Gearbox's Mikey Neumann has been billed as many things. Sometimes, he's "a guy who can get you things." Other times, he's a creative director. Today, he's answering some of the questions I had after wrapping up my initial playthrough of Borderlands.

And before we got around to discussing the ending--rest assured that spoilers are limited to the third page--we chatted about a variety of topics that any fan of Borderlands should find interesting, including talk of downloadable content and a vow that "we'll look at what the community really latches on to or wants, and we'll move in that direction."

Shack: Before we get started, is there any service you'd like to call out as exploiting developers or a game you want to label as boring in comparison to Borderlands?

Mikey Neumann: No. I'm actually pretty agnostic there.

On the subject of Steam and Fallout 3, just so like, anybody can start quoting me if they feel like it, I think Steam is a really interesting thing, and I think Randy was [taken] a little bit out of context on some of that.

Obviously, that story got around. I understand what he's saying when he says there's a little bit of a conflict of interest there theoretically. To Valve's credit, I have not seen that [factor in], I don't think they're exploiting it in any way, and it's the best we've got right now, so we all use it.

I think they blew it out of proportion. Randy loves Steam. It was one quote that is entirely truthful--there could be a conflict of interest there--but I mean, they can take whatever they want and they they blow it up to whatever story they want.

Shack: So, on to Borderlands. Early in the game, I got a shotgun with bouncing pellets that really got me excited for other weapons with unique quirks like that, but it seemed like everything else I ran across in that playthrough was pretty standard fare.

Mikey Neumann: There's definitely some really really super rare stuff, that's the stuff that always surprises us--the spiraling guns, the bouncing guns, the guns that shoot things they're not supposed to shoot. Those are your yellow-level stuff or your super rare purples. If you dig around, you'll definitely find some, but you're gonna have to really try and find them. There's some footage in the next trailer of some spiraling stuff that's pretty cool--it just happened to come out during the playtest for the footage.

Shack: I stumbled across rocket launcher that fired three rockets at once in a spiral.

Mikey Neumann: Somebody here found a rocket launcher that split. Like, the rocket fires and then it splits into two and if it doesn't hit anything it splits into four, eight, you know. It keeps doubling, basically. So if you found an open enough area and fired it at a flat enough angle you could generate like, tons and tons of rockets in one shot. It was pretty cool.

Again, that's the stuff that surprises us. There's a bunch of little stuff that I think some of the designers hid in there that maybe we didn't know about, they're kinda the really really wacky [ones]. Those are obviously super duper rare when the game makes one of those.

Shack: How rare are those yellow-level [the game refers to them as orange-level] items?

Mikey Neumann: Those are the most rare in the game. They're above purple. They're supposed to be rare, like super-duper rare. Chances are you might see one in your travels if you just play straight through. Our hope is, when you start running through the same areas again, you'll start to find stuff. Like if you're that guy that wants to grind for the super insane ultra-rare stuff, that end game is definitely there.

We wanted at least one level of weapon for the people that really want to dig into the game over the really long-term. How many purples did you get?

Shack: A lot.

Mikey Neumann: That's good. That was intended. It sounds like everything's working pretty much by design. Hopefully you would've got one yellow, but we can't obviously control that.

Shack: I got some pretty nice weapons. A repeater with a fire rate of something like 40.

Mikey Neumann: So it's like a death stapler.

Shack: Yeah. I can just point it in a general direction and the spray will decimate anything in its path.

Mikey Neumann: I like when you've got a repeater that has a knife on the front that add like 300 to your melee damage. You can just run around and decapitate people without firing it. Those are awesome.

Shack: What happened on the PC with the one-week delay--something about optimization?

Mikey Neumann: Sometimes a week can buy you a lot. I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but we ran into a couple little things.

The thing with PC is that we don't go through certification the same way. We made sure that 360 and PlayStation versions, those are essentially done first, and then anything that's a PC-centric problem we put into a bug queue to be done while we're certing the other things. The schedule seemed like it was going to work out, but it was off by about a week.

Shack: I noticed the voice chat options were a little lacking in the PC build I got for review. As in, I was unable to turn off voice chat, adjust the volume, or even mute.

Mikey Neumann: Yeah. We noticed that and know what people want there. It has already been under scrutiny here at Gearbox.

Shack: Could split-screen be something that's patched in later on PC?

Mikey Neumann: If we find that it's something that people want, we can certainly patch it in. As of right now, it's not there.

Shack: Are you at all concerned that people can duplicate items and share saves? I understand that it's a player's decision as to whether or not they engage in such actions, but it could still affect the community.

Mikey Neumann: It's also PC-specific. On the console, the saved games are linked to the profiles. But because it's not Games For Windows, no profile, and yeah.

Shack: Any plans to expand on item trading beyond the "drop this on the ground and hope the right person picks it up" honor system?

Mikey Neumann: We were pretty careful there. We wanted free-for-all looting for now. Then we'll look at what the community really latches on to or wants, and we'll move in that direction.

I haven't had a problem with it because I play with my friends, co-workers, and sometimes random people and we'll agree to loot rules. A lot of times if we wanted something, we'd duel for it. That seems to be the best way. It's kinda the honor system. It is fun to fight your friends and show who's the big dog to get certain loot drops.

If people are clamoring for some trade stuff, or clamoring for some better trade rules, then we'll look at that moving forward. I mean, if you look at the first release of World of Warcraft, it had like, what, 20% of the features it has now?

Turn the page for more on post-release support, downloadable content and firemen.