Interviews// Borderlands 2: Rolling the Final Die

SPOnG: One of the things you mentioned was that you wanted to let people rethink their relationship with shields and health bars. Did that correlate with player behaviour that you guys may have seen?

Paul Hellquist: A little bit. Some of it was based on how this guy plays [points to Anthony, laughs]! He sits right next to me and plays Zero like a total... idiot, pretty much.

Anthony Burch: I was awesome at it!

Paul Hellquist: He was great at it, but he was using Fight for Your Life in a way that wasn’t originally intended. Which was fine, it wasn’t that he was doing it wrong, but it was very interesting. Basically, he just didn’t give a shit - he would run in with Zero and go crazy, shotgun-blasting everybody... and he’d go down like every 20 seconds. But he’d get back up every time, so it never felt like a failure to him.

A lot of players feel like they screwed up if they enter Fight for Your Life. Anthony thought it was great - he was invincible, all he needed to do was kill a dude and he could keep going. So that was definitely part of the inspiration, watching him play. And he’s not the only one that plays that way. We thought we should make a character, therefore, that actually encourages that style.

Anthony Burch: Obviously, Krieg is my favourite character now [laughs].

Paul Hellquist: Krieg encourages people to get into that habit, which is very different to how most people play, and I think that’s where a successful character in a class-type game like this needs to be. It needs to make people change their normal habits. If it’s not doing that, then it’s probably too much like some of the other characters.


SPOnG: It must be a challenge to try to persuade players to step out of their comfort zone and play in a different way.

Paul Hellquist: Yeah. It’s been interesting watching the focus tests. We’ve had lots of focus testers come in and play, and it takes some of them a while to realise that maybe they’re not doing things right. Sometimes they’re not feeling it, but then they’ll switch to a different tree, and for whatever reason - whatever little mechanics or combos they’re finding there - it clicks.

Trying to communicate that is difficult. You have to change the way you play and/or try a different tree because the one you immediately think you’ll love, might not actually be the tree that works best for you. We had a guy in focus testing who played in the Bloodlust tree for a week, and was like ‘I just don’t get it, it just doesn’t feel very good.’ Then he switched to Hellborn and came back saying, ‘This is the best character ever’. Another guy switched from Mania to Bloodlust and found Krieg to be instantly awesome. So it’s very much a player-to-player thing. Krieg’s got a lot of subtlety going on there.


SPOnG: This is DLC 4, the last one I imagine. So you both must have had some opportunity to reflect on the development of the main game and all the DLCs up to this point. What were the most challenging elements, the most positive and the bits where you felt the game has evolved the most over time?

Anthony Burch: I personally have become more comfortable with the idea that Borderlands is a franchise that is about character and not story. We’re at our most successful when we’re focusing on a particular character and showing you different aspects of them. When the story serves them, rather than the character serving the story. I think some of our strongest stuff is there.

Paul Hellquist: And to add to that, DLC is a great place for that, because they can be more intimate stories. When you’re making a big sequel to a disc game, something has to be earth-shattering. You need flying cities, main characters to die and all of Pandora’s got to be in trouble if we don’t succeed. Whereas with DLC, we can do something that’s about Tiny Tina living her life, those kinds of things. Stuff that we don’t have as much opportunity to do with the main titles.... [Turns to Anthony] What else were you going to say, sorry?

Anthony Burch: I dunno... I learned don’t use internet memes [laughs]?

Paul Hellquist: Other challenges... I think we keep learning that players want to know about the world they’re inhabiting more than we thought. They want to know about the characters they are playing as. They want to know about the Vault Hunters way more than we thought. What little was in Borderlands 2 was added at a super-late stage, because focus testers were like, ‘I would give this game a ten [out of ten] if I knew who the fuck Zero was or if I knew why Maya was here’ or all these other things.

So we panicked a bit, added all those ECHOs throughout the game that sort of told you the moments leading up to them starting this adventure. Solely based on that feedback, that people were really hungry for character-based info. Stuff that we thought nobody would give a crap about [laughs].


SPOnG: Thanks a lot for your time!

Anthony Burch: Thanks!

Paul Hellquist: Thank you.