Each Borderlands DLC pack was made in eight weeks
Borderlands 2 art director Jeramy Cooke and concept designer Scott Kester both worked on the first Borderlands, and they shrug off accomplishments such as "made Borderlands" with considerable humility. When Cooke mentioned casually that every piece of DLC for the first title was created in just eight weeks each, we stopped him for clarification.
"You don't understand, those first DLCs, we were literally counting K to try and fit features in there because at the time we hadn't expected it to be such a huge success, so we didn't know that 'oh, we'll have to put all this DLC in,'" Cooke said during a meeting at PAX East 2012.
This development time is impressive considering the heft of each pack, but also because Gearbox hadn't prepared the full game to handle add-on content.
"It was the first time the company had ever done DLC, but we were like, damn it, if we're going to do it, let's do it," Kester said. And so they did.
Borderlands 2 is the second time Gearbox can attempt DLC and it has implemented a robust backend system to support whatever additional content it needs, including patches and support updates. With this improved system maybe Gearbox can beat its previous record and build one piece of 20-hour DLC in just 2 hours.
Maybe.
