Borderlands 3 was among the biggest games at E3 2019, with a huge booth that was impossible to miss for any attendees. During the Los Angeles fair, the folks at Metro GameCentral were able to chat with Scott Kester, Art Director at Gearbox, who revealed a few interesting details on the development of the game.
For instance, he reckons making Battleborn helped them create a better Borderlands 3 in the end.
Okay, so we made 1 and we made 2 pretty back-to-back. I was on both of those games and we were tired. And we were like, ‘Should we make another one?’ And we didn’t want to, we needed a break. Because if we didn’t have a break I think we wouldn’t have made something as good.
By the grace of the beautiful 2K, they allowed us to say, ‘Hey, we want to try this Battleborn thing, we just want to kind of reset our palette, we’re gonna try this thing’. And we did it and… you know, if we didn’t make that game Borderlands 3 wouldn’t be as good as it is now. It made us think about things a little different. I’ve worked on this game for over four years now, it’s been in development for a while. The second I finished Battleborn I essentially started going into this. To us it wasn’t about, ‘Hammer it out, hammer it out! Let’s punch it out, let’s punch it out!’ It was like, ‘Let’s make the right thing. Let’s get it there and then we’ll take our time’.
With Borderlands 3 so close to release, Kester also commented on the DLC plans, saying they will be as meaty and substantial as fans remember from the previous franchise entries.
We do plan to support it post-launch but in the same way as we did before, so if that counts as games as a service, I guess… But some of those other games out there don’t have a great endgame, but we believe in the second and the third playthrough. We believe in a thing called Mayhem mode, which drastically tweaks the numbers of things… how hard do you want the game to be as you play through the second and third time? We have guardian ranks that… once you beat the game there’s an entire whole skill system that becomes unlocked after you beat the game. Our endgame is really deep and we want people to keep playing it. We do plan to go into DLC but I think we also kind of tried to put a stake in the ground for making DLC too. We’ve made pretty substantial, meaty DLC and we want to continue doing that. So if that’s games as a service then we will continue to do that, but we didn’t call it that.
Borderlands 3 is out on September 13th for PC (Epic Games Store), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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