Borderlands 2 Interview
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Obviously, when Borderlands, the first game, took its aesthetic left turn and went for this comic book look, and rebooted the aesthetics, it was kind of a big bet but it really paid off, I think, with people.
At the beginning of this generation, you heard a lot of complaints, for example with Team Fortress 2 before it actually came out. People were so skeptical about this. But do you feel that placing these creative bets is actually the right decision for a company like yours?
RP: It really depends on what you're doing. I think for Borderlands, it started from a game design concept. The initial idea was about knowing that we could take the fun that we get from collecting loot, making choices about our character, making choices about our gear, making choices about our build of the character, and taking those things from RPG and blending it with FPSes, and we kinda knew that was going to work.
So that was the starting idea, and style and story kind of followed that. And for a long portion of the development, there was this mismatch... of the fun of the concept art, and the fun we were having on the conceptual point of view towards what we were actually building and rendering in the style of the game. So, that needed to break and get loose, because that just naturally fits with the game that we're making.
I think the game design of Team Fortress could go a lot of different ways, as evidenced by the gameplay that we had in earlier iterations of Team Fortress. If you kind of rewind, though, and you think about what Team Fortress Classic was, or what the original Team Fortress for Quake was, style was less of a defining characteristic, but when you think about the game play and what kind of things we were doing.
Even the designs of the characters in Team Fortress Classic -- the current Team Fortress 2 feels like a natural extreme hyper-evolution of where that was probably should've headed anyway. There was a moment where, I think, Team Fortress was going to go a different way after Half-Life came out and they showed us Team Fortress 2 and it was very realistic and very gritty, and I think that for anyone who imagined what they could be and wanted that, and they see this other thing, there's a kind of disconnect.
We had people with Borderlands 2, that when we were playing around with realism that told us, "I like realism. I like the realistic look. I'm afraid I'm not gonna like this." I think in the long range, after you play Borderlands, it feels like, "How could it be anything but this?" When you're dreaming about things, it's kind of difficult for some people to be as adaptable, I guess.
