Borderlands 2's revamped weapons and AI detailed

Gearbox has already made it clear it's overhauled enemy AI and weapons for Borderlands 2, but now we've learned more precisely how.

"There are a lot more guns this time, like, several orders of magnitude more," art director Jeramy Cooke told Kotaku.

"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."

Gearbox has also made an effort to ensure the many variations of parts are as visually distinct as statistically.

"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.

The art director also nixed any plans you might have for relying on the somewhat less than clever AI seen in the first Borderlands.

"We saw people in the first game exploiting the AI, hiding around a building, getting the AI stuck and stuff like that," he observed.

"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."

Borderlands 2 is expected in 2012, on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.