Borderlands 2 Interview
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AusGamers: Anthony: from a writing perspective, can you talk a little bit about where the game began and where you've taken it. Because obviously with the first game, one of the criticisms was that it was a little bit barren. The story was quite good, but you've filled the world up now with a much richer cast of characters, and a richer background. Can you talk about the evolution of that?
Anthony: Sure. We kind of came from a place of really specifically knowing peoples responses -- like you said -- and going (How can we alleviate that problem?). If the idea is that they like the world, and they think some of the characters are cool, but they're saying that the story specifically is lacking, then what can we do to give that some more focus.
So we thought (Ok, well maybe it's about focus in the narrative; that maybe just going after the vault was maybe a little bit too vague for them; maybe they need something more direct to hone their attention). So we thought: (Ok, what about a really strong central villain? What's something that can mock you the entire time you're going through the game, and constantly be there as both something that's reminding you that the story exists verbally (because they're a character), and as an end goal, because you're always thinking in the back of your head (Oh, I can't wait to shoot that guy in the head).
So it really started there, and then became (Ok, if the whole game's just about kill this one guy -- really simple plot -- what else can we do that makes this character-centric world all revolve around that), and then it was like (Ok, we'll set it five years later, so we can have this impact on the world, and we can have you meet the original four vault hunters as NPCs, and then show how they have been changed by this one villain), and just try and expand on that one nugget of an idea that this game is about a villain that you're trying to kill, and try to make it all work around that.
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AusGamers: Now you mentioned this just before, that it was a performance issue that capped the players at four. Again, I know you can't really talk about next gen stuff or what you're doing, but at the very least, that must be an exciting prospect: that now that there's enough horsepower. Obviously the PC can do it anyway, but the next-gen consoles and the networking side of that seems like it caters itself toward you guys expanding. Can you at least talk about the possibilities that might be running through your mind?
Paul: There's obviously more power, so some of those performance things will diminish, but... [laughs] we are always filling up all of the performance we are given by the hardware manufacturers, so I'm sure we'll have different challenges. But there is also a thing we've talked a lot about internally with going more than four, where we think that if we go too much more than four, the experience will actually start to break down; that four is kind of a nice sweet spot, in terms of enough craziness, and of all of these different personalities and character classes and everything, but you can still kind of keep track of what's happening.
We do have a little bit of a worry that if we go to eight or sixteen or something crazy, that everyone will spread out, and you'll kind of actually lose that more intimate (We're working together) kind of experience. So there's an interesting balance there that we'll need to investigate.
