GFW: You said from the first week you guys were designing this as a co-op game. What sorts of things are built into the game for the explicit purpose of teamwork or playing with a friend? Or is that an open-ended...

RP: If you are alone, you can play the game beginning to end. If you have friends, the experience is fun too. It's fun in different ways -- you can interact socially, you can work together, you can trade -- but the game works whether you have one, two, three, or four players. In fact you can play the game halfway through yourself, take your character and all your stuff and all your skills, and then join [director Matt Armstrong]'s game and you guys can play together and get some new stuff. Maybe he's got some items he'll give to you, and then you can take all the stuff you've got, the new levels you've gone up, the new skills you've developed, all your new equipment, and then go back to where you were in your game and keep going. You can finish the game, take your character, and start it again. And your character is just going to get better and better and better.

GFW: Yesterday, when we were talking about Brothers in Arms, we talked a lot about the ways you were going to tell a really great story cinematically. Would you say much of that carries over to Borderlands?

RP: I would say that we're developing skill there that has accelerated compared to a lot of folks that either haven't been doing strong story-based things, or aren't involved in the sum of the kinds of things we're involved in. So that skill and understanding of the impact of the decisions we're making is...it's not hurting. These games are very different; they're not trying to be the same game. There are some advantages -- there's technology we can invent on one game that's applicable to the other. That allows both games to basically have an effective budget that's larger than it would have been if we were only making the one game. But they're very different games. Hell's Highway is...one of our mottoes is, the games we want to play are part of history, so we're going to do this very crafted storytelling. Whereas Borderlands wants to get the player involved a little more in the choices he's making and the quests that are available, and have different things that can happen.