Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Goes Gold, Interview

I have to admit Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has flown well below my radar, and that I didn’t realize we are only a literal couple of weeks from release, so this tweet with which Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford announced the game has gone gold caught me a bit by surprise (thanks IGN), though I’m sure it will please the series’ fans among our readers:

Borderlands: The Pre Sequel is GOLD on all platforms! Launches Oct 14th in North America, Oct. 17 worldwide.

Speaking of series’ fans, if you happen to be one them you’ll want to read this Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Gearbox’s producer James Lopez and product manager Chris Faylor and 2K Australia’s designer Stephen Mander-Jones, which mostly focuses on the game’s writing and tone. Here’s a snippet:

RPS: There’s quite an Australian flavour to this Borderlands. Is that just the result of where it’s been made?

Mander-Jones: Sort of. It also helps that it’s set on Pandora’s moon, so it’s like a different part of the Borderlands universe. It makes sense that maybe a different kind of people might live there, so we thought, why not make them Australian?

RPS: A different place, but also a very different time, with different angles on the plot. But first, what kind of Australian angle did you bring to things?

Mander-Jones: There’s definitely a lot of humour that’s quite different. Some of it might confuse people, some of it might just be hilarious. I think that’s one of the great things we bring to it. A lot of the enemies or NPCs or quests are just styled to be kind of Australian and it brings quite a lot of flavour to it. We had a lot of fun coming up with those things and it wasn’t necessarily just the writers who came up with them. We let anyone who had cool ideas, as long as they were funny and Australian, put something in the game. We took all those suggestions on board and all the coolest things ended up in there.

RPS: It seems like a good opportunity to represent that. We don’t seem to see that many Australian characters in video games lately.

Mander-Jones: Yeah, there’s not too many. I think most people get confused by the accent.

Lopez: It’s exciting to have a little more diversity in the Borderlands universe. For the most part, we’ve heard typically American accents and a little bit of a British smattering here and there, but not really much of anything else and not a lot of other groups represented. Early in the development of the Pre-Sequel, 2K Australia was doing proof-of-concept missions by putting in temporary VO [voice-overs] and as we were hearing those accents in there, we started thinking (The moon definitely needs this.) We’re excited to add it because it makes the Borderlands universe all the richer for it.

Mander-Jones: It also helps reinforce that you’re off Pandora. You’re somewhere foreign, populated by a different kind of people.