Borderlands 2 drops enemies on you - from the moon

Gearbox has implemented a novel solution to the old random encounter problem.

"Hyperion was able to deploy these robots, loaders, that are dropped in from the moon onto the planet and immediately start attacking," lead designer Jon Hemingway told IGN.

"What this really does is it means that the player is never safe. Anytime where Hyperion knows where the player is they can be dropping in attacks so it adds a really interesting element of sort of chaos throughout the entire game."

"Yeah, and it's a pretty spectacular way to bring in enemies," lead writer Anthony Burch added.

"The bandits come out tents and that's cool and they scream things at you and curse but robots shoot down from the moon and things explode when they hit the ground. It's a much more visceral, spectacular way of bringing in enemies."

Hyperion is a weapons manufacturer with a major role to play in the plot of Borderlands 2; Burch explains that those who played the original game's General Knoxx DLC have some idea of the delicate situation which brought Hyperion to prominence on Pandroa.

"You saw what happened when Atlas tried to come to Pandora. You know they got their asses kicked by the vault hunters and that power vacuum allowed Hyperion to come in and snatch up a whole lot of stuff really quickly. Everybody wants to be Hyperion at this point on Pandora and get all the Eridium they have," he explained.

Despite their backseat role to Hyperion, the other manufacturers still maintain a presence in the game's world, and Gearbox wants to make that clear.

"We've talked a bit about the guns in a few other places but one of the big goals with the guns was to make the manufacturers shine more and so it's very easy to identify all the different manufacturers guns," Hemingway added.

"They all put their own specific attributes and love into the guns so Maliwan is still the really hi-tech companies but now their guns look really sleek and just really smooth, kind of like the Lamborghini of gun manufacturing. Jakobs looks really old timey and has wood. So yeah, all the manufacturers are all there and represented."

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