Paul Hellquist: I think it does. Not necessarily because of the cool content that we’re talking about here, but I think it does because Borderlands has become something that a lot of gamers play every day now. It’s a hobby - I play Borderlands, sometimes with my friends, we get together once or twice a week, play through the latest challenges... that sort of thing.
Some people play it for so long and put so much of themselves into it, I think that it connects in different ways, and has become part of some players’ lives to a degree. We’re reflecting that in some ways with Tiny Tina’s D&D game... the idea that a bunch of friends are gathered together and just playing a game or two to relax.
Anthony Burch: One of the things that makes Borderlands so neat to me is that... you play Assassin’s Creed and you find that everything’s all very polished. All the sharp edges around it often feels like it was made by a team that was all working together and...
Paul Hellquist: We don’t work together very well. [Laughs]
Anthony Burch: No! I mean, it was like, they worked together to make something that was very palatable - very clean and uniform, in a sense. There is a cohesiveness of tone and vision in something like Assassin’s Creed.
Paul Hellquist: You saying I didn’t do my job..?
Anthony Burch: I’m saying you sucked, yes [laughs]. No, I’m saying you can boot up Borderlands, and can play a quest that’s about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then a quest about a girl who’s lost her best friend who died, then a quest about a woman who’s using a tea party to torture the person who murdered her parents, then a quest about Top Gun... they don’t all necessarily fit together in the most perfect way. It’s like this potpourri.
But I think that’s what’s cool about it, is that you get the sense that this game was made by a bunch of individual people, and there are certain things that bring it all together. Like the general sort of no-rules feel about it all. Again, you can go through this DLC and see that. There’s a serious quest about Tina who’s got these issues to work with about Roland. And then you have a quest that’s about Lilith and Brick arguing whether Game of Thrones is better as a book or a TV show.
Even the tooltips we have, when you’re looking at the loading screens... they’re not written in the way that you would expect them to. They’re not very professional, concise or have the perfect grammar. I intentionally wrote some of these like the player is just reading a dude tapping away at a keyboard. You feel like a person made this. This isn’t a faceless team, corporation or developer that made this. This is a bunch of people adding their own specific stuff to make it feel different.
Paul Hellquist: Yeah, make it better [laughs].
Anthony Burch: [Laughs, looks at Paul] Wh... what?
SPOnG: Let me give you a personal example. I completed all the DLC as well as the main game, except for the third DLC with Hammerlock. My interest just kind of tailed off - it didn’t have that same engaging appeal as the other packs or main game did. Was that a concern that players came forward to you with, or were there more specific things?
Anthony Burch: Well in a general sense, not really, because it’s very hard to articulate very general things. But we got a lot of really specific feedback on things that players wanted us to fix. They wanted certain characters to come back. They didn’t feel like they spent enough time with Torgue, for example, so we brought him back.
They wanted more uses for their Eridium, because they maxxed out at 99 and that’s it - so we added a whole shipment of new things to use Eridium on. We have new slot machines, chests that have D20s on them and if you spend Eridium then it rolls two D20s and you get something based on how good the roll is. We’ve got shrines all around the maps so that if you spend Eridium you get a buff of speed or regenerating health for a limited amount of time.
People wanted to hear their characters talk more - and this wasn’t just feedback from DLC, this is main game too. They wanted their player characters to be less like an accessory to the plot and more of an active participant. So you may have noticed a few times that your player character talks and comments on what’s going on. That differs depending on which player character you are, too. At the beginning, when Tina says “This smells of butts and dead people”, Lilith might say, “Oh, this smells of butts and dead people”, but Kreig might scream, ‘Oh, this smells like home!’
Paul Hellquist: The concept of ‘Hey, let’s make a playable Psycho,’ was a pretty easy pitch around the office. It didn’t take long for us to agree on that. But then we started to think about what having a Psycho in play actually means. How do we capture that? I talked with the guys who made the Psycho enemies and tried to understand their definition of a Psycho’s way of life.
Mostly? It’s about a total disregard for yourself. For a Psycho, killing whatever’s in front of you is more important than your own life. That’s a thing with the - they’re just charging at you, don’t really care that you’re shooting at them. They don’t even really dodge all that much. Then you have the guys that just blow themselves up, the guys who are on fire all the time... all these things came into designing Krieg.
We realised that this guy needed to make you feel like a psycho when you were playing. Some of the rules I had when I was thinking of the skills trees was that this guy should never take cover. If we had any skill that encourages you to go stand behind a rock, it was wrong and we needed to change it. So the goal became to reward aggression. Being out there, taking damage, constantly charging into battle. I think we’ve done that, which is really exciting. There’s pretty much nothing in those trees that encourage you to slow down.