Borderlands 2’s new and improved AI detailed

In the leaked Borderlands 2 gameplay video we saw a few days back, a Gearbox employee explained some of the enhancements made to Borderlands 2 over the original, particularly in the AI and animation department.

As fun as it was to blast away wave after wave of enemies in Borderlands, you have to admit the AI was a little.. lacking. Considering you could hide around a corner and the AI wouldn’t know what to do, you never really felt a whole lot of pressure from your normal encounter.

This is all set to change with Borderlands 2, though – and thanks to an interview with Gearbox from Kotaku, now we know a little bit more of how much an improvement we can expect.

One of the chief AI enhancements stems from enemies’ abilities to navigate terrain just as player would. If a player jumps on top of a house, for instance, the enemy can climb or even jump on top to meet them.

“We saw people in the first game exploiting the AI,” Gearbox’s Jeremy Cooke told Kotaku, “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.”

Gearbox also talked a bit about the new weapons and weapon types we can expect in Borderlands 2. In addition to bringing new weapon manufacturers and ammo types, Gearbox is also adding additional weapon parts to the weapon to allow for an even larger variation of weapons.

“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.”

Borderlands 2 is due out on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sometime after April of next year.