I loved Borderlands, the way you love memories of a summer or a semester when you first read a favorite book. Yet writing up impressions of a game like Borderlands 2 is quite difficult, actually. Where do you begin? "Hey, remember that game from October 2009 that inhaled 80 hours of your time? Well, get ready for a whole lot more of that." Because Borderlands 2, structurally, was instantly, drop-in-like-it's-2010-again familiar for me.

It's not to say there is no difference, or that this constitutes one huge DLC extension with four more classes. The first Borderlands couldn't draw on any user telemetry to refine its experience—which highlights how remarkable it is that the game became such an obsession. Borderlands 2 has the benefit of tuning itself with that data. "In fact, the servers are taking telemetry from the game we're playing right now," Jeramy Cooke, the game's art director, told me as we romped around Hyperion City, trashing the local dictator's monuments to himself.

A full featured minimap is perhaps the best example of that. Borderlands, remember, had only the compass with the cardinal directions across the bottom of your HUD, with a single diamond for your next objective. The mini-map doesn't obstruct your view, and it properly calls out objectives, enemies and allies, though I could see why maybe it was left out of the original. With a mini-map, I do tend to spend a lot of time glancing at that instead of a game's surroundings, however stylish.

There are still a lot of whoa-shit surprises in this game, most often in the firepower and loot you acquire. The four new classes all have new Action Skills, but I only got to test one in great detail: the Assassin's. Cooke, playing as the Siren, showed me that class' speciality, the phase-lock. The Assassin (name: Zer0) deploys a decoy of himself and then cloaks for a short burst of time. Your foes' critical areas are then highlighted, showing what to aim for to score a critical hit. Landing hits early in the cycle, I was told, won't deal as much damage but they will extend its time; waiting until the end and scoring a hit right as time runs delivers a mega-critical, whose damage practically assures a one-hit kill.

The Siren's phase lock draws somewhat on Lilith, the Siren from the original Borderlands, and fleshes out the canon of this peculiar character class. Evidently there are only six Sirens in existence at one time, and Maya, the Siren of Borderlands 2 is one. Her Phaselock accesses the same dimension that Lilith used to perform her Phase Walk, and freezes an enemy in a bubble. This is particularly useful—especially in solo play—when you or your team needs to pick off the weaker members of an enemy cohort before going after the real big problem leading it.

Maya has other skills that are especially useful, including one that, when Phaselock is deployed, drags a cluster of additional foes toward the bubble, presenting a nice fat target for those on your team who deal beaucoup splash damage (think: grenades). Mostly, the classes' trees evolve as they did in the original Borderlands, with some recognizable analogues to the original skill sets. However, Cooke said, re-spec costs have been reduced because of the designers' expectation that characters will have to reformat their skill loadouts to deal with different bosses and climactic battles as the campaign wears on.

Re-speccing should also help address one agonizing drawback of Borderlands that I encountered with my first character. I stupidly acquired weapons with high accuracy and damage factors but little (or zero) elemental effects, which were utterly necessary to defeat the Crimson Lance in the General Knoxx DLC on second-playthrough difficulty. Here, Maya's skill tree offers powers that deliver elemental effects, for example, allowing you to re-spec for a showdown with enemies particularly vulnerable to one of them (corrosion for armored foes, for instance) without having to hunt up a weapon to do that job.

I was disappointed to learn, however, that some of the hilariously grim death animations had to be toned down. I'll never forget the first shock kill I got, on a Brute in the second mission at the Dahl Headlands. Watching his eyes pop out and his head fry down to a barren skull, through my sniper scope, defined the holy-shit thrill that the original Borderlands provided. Unfortunately, overseas censors aren't too keen on seeing them this time around, so the electrocutions and immolations won't be as graphic.

The game still looks fantastic, runs fast, and plays just as addictively as its predecessor. Cooke and I had to be interrupted twice by a 2K Games representative whose job it was to shuttle me off to see another game.

I took a week's vacation when the original Borderlands released, riding my bicycle eight miles to a store to pick it up. In hindsight it was my personal game of the year for 2009. The only titles to get more time out of me this console generation have all been sports. Simply booting up Borderlands nearly three years later takes me back to some very fond memories. I'm old enough to know that you just don't get the same feeling the second time around, but Borderlands 2 looks like it will try its damndest to give it to me anyway.

The Borderlands 2 hands-on demo at E3 involves a bunch of 25-level characters from each of the game's four classes, partly to give players a chance to spec out higher-level characters and see what that's all about, and also to give them a taste of combat midway through the campaign.

But the gang at Gearbox is also letting folks take home a weapon if they fell in love with it. Not literally, of course. You get a code to unlock it when the game releases. There was one, and only one, gun I wanted: the Jakobs Horse Cannon.

Jakobs, according to the Borderlands canon, is known for making guns that deal a whole hell of a lot of damage, and fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. Keeping with their Wild West design themes, they usually have engraved gold plating inlaid into the grip or stock. The Horse Cannon is one of those that come up with a purple name in your inventory, meaning this sucker is an "Epic" weapon, a step below "Legendary" and two below the unique firearms acquired from bosses.

The Horse Cannon has a drum magazine that looks like a motorcycle wheel—Jeramy Cooke, the game's art director, told me it is actually "a magazine of magazines." It blows up a ton of ass. I twice got second-wind saves just unloading into Badass-caliber construction mechs. But it has a reloading time somewhere in the neighborhood of baking a potato.

Well, anyway, this take-it-home offer is good only for the game's PC version, which means I won't be able to keep my trusty Horse Cannon. So I'm going to give away my claim to one lucky PC gamer. What that means is, I will send the winner the card itself with the Steam redemption code on it. It will not work until the game releases, so there's no point giving this code out first-come, first-served over Twitter. There'd be no way to tell if you won.

Now, I want to be sure this goes to a PC gamer who can use the item, not someone who can't read instructions or doesn't know it's not for the Xbox 360 or PS3. So email kotakucontest@gmail.com, and include a screencapture of your current playthrough in Borderlands. It'd help if there's some sort of visual proof this is the PC version.

I'll select a winner at random between now and the time I get home from E3 on Friday and mail him or her the card. So the winner will need to provide me a mailing address in the United States for purposes of this contest.

If you're curious about the Horse Cannon's stats, feast your eyes on them below. This sumbitch kicks like a mule. I suppose I should have specified this is a level 25 weapon, so it won't be available to you until you reach that level. If you win, either unlock it immediately and carry it around (or sell it, hell), or wait until you hit 25 and unlock it then. Good luck!

Note from Stephen: Hey, Kotaku, Gearbox Software boss Randy Pitchford was sitting next to me in the Spike TV green room this afternoon, so I asked him to write a guest Kotaku post. He hesitated for maybe 15 seconds. Here's Randy...

Hey - You're letting me do a live post? Crazy, Stephen... Ok - what's topical for us... Oh! Loot Chest! I'm not sure how many of the Kotaku readers are pissed off at us about this, but I want to apologize for us radically underestimating demand of the limited editions of Borderlands 2. I'm told that the Ultimate Loot Chest Edition of Borderlands 2 has sold out after just a few days.

We're seeing unprecedented demand and I've been communicating with our awesome publishing partners, 2K Games, to see if there's anything we can do. It doesn't seem likely that there can be more loot chests manufactured by launch, but please keep in mind I'm not the sales guy, not the manufacturing or distribution guy - just a guy who wants to entertain and have happy customers. So if we can make something happen here, we'll report it on our website.

No, it's not the result of a customizable weapon. It's just 2K community manager Elizabeth Tobey's dachshund, Pancake. Isn't Pancake just adorable?

The real Borderlands 2 collector's edition won't come with a dachshund to sit pretty in your loot chest, but it does come with a bunch of other goodies.

Pancake is famous [dahanese via Reddit]

The team behind upcoming shooter Borderlands 2 first showed off their fancy loot chest last month at PAX East. The design came from community suggestions, made to look like the in-game loot chests, and they promised it would be filled with as-yet unannounced goodies.

Well, now the goodies are announced. Nestled deeply in among the map, stickers, bobblehead, art book, steel case, lithographs, field notes, creature ID chart, and certificate of authenticity, the "Ultimate Loot Chest Limited Edition" also includes, if you look hard enough, a disc with the game on it. The big bundle goes for $149.99.

Meanwhile, the "Deluxe Vault Hunter's Collector's Edition," at a slightly more affordable $99.99, includes the book, the stickers, the map, the comic, and the bobblehead. Both special editions are available for all platforms (PS3, Xbox 360, and PC) and include additional DLC. All pre-orders of any edition of the game, including the standard version, will receive the DLC Mechromancer character, also detailed at PAX East, for free.

Personally, I am nearly ready to start paying game developers to leave bobbleheads out of their collectors' editions. Those things are just creepy.

Borderlands 2 Pre-Order [Official site]

I love animal companions that fight on your side. The mabari you get in Dragon Age is a great example of why; they're adorable, loyal, and not too shabby as fighters.

Borderlands could also benefit from this concept. After all, skags are such a huge part of the universe that you might as well give the player some friendly, trained ones.

In the spirit of Pokémon, one user created this grenade mod that lets you throw Pokéballs that release one of ten skag variants to fight on your side. That's a feature I would definitely love to see in a Borderlands game.

Thanks, Jason!

Earlier today I attended Gearbox's panel at PAX East, where they revealed a badass new downloadable class in the works for Borderlands 2.

But the existing four classes still needed some flair. Enter the new character customization feature, through which you can create all sorts of wacky costumes and hair colors for your character.

There are also "bazillions" of character skins to choose from, so there's definitely a healthy amount of fun to be had with building your new treasure hunter/mercenary.

In a panel at PAX East, Gearbox Software just revealed that Borderlands 2 will add a new class—the "Mechromancer" sometime after the game releases this October. The class is in the conceptual stages only and will be developed once the game goes into its certification stages later this year. Concept art for the character was shown during a Gearbox Software panel at PAX.

To clarify confusion regarding our original wording, while preorders will receive the Mechromancer for free, the content will release to all players at the same time. That date is not set but a Gearbox representative said it would be 60 to 90 days after the game releases.

Furthermore, those who did play the first game (and still have their gamesave, of course) will be given a custom character skin and a unique head as a thank-you, Gearbox said at the same panel.

Some of the game's special edition premiums—which the studio had put up to a suggestion box last year—also were revealed. There will be two tiers of special editions. The "Deluxe Vault Hunters Edition" at $99, gets a Marcus Kincaid bobble head. He's the weapons supplier with the lothario accent who narrates the first game. The second, an "Ultimate Loot Chest Edition" (pictured above) delivers you a stylized Borderlands loot chest with all the goodies packed inside. It doesn't open up with hydraulics—it's more like a jewelry box, but it matches a community suggestion as best it could. More goodies and premiums in both editions will be announced later.

Finally, the Gearbox gang tossed out Easter eggs with codes inside, redeemable at a special website, that allowed attendees to compete to potentially insert their names into Borderlands 2 or Aliens: Colonial Marines as an Easter egg.

What would games look like if the developers behind them had an unlimited amount of time to work on them?

I'm not talking about an unlimited time in development hell, like Duke Nukem Forever. I'm talking about the luxury of not having a publisher breathing down your neck to crank a game out by the contracted time.

So what would Borderlands 2 look like if the Gearbox team had no time limitations? Would it look different than what they anticipate it currently will?

"No. It would look the same," says Sean Reardon, senior producer at Gearbox Software. But why?

"I don't buy into unlimited time. As a producer, I think the thing that creates quality is the focus on time. If you have unlimited time, you're going to have no constraints. The boundaries are too ill-defined for me to do anything creative in that space. I need something concrete to be creative. If we had infinite time, we'd still be dicking around on that very first decision. There'd be no game."

What about infinite money? Surely you could use infinite money for glamorous cinematics, high-end voice actors, motion capture, promotional campaigns, anything?

Nope, not that either. "If I have infinite money, where's my passion? If I have no creative boundaries, I have nothing to do. I have no challenge. I'm not saying, ‘Work for money,' I'm saying, ‘Use money to solve interesting challenges.'"

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There's A New Siren In Borderlands 2, And She Kicks Fierce Robot Ass

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How The Worst Thing Players Did in Borderlands Made It Better

Gearbox Software's first Borderlands won fans over with its awesome, awesome loot, high-contrast art style and wacky characters. But, as great as the game's procedurally-generated weapons were, Gearbox say that the first-person shooter/role-playing hybrid was whatever the gamer wanted it to... More »

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Day One DLC Isn't Always Evil, Says Borderlands 2 Guy

Everyone hates day one DLC. But even haters of the practice don't really understand why it exists.
The exact procedure that goes into launching a game means that developers aren't always on-hand with a game up until to the day it is launched. More »

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Everyone hates day-one DLC. But even haters of the practice don't really understand why it exists.

The exact procedure that goes into launching a game means that developers aren't always on-hand with a game up until to the day it is launched. Teams are left free to work on bugs, patches, or extra content after the game has entered its alpha stage.

Gearbox senior producer Sean Reardon finds it unfortunate that the wider community of gamers does not understand this procedure, but to him it's also understandable. He loves working on DLC, and in fact was the producer for the DLC on the first Borderlands title. DLC, he says, is not always evil.

"I can imagine a situation where the game is in certification for 5 weeks before it comes out. It's actually off our hands. Day one feels different to me than on-disc. On-disc means that at the time of going into certification I've done extra work and decided, you know what? I'm not going to give you that. I'm going to cordon that off and ask you for more money later on. There's a line there.

I'm going to go home and I'm not going to get my $60 worth. Then they're going to charge me more to unlock the thing I should've gotten the first time. That's horseshit. That's actually horseshit. And I firmly believe that."

It's safe to say you won't be seeing any on-disc DLC with Borderlands 2. Reardon says he is going to push his team to put every ounce of effort into creating a complete game for launch, and then push them even further for any potential content thereafter. "The only work that had happened before shipping Borderlands 1 was to enable the fact that we could even have DLC. There's actually a lot of work to make that possible to not exclude that option."

The first title's DLC gave players new settings, creatures, vehicles, and gameplay modes that convinced gamers to revisit their gameshelves for Borderlands 1. For those of you who were as addicted to the game as I was, the downloadable content was both a welcomed addition as well as the perfect excuse to keep playing. Any potential Borderlands 2 DLC will hopefully inspire the same amount of creativity from the development team.

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There's A New Siren In Borderlands 2, And She Kicks Fierce Robot Ass

What do you do with a sequel to a game that has a huge roster of weapons, quirky characters, and awesome 4-player co-op? You add more weapons, of course. More »

---

How The Worst Thing Players Did in Borderlands Made It Better

Gearbox Software's first Borderlands won fans over with its awesome, awesome loot, high-contrast art style and wacky characters. But, as great as the game's procedurally-generated weapons were, Gearbox say that the first-person shooter/role-playing hybrid was whatever the gamer wanted it to... More »

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