Battleborn made Gearbox think differently about Borderlands 3
Battleborn is largely remembered as Gearbox's biggest flop, but the developer says it helped make Borderlands 3 a better game.
Borderlands 3 art director Scott Kester told Metro that after making two Borderlands games back-to-back, the studio needed a break.
This opportunity allowed the team to try something new with Battleborn, which didn't quite pan out, but Kester says the break - and the experience making Battleborn - helped make Borderlands 3 what it is.
"So we made [Borderlands] 1 and we made 2 pretty back-to-back. I was on both of those games and we were tired. And we were like, ‘Should we make another one?’ And we didn’t want to, we needed a break. Because if we didn’t have a break I think we wouldn’t have made something as good," said Kester.
"By the grace of the beautiful 2K they allowed us to say, ‘Hey, we want to try this Battleborn thing, we just want to kind of reset our palette, we’re gonna try this thing’. And we did it and… you know, if we didn’t make that game Borderlands 3 wouldn’t be as good as it is now. It made us think about things a little different."
Kester added that Borderlands 3 has been in development for about four years, and some of the work even started soon after Battleborn shipped.
"To us it wasn’t about, ‘Hammer it out, hammer it out! Let’s punch it out, let’s punch it out!’ It was like, ‘Let’s make the right thing. Let’s get it there and then we’ll take our time’. But also, we’ve put so much junk into this game. It’s frikkin’ huge. It’s considerably more content than we’ve put into anything else."
Borderlands 3 promised to be bigger than anything Gearbox has ever made, and it's out September 13 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.