Borderlands - Mad Moxxi DLC Interview @ Shacknews

Mathew Armstrong talks to Shacknews about the latest DLC content for Borderlands. They talk about the new areas, scaling, level caps, quests and the reasons behind the later PC and PS3 releases. Here is a snippet from the interview:

Shack: Does Mad Moxxi raise the game's level cap? If not, why, and is that something that's coming in a future download?

Matthew Armstrong: Early on, we said we would dedicate our DLC to giving the players what they want. We have many loyal fans who have played the game for a long time asking us for a place to really challenge themselves and show what they can REALLY do. Riot mode is not about growth! It's about proving yourself. It's about over the top co-operative combat and seeing if you're as tough as you think you are.

We have two tiers of tournament. The small tournament is five waves and gives a real nice prize at the end. It's a challenge, but it's designed to be something that anyone can tackle with a couple of friends. Each of the three coliseums takes about 2 hours in the small one, so there are six hours of repeatable gameplay in that one. But for the hardcore player, we have the BIG Tournament, which takes you through 20 increasingly difficult rounds, with new rules added, tougher enemies, and more enemies as the rounds progress. It's an epic challenge where you have to team up with real good players and fight as a team to emerge victorious.

Some examples of these rules are things like low gravity mode or vampire mode or headshots only mode etc. As these overlap it gets to be quite intense.

Now with that being said, we do recognize that some people just want an avenue to build their character just a little more. So what we did is figured out a way to maintain compatibility across all players and also allow people who got Mad Moxxi to gain additional skill points. It's in there.

Shack: Zombie Island hit PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 simultaneously, but Mad Moxxi is arriving on PlayStation 3 a week later than Xbox 360. Why the delay? And is there any clue as to when Mad Moxxi will be available on PC?

Matthew Armstrong: We try to get everything out to our fans as quickly as possible. Development, testing, certification, and a multitude of other factors all contribute to defining the release of DLC or games on various consoles. When we find that the release/ship dates for different consoles do not fall on the same date, we have to ask ourselves whether it's better to delay some so they all ship at the same time or to allow them to ship when they are ready, regardless of the other versions.

On Borderlands, we've generally decided to release things when they are ready to be released. Almost every developer or publisher has to make this call sometimes. It is inherent to making games. Next time maybe we'd love to do things differently.