Borderlands 2 Writer Regrets Not Writing More Dialogue for Protagonists

Former Gearbox writer Anthony Burch apparently regrets following the same beats as the original Borderlands and writing the Borderlands 2 hero characters as quasi-silent protagonists, we learn thanks to a post-mortem piece of sorts he’s penned for Kotaku. Apparently Burch only realized the mistake thanks to feedback from focus testers, but didn’t have a chance to fully fix this perceived mistake during the development cycle:

But we talked to the focus testers (one of whom, Kirsten Kahler, would later go on to co-write Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel) some more, and eventually even I couldn’t argue with what they were saying. Everything in the game had a backstory, even the hordes of no-name bandits! Everything was explained and joked about and explored, except for the main characters of the game!

Paul and I agreed: we needed to change all the player-characters’ dialog. There was only one problem. At that point in development, it was impossible to change the player characters’ dialog.

The mission scripting was all but finished, and changing any of it would have created a QA nightmare. Global localization (the teams who translate all the English dialog into a handful of other languages) was expecting a chunk of dialog pickups (re-recordings), but nowhere near as many as we would have needed.

We had to do something, though. We knew that whatever we did wouldn’t be sufficient to solve the problem so much as mitigate it, but we figured something was a lot better than nothing.

We wound up stuffing a character-specific audio log into each avatar’s inventory. We didn’t force players to sit through any additional backstory on their characters, but if you ever checked your inventory (and since Borderlands is a game about loot, you were almost certain to) you’d at least have to choose whether to listen to the audio log or throw it away. Then, we added hidden audio logs to several different maps which combined to tell you who each protagonist was and why they came to Pandora.