Borderlands 2 Interview
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RPS: You must be spending an awful lot of times just sat in rooms talking to people at the moment. What has been your specific involvement with the game beyond obviously being at front of show?
Randy Pitchford: I am the most accountable. I am the most responsible. There's always a few very specific creative things that I care about that I'll tend to get involved in the specific development of. I always take an overarching role where I'm responsible for the intent, responsible for where the money comes from and how we're spending it. I make myself responsible for things that I think are important.
For example, I really wanted to have a meta thing as Borderlands 1 became a hobby for me, the idea of starting a second character after I'd maxed that one, I hated the idea of having to start over. So having something that caters to that a little bit was really important to me, so I designed the Badass Ranks system and had a lot to do with it. One of the things about Borderlands 2 is that most of the core systems are iterated upon the designs we established in Borderlands 1, so with Borderlands 1 I designed a huge percentage of the core loop stuff, but with Borderlands 2 I've become a bit more surgical with the specific work. And then with the general work I'd say that wherever I feel that I can add value or wherever I need to attend to things.
The other thing too is when you work in a team, it's a pretty big team of pretty amazing people that I'm very fortunate to get to work with every day. We tend to learn as we work together over time, we tend to learn about each other's strengths, and we tend to want to leverage them. We also tend to learn about each other's weaknesses, and we tend to try to mitigate them. So there's a lot of awesome people that you go to because of what they're strong at, and then there's also some things that I'm strong at that people will just come to me to get that from. There's also things I'm weak at that people want to avoid. We all have that.
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RPS: Especially with dialogue, you get so many games where it's just there to advance things and people want to skip through it, but if they know it's loaded with all this weird stuff they might actually want to pay attention.
Randy Pitchford: It's actually part of the process. When we wrote Borderlands 1, we had all the lines accounted for, and I wrote a version where it really just attended to the information, and I've done this for a lot of games. One of the common jokes is something I did when I was working on the Half-Life stuff, a line in the script where the guy that's leading you along says .ood job doing previous stuff, get ready to do next stuff!' And that wasn't a joke, it was just a draft, a place holder, informing what the real line needed to be as '˜Ok, I need to acknowledge what he just accomplished and I need to present the next step, but I need to do that in a way that's entertaining and in context to the situation of my character, but I was just trying to get through the information of what have you accomplished.
So I wrote this script for Borderlands 1 which had a lot of that and then Mikey went over everything and he made it crazy. I don't know if you listen to the logs, Professor Tannis, she gets more and more insane. My first ones were very dry and scientific, in fact my wife did the first pass just hitting the information, and I went over them with some flavour very dry and scientific, kind of '˜Captain's Log, Stardate 21/47'. We had bits of information that we wanted to get through in terms of back story that would give a sense of the planet and the universe and the situation, and then Mikey took each of them and rewrote them and first of all made a personality for her, listening to her descend into insanity, and crafted a narrative, so each entry was a step in this simple side narrative that happened, and in some of the cases, he lost some of the information. So I'd go back over it again.. we had that process a lot.
Even the intro that Marcus introduces, '˜You vant to hear a story, a tale of.' we had this kind of back and forth where I would enforce the information and he would put the personality in there, and the humour. It really worked out really well, and shows the teamwork. With Borderlands 2, it's even better because we've hired Anthony Burch he owns it, he now can maintain all of those threads and influences. There've been a lot of influences from a lot of different directions, but now you have a single owner of the script, someone who isn't also owner of the company, which is really helpful because it creates more peer interaction, and a lot more stuff can come into it. It's a better story as a result.
