," he said, "hiding around a building, getting the AI stuck and stuff like that, so now AI can completely navigate where players can navigate. They can jump from rooftop to rooftop, climb ladders, they can kick barrels down stairs... they have a much better sense of what's going on in the world. There's a whole new layer of communication, there's a whole new layer of states—we have wounded states, all these awesome buff states where guys hulk out. The AI is totally new from the original game."

"The other big area is user interface," Cooke continued. "We had a ton of fans who played the game on PC, but they honestly got a port of the console game. We heard a lot of fans say, 'Hey, you didn't really take care of us here.' So, we completely ripped out the UI - there's a completely new UI for PC, it's mouse-driven, supports drag-and-drop, all of the things that you would expect in a PC title. It'll be a lot more fun for people."

The first Borderlands managed to go from "oddity" to "obsession" to "dark horse GOTY candidate" - it was a flawed title that still managed to create an enjoyable experience simply by way of its strong mechanics and unique look. Listening to Cooke talk about the sequel gave me the impression that the dev team has listened hard to player feedback and is methodically addressing their concerns one by one. Very promising, to be sure.

An intrepid tipster has sent in a video s/he shot of the latest demo of Gearbox's upcoming shooter Borderlands 2, and so of course we thought we'd share it with all of you.

Unlike the last leaked footage we ran, this video is taken not from a possible pants-cam—it's clearly in-bag. Though it wasn't shot at PAX, it's basically the same demo (as well as the one that McWhertor checked out at Gamescom), so if you weren't able to make it to the show (or didn't want to wait in the ginormous line), now you can watch a slightly janky version of it at home.

At PAX, the presenter was sure to point out that everything seen in the long view seen at 5:45 was fully explorable, which… yeah. Cool.

Enjoy, and do stick around to the end.

You get a Borderlands 2! You get a Borderlands 2! This is Randy Pitchford and other top people from Gearbox Software giving away a copy of Borderlands 2 to every one of the 900 people who showed up at their community panel at PAX. Everyone got a card that includes a redemption code for the game (redeemable when the game launches.)

Randy then made everyone take an oath, which you need to see and hear to believe. It was a madhouse. (Good thing I had my camera!)

Technically, they said that Borderlands 2 publisher 2K Games was giving the games away, but it was clear that this was a gift inspired by Gearbox, one that went over pretty well. The codes are valid in the U.S. only, though Pitchford said he hopes to be able to accomodate non-U.S. attendees as well.

A new patch coming September 9 for the PC version of Borderlands will add Steamworks support and will begin to test some new systems development studio Gearbox Software wants to incorporate into Borderlands 2.

"This technology, dubbed B-Test for this patch, is about increasing the relationship between you and us, " Gearbox president Randy Pitchford said as he announced the patch at a Gearbox panel at PAX. The new tech will send data back to Gearbox, letting them know "which guns suck", which areas aren't being visited and other info that, presumably, Gearbox can tweak.

"This will allow us to make better games," he said.

It wasn't clear if this tech would allow Gearbox would be able to use that data to update the first Borderlands will influence the second, or will actually allow Gearbox to track Borderlands 2 play habits and keep that game in a constant state of improvement even after it has launched.

The addition of Steamworks support, Pitchford said, will help people not lose their saves, which people will be able to save in the cloud.

[UPDATE: I spoke to Pitchford after the panel and he clarified that the B-test may be used to test a two-way connection between players of that game and Gearbox, the intent is to test that tech so that we'll see it actually work and affect change and interaction post-launch in and around Borderlands 2. Pitchford emphasized to me that it would be a two-way connection but doesn't want to divulge more details or over-promise.]

You thought you saw all there was to see of Borderlands 2 at Gamescom last week? These two fresh shots direct from PAX will show you how very slightly wrong you were.

Man, that's an empty looking gallery. I almost added a picture of a friendly kitten, just because those two new shots looked lonely. That would be silly though. A fluffy kitten wouldn't survive for a minute on the surface of Pandora.

Poor kitties.