Borderlands the Pre Sequel Not Being Able to Upload Missing

At that place's a new big Borderlands game coming this twelvemonth, but it'due south not Borderlands three and franchise creator Gearbox Software isn't in the commuter'southward seat.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is coming to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows PC this autumn and is in development past 2K Australia. Randy Pitchford, head of Gearbox, met with journalists in New York this week to walk them through the upcoming game and explain why it won't be on next-gen platforms or made past the people who created the showtime two.

Gearbox, Pitchford said, is a studio right at present that very much wants to concentrate on edifice entirely new properties and creating "engineering for the future." Merely the studio as well still sees an unmet need for more Borderlands past its most passionate fans.

"The last quarterly report that Take-Two talked to the shareholders about, they announced that Borderlands 2 has become the best selling game in 2K Games history, which is pretty awesome," he said. "I'm really pleased with that, evidently. It's a challenge for us, though, because my studio has dedicated a lot of its attentions toward building new IP and towards creating technology for the hereafter, which, in spite of the unparalleled support we gave to Borderlands two and the corporeality of DLC and other additional content nosotros added to Borderlands ii, we still accept not really met the need that there has been from our fans. And to be fair, besides, within Gearbox, nosotros really love Borderlands, and so there's a lot of us that go along wanting to do things with it, want to spend more than time in the space.

"So we were very fortunate later BioShock Infinite shipped that the 2K Australia squad was available, and and so these guys have been able to jump in 100 pct to make sure that we could bring more content to Borderlands fans, and that'southward what's becomes Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel."

Borderlands ane.5

Early on in his pitch to journalists, Pitchford said he wanted to call this next game Borderlands one.5 because that'due south when it takes place, but Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel won out because the game brings with information technology a host of new features and engineering.

The Pre-Sequel have place in the time lost between Borderlands and Borderlands two and is meant to be a sequel to the kickoff game and a prequel to the second. Players become ane of four characters, four new heroes, fighting aslope one some other on the team of Handsome Jack.

"The story is about the ascension of Handsome Jack, so it turns out, y'all'll discover, that he begins his journey maybe with morally skilful intentions," Pitchford said. "And throughout the class of this game, you'll see how he becomes the horrific, evil villain he is in Borderlands two that seems to have enjoyed cutting people'due south eyeballs out with a spoon. He wasn't always so bad."

While new equally heroes, the game's iv playable characters aren't new to the fiction of Borderlands. Gamers will have the option to play as Athena, a sometime Atlas assassinator who was introduced in the Hole-and-corner Armory of General Knoxx in the original Borderlands as a member of the Scarlet Lance; Wilhelm, a Hyperion engineer who is the first major boss players fight against in Borderlands 2; Nisha, the sheriff of Lynchwood in Borderlands 2; and the fourth playable character will be the famously chatty Hyperion robot Claptrap. While this is the Claptrap outset seen at the start of the original Borderlands and the last surviving Claptrap from Borderlands ii, he is known as Claptrap, the Fragtrap in this game.

The four characters, similar Handsome Jack himself, each come with a lot of backstory, or frontstory as the instance may exist, that needs to be explained in the game. Each character starts out as happily teamed up with Handsome Jack, and through the playing of the Pre-Sequel, players will discover how they changed both morally, and in at to the lowest degree i case, physically.

"You terminal experienced or encountered Wilhelm as the first boss that you fought, the first major boss y'all fought in Borderlands 2," Pitchford said. "He was a giant robot under the command of Handsome Jack. Wilhelm was once a human, and in the course, if you lot choose to play him, in the course of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, every bit you add skills, you will slowly transform him from a human to a machine. Every skill bespeak you add together increases the amount of cybernetic attachments and modification that Wilhelm undergoes. And some of those skills have new features and new capabilities that are a lot of fun."

Pitchford said some of the playable characters start out as kind of "psychopathic but fun and then ended in a place where they were really aggressively wanting to stay with Jack so they could kill more innocent people and become paid for it."

And of grade y'all have Claptrap, who at the beginning of Borderlands two is found abandoned in a frozen wasteland.

"We will finally discover what happened to Claptrap between Borderlands one and Borderlands 2," Pitchford said.

He added that this Borderlands has more dialog from actor characters then in any previous game because they need to tell their story every bit the game develops.

"Speaking to characters having arcs," Pitchford said, "at the showtime of the game, Jack is not necessarily a bad guy. In fact, you kind of think he's motivated for the right reasons, only as his story progresses, he has to get the Jack we know.

"We know Wilhelm is on Jack'southward team in Borderlands two. If you know anything about Athena, y'all know she once was part of the Crimson Lance, but she actually became disillusioned with Atlas and kind of went rogue. What'south her arc similar when she's on Jack'due south team? Is Jack the antidote for everything that was incorrect with Atlas, and then what does Jack become and where does that exit her? And these are interesting things too. And of grade, I don't want to go spoilery, simply we have all the other characters that you know that we have to deal with. We have all the characters from Borderlands 1 and Borderlands two and how nosotros're bridging the gap for them also."

To the moon

The principal impetus for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel wasn't to tell the story of Handsome Jack and how he became so evil; it was to go to the moon.

"At present, when you've played Borderlands 1 and 2, for the people that have spent hundreds of hours on Pandora, they've always looked up at the sky and talked about the moon and the moon base," Pitchford said. "In the pre-sequel, we're going to the moon, going to the moon base of operations."

And journey to the moon and its base brings with it a lot of new game elements, different sorts of boodle chests, and weapons.

During a hands-off demo of part of the game, 2K Australia general manager Tony Lawrence and Pitchford explained some of those new elements.

Gameplay opened on the moon inside a facility that had both some gravity and an atmosphere. Before venturing exterior, we got a look at one of the game'south new freeze weapons which use a cryo upshot to shoot ice bullets.

Striking an enemy with these frozen bullets initially slows them down, merely eventually will freeze them solid. And then you tin can simply shatter them into encarmine ice cubes.

The game volition likewise have laser weapons which tin fire an array of different types of lasers including everything from the beam shots you lot'd find in Star Wars to a wavering stream similar to something you lot'd see coming from a Ghostbusters' positron collider.

One massive addition to the game is the need for a new type of gear, the oxygen kit, or Oz kit. Once a player makes their manner onto the moon's surface a helmet digistructs over their caput. An oxygen meter tracks how much oxygen they have, just it's not really to make sure you lot have enough to exhale with. The oxygen tanks on a player's dorsum can also serve as a low-gravity bound jet. By venting oxygen you lot tin can double jump, hover, fly a footling fleck and, most impressively, exercise a dissentious basis pound.

Like much of the game's gear, those Oz kits as well can add different bonuses like increasing your burn rate or reload speed or adding unlike types of elemental harm to that ground slamming assail.

"There's lots of gear variety in the Oz kits besides, so it's a whole new dimension for gear," Pitchford said.

Because of the low gravity of the moon, a players jumps is much higher and a lilliputian slower than usual, but the ground pound makes upward for that and prevents players from becoming slow moving targets for enemies on the ground.

While we didn't get a look at Nisha or much of Claptrap in activeness, we were able to meet some of the skills that Athena and Wilhelm will bring to the game.

Wilhelm, as Pitchford mentioned, starts out equally a lightly augmented soldier. Initially he makes use of a shoulder-mounted cannon and has drones he can call to aid him in combat. As you build upwardly his skilltree though, he becomes less and less human.

Athena's master ability is a shield she tin digistruct which can absorb damage. As new abilities are unlocked, the shield becomes increasingly various and powerful. Some abilities allow Athena to throw her shield similar a weapon or even absorb elemental damage and and then deliver information technology to enemies during a throw. She besides has the ability to taunt enemies, which combined with her damage absorbing and dishing shield, turns her into an impressive tank.

We too defenseless a brief glimpse of a new vehicle, a hoverbike called the Stingray.

There are, equally with whatever Borderlands game, plenty of other groovy petty touches. The game, a full game promises Pitchford, is being written by Gearbox writers including Anthony Burch along with a team of writers in Australia.

Because the game isn't Borderlands 3, there is less of an emphasis on new technology and a new expect, and more than of one on the game'south story, Burch said.

"I thought, 'OK, well what's a story that exists within our electric current universe that will make sense?' and we found this by space between Borderlands 1 and Borderlands 2," he said. "Why not tell Jack's story in a way that makes him a little chip more sympathetic and maybe the hunters from the other ii games a footling bit less sympathetic to sort of push the game's dark tone a little bit further considering for all of its jokes, not taking itself seriously, the Borderlands games are kind of most not super awesome people. Similar, they're dudes who murder people and take stuff from their bodies, and we laugh about it because it'southward funny and it'due south a night humor kind of earth, but we thought, 'Well, OK, if we're going to do something that's this gen rather than next gen, that gives us license to have more risks.'"

That mix of writers, Burch said, will also hopefully produce a wider variety of comedy in the game.

"It's Australian gags for the about role, which is a very unlike sort of sensibility, a very English language sensibility compared to our very westernized, farts and screaming at the player kind of thing," Burch said.

The squad decided early on on that information technology would also be fun to essentially brand the inhabitants of the moon Australians.

"That just became the dominion," Pitchford said.

Among the voice talent the 2K Australian team brought on is Bruce Spence, the New Zealand thespian who is all-time known for his role as the gyro airplane pilot in Max Max ii and Mad Max Across Thunderdome.

"We definitely have a lot of Australian culture to tap into, and the Borderlands world is kind of perfect to do that," 2K Commonwealth of australia's Lawrence said. "There'southward definitely that kind of variance of the American humor, British sense of humour, Australian humor, and there'due south besides Dickensian kind of side missions in there. In that location's cricket side mission in there."

A new beginning?

Piece of work on Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel started almost four or five months after Borderlands 2 shipped in September 2012, Pitchford said.

"Nosotros started with, 'Well, OK what are we going to exercise?'," he said. "I think the first tentpole was, we've got to go to the moon, nosotros've got to become to the moonbase."

The problem they studio faced was that Borderlands 2 then resolved the conflict and setting of the moonbase that going there in a game that took place afterwards those events would essentially be irksome.

The team didn't want to undo whatever of the fiction of Borderlands ii simply to spice up the moon, and then Burch said they did the adjacent best thing.

"If we're going to go to the moonbase anyhow, what if we try something completely different that people aren't expecting," Burch said.

Pitchford said they're using this game to "scratch a lot of those itches" players have from playing through the first ii games.

"We do want to spend time upwardly at that place," he said. "Nosotros do want to play in that space. Nosotros exercise want to mess around with that moonbase.

"It'southward kind of like, what fun is playing the events of Star Wars after the emperor is killed? That's lame, the stakes are zero. And so we kind of realized that, like how can we scratch that itch and satisfy the involvement by increasing the stakes and make the stakes really interesting?"

The determination to have 2K Australia accept the pb on development was driven in office by the fact that the studio was able to go started on information technology a fleck more than a year ago, Pitchford said.

"There'southward been a lot of energy on their side put in," he said. "Gearbox has been able to aid out with strategy with these guys and nosotros had a couple of people involved early on. Now we have a lot of people involved, and so we were able to go more people involved as things went on. But this has mostly been a 2K Australia-driven effort, and they've been 100 percent dedicated to this for a long fourth dimension now."

Pitchford said that while all of the team's energy is on developing the game correct now, it'south non unreasonable to await postal service-launch support for the Pre-Sequel.

"I think nosotros all expect to do stuff for the Pre-Sequel," he said. "Nosotros don't know what it is yet and we haven't started spending whatsoever energy on that because all of our mindshare is on the game, but I think it's a fair expectation and I would exist sad if we don't alive up to information technology."

And, he added, he hopes 2K Australia volition work on that content as well.

"Most of our core energy is beingness spent toward other new IPs, but I hope 2K Australia is involved," he said. "When you see things similar Oz kits and the thought to have the ground stomp, Gearbox didn't come up with those ideas. That'southward all Australia, and ane of the things I imagine or anticipate is, nosotros've all played content from these guys for a long time, correct. Nosotros've played the BioShock games, and then not many people know who 2K Australia is, and I wonder if this game might be kind of like what One-half-Life: Opposing Force was for the states, where it might put them on the map finally. And I think that's kind of neat.

"My fear is that they're going to piece of work on other things, perchance their own stuff as well, and I kind of hope they do a lot more Borderlands stuff considering they're really kick donkey at information technology, so we'll run into what happens. If I could wave a magic wand, these guys would be doing a lot of Borderlands."

Does this new game, then, stand for a handing off of the franchise to 2K Australia?

"Borderlands is obviously a Gearbox created brand, but I recall if ... it'southward really tough, correct?" he said. "It's a huge success, so there's a lot of expectation. If we but kept making the things that already proved successful, Borderlands itself wouldn't be. We would but keep making Brothers in Artillery games forever. So, I've always been pretty quick to trust people that have passion and energy, and results vary. We did a bargain with the Telltale guys to practise a Tales from the Borderlands game and I'm really excited virtually that. This is like a core Borderlands game, y'all know the Tales guys might practise their own blazon of thing. The 2K Australia guys are super experienced with shooters. They know the Unreal engine, which we license. They were able to learn our stuff really fast. They've washed some neat stuff in the BioShock universe and I think the results speak for themselves.

"So I'd love to for them to keep going, but we take each determination as it comes. It'due south non like this moment in fourth dimension where we become, 'Hey we're handing things, handing off a franchise.' That's not how we approach problems like that, merely I do love the thought of these guys being in a position where, with a lot at pale they're excited about information technology and being locked for fifty-fifty more Borderlands."

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/2014/4/9/5593970/borderlands-the-pre-sequel-not-borderlands-3-interview

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