Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Interview – Matt Armstrong (Franchise Director) and Tony Lawrence (Studio General Manager, 2K Games)
Recently Impulse Gamer was invited to a preview event in Sydney for a hands on impression of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel as well as getting the chance to speak to some of the creative minds behind the game. What follows is an interview with Matt Armstrong, Franchise Director, and Tony Lawrence, the studio general manager of 2K games, with most of the stammering and awkward pauses of my interviewing technique edited out for your leisure.
Welcome to Impulse Gamer Guys, thanks for the interview
Tony – Cheers.
Matthew – Thanks for coming
So, can you just tell us a little bit about Borderlands – The Pre Sequel?
Tony – Yeah, sure. The title Borderlands – The Pre Sequel kind of tells you a little bit about the game – It’s a prequel to Borderlands 2 and a sequel to Borderlands, it takes place in the five year period between the two titles. There’s a whole heap of story there but basically the story is the story of Handsome Jack as he sees himself as the hero, starts off as kind of a lower level programmer for Hyperion and he’s there to save the moon; He’s recruited four lieutenants to help him do that and these lieutenants you may have seen before from previous borderlands games and DLC – Nisha, who we see in Borderlands 2 as the Sherriff of Lynchwood, she’s a gunslinger in Borderlands – The Pre-Sequel, Wilhelm – He’s in Borderlands 2 as a… Well, a “Wilhelm”, so they’re the kind of characters that also grow along with Handsome Jack during the story.
So, did you choose characters that were somewhat already familiar to fans of the franchise in some capacity as a way to orient players and just jump straight into the story?
Tony – Well, we wanted to sell the story of Handsome Jack and how he came from where he was, like starting off at Hyperion as a programmer to where he was in Borderlands 2, and the reason we chose the four playable characters specifically was because these were the people who were with him in Borderlands 2, so how is their journey affected and how did they end up working with Handsome Jack along the way? So, those kind of characters were like, of course they’d be with him throughout these missions and that obviously fed into selecting the characters (To fill in the gaps). For example, Claptrap, who has an intense personal hatred and grudge against Handsome Jack – Why would a steward bot have a grudge, a personal grudge, against the CEO of Hyperion, one of the most powerful organisations in the galaxy?
So, it’s just mostly fleshing out the characters and their relationships from the previous games?
Tony – And there’s also the development of Athena, who wasn’t in Borderlands 2 – But she’s someone who kind of fits in with the whole mix of the characters and she’s someone who’s looking for something good and a reason to fight, a reason to, I guess, to hitch herself to something she believes in, and a hero, which finds her hitching herself to Handsome Jack… Which may not be a good thing.
So what are your individual roles within the production?
Tony – I’m the studio head (Laughs).
So, you’re kind of like the Overseer?
Tony – Overseer! I Like that! No, my actual role is to basically facilitate everyone in the studio to do the absolute best that they can, have an opinion where it’s needed but make sure they feel good and empowered and have the creative tools everything they possibly can
And Matthew, you worked with Gearbox, correct?
Matthew – Yeah, I’m the franchise director
And you’re obviously very familiar with the franchise, but is your experience here at 2K in a different capacity than what you’re usually used to?
Matthew – I’m the head Cat herder of the Borderlands franchise. Um, a lot of it is, when people have ideas, I make sure that those ideas fit in with the universe, understanding where the borderlands stories come from and where it’s going and just making sure to shepherd it in the right direction , also, sort of finding ways to ensure that what’s happening with The Pre-Sequel works, not just with the other games that already exist but also with what’s happening over at Telltale where they’re doing “Tales from the Borderlands”.
I’ve spent some time there working on the story and how The Pre-Sequel influences that story and that influences this story because they’re actually part of the same universe, part of the same canon. So, it’s kind of a long and intricate tapestry and a lot of people are working on their individual sections and my job is to make sure everything is cohesive.
How much of a degree of involvement would you say Gearbox has had with The Pre-Sequel? Have they just basically handed the reigns over to 2K and said “have at it?”
Matthew – It’s been a cooperative development experience. It is very much working together… From my perspective I look at this as being pretty much a 2K Australia game but we really helped a lot.
We have a lot of influence from the top, because it’s our franchise, and we have lot of influence on the bottom side because we’re helping develop it. 2K has a big team on it and we’re working together all the time, working the same code, they’re writing a lot of the characters and doing some of the writing – We sent our level designer to live there for several months and they sent their creature designer to live over with us for some time… It’s a collaborative experience. It’s like one big company split across two hemispheres.
Building on that, do 2K Australia feel a certain kind of pressure taking over a franchise with an already established – and oftentimes rabid – fanbase?
Tony – Yeah, but we love it. We were all fans, we were that fanbase to some extent before we started working with Gearbox, so we came with our eyes open in terms of “We really love the Borderlands franchise” and the opportunity to work in the Borderlands franchise was like “Cool, all the things that we would have liked to have seen in the series, maybe we now have the opportunity to do that.” So, it was a bit nerve wracking as fans, we wanted to get into it and have the opportunity to work with the guys who made that but it felt really easy, in terms of Gearbox saying “Put your own mark on the game”, so it wasn’t intimidating once we started working with Gearbox.
Matthew – We were also fans of 2K Australia, as I’m sure you know they started off as Irrational Games so they worked on every single Bioshock game and they’ve done fantastic work and have a really strong pedigree, so it’s been fun for us to work together.
With 2K as pretty much the only major AAA Development house in Australia, do you feel an increased sense of national pride, like you have to prove that Australians can make great games as well?
Tony – Aussies can create great games, it’s not just us, there’s a whole heap of other studios creating brilliant games. We’ve just had some fantastic opportunities to work with some really great people and make some really great games. We’re doing that now with Gearbox and I’d like to continue doing those kinds of things.
So, did you insert the Australian characters on the moon as a sly little nod to where the game is being developed, because I definitely would have remembered if that fact was mentioned in Borderlands 2?
Tony – You’re developing the game and figuring out the narrative before you start actually getting the voice actors in to record so you use your own voices, so the guys in the studio start acting out scenes and then we send a build over to Gearbox; I mean, we were trying to do the best American accents we could, how we thought the game would sound, um, but it didn’t turn out that way.
Matthew – Our reaction was “You’ve decided the moon is Australian, that’s fantastic, we completely support your decision to reference your culture and your people and that great Australiana”. They were trying to do American accents and we were like “No no no, you’re not working for hire for Gearbox, you’re working with Gearbox and we want you to infuse your own culture, your own ideas and your own humour; each individual person at the company is going to put a part of themselves into this game.” Anybody who’s worked on The Pre Sequel can say “That’s my game.”
That’s the best thing about working on Borderlands, it’s very much a kind of collaborative game, I love a game that’s an auteur kind of development, where a person has a vision and everyone works towards accomplishing that, I love those games but Borderlands is very much a collaborative vision and we encourage everybody from every area of development to contribute their own unique elements and personality into the game and that’s how we get such a rich and diverse project.
You’ve got Bruce Spence fittingly voicing a Gyrocopter Captain in this game, right?
Tony – Uh, when we started doing this, we had a gyrocopter in the game and when we were looking for actors Bruce Spence came up as a guy we could work with, and it was a no-brainer really, to say “Can we cast Bruce Spence as a Gyrocopter captain as a homage to Mad Max?”.
We actually did a few things like that, where we had Elle Dawe, who plays Shazza in Housos, and that came about where we used her performance as reference material for our voice actors, like “Here, sound like this”, and the guys were just like “Can we actually get Elle Dawe to come and do some voices for us?” and we rang her up and she said she’d love to do it. She came in and did some extremely Bogan voices really well; those kind of things just happened and it was just great to help make them happen.
So, let’s talk about some of the new features in The Pre-Sequel, like the low gravity environment of the moon, the cryogenic weapons – How do you think they add to the gameplay whilst still retaining the core of what makes Borderlands such a unique experience?
Tony – When we talked about what we wanted to do with the game, where we were going to set it, one of the things we first talked about were Handsome Jack and his whole character arc but the other key element of the game was where it was going to be set. What we talked to Gearbox about was how fans really, really wanted a Borderlands game set on the moon, so that was where we decided the action would take place. Once you’ve made that decision of it’s on the moon, all these things come into play: The scientific aspect of pop culture was something we really wanted to play with, which led to things like low gravity, this cool feature in The Pre-Sequel which adds a whole new set of possibilities to the combat and traversing the maps and moving around.
There’s no oxygen on the moon, so that means you have to do something with it, so we talked about the OZ kits. Now, OZ kits don’t just keep you alive, they can be weaponised to some extent as well, so you can use them as jetpacks to fly in the air, to double jump and it’s really cool to also use in areas with oxygen to use to speed down the hallway, which is cool fun. Then you can use them to slam, so you can slam for the first time in a Borderlands game and you have an impact area that causes damage so you can blow your enemies completely off the moon and then combine that with the weaponised OZ kit to use some kind of elemental damage, so you can set enemies on fire, freeze them, etc.
When you’re talking about a Sci-Fi aesthetic, Lasers are obviously something you want to bring in to play and it’s a Borderlands game, so how many lasers can you bring into the game? We really played with every kind of laser we could think of, so you have shotgun lasers, rail guns, your Pew Pew, continuous beams, different kinds, and you can combine that with your elemental damage, like having a laser gun that also freezes your enemies.
When you do freeze your enemies, it slows them down , so they’re easier to hit; if you want to freeze them completely you can do some really cool stuff with them. Smashing an enemy into pieces and watching them fly all over the place never gets old.
So, all of the new features really lent themselves to the environment to some extent but we’ve really tried hard to make them fun and to add something new to the Borderlands franchise.
Personally I love the anarchic sense of humour, but what is your favourite aspect of the Borderlands universe?
Matthew – I like the characters. It’s a character driven universe and it was built that way from the start. One of the first questions we had was do we have character classes or do we have characters? Is this about “I’m a fighter, or a thief, or a Wizard” or is this person’s name Lillith? This is her history, this is who she is, this is what kind of a person she’s going to be.
And early on we realised that we wanted this to be about the characters, to the point that we decided that Borderlands 1 characters were going to be non playable characters in Borderlands 2, we knew that when we were making the first game, we wanted to build them in a way so they can become – One of the problems is that you do a sequel to a game and you’ve ended the game and you’re level 50 and you’re all powerful and stuff and then you go to the sequel and you’re underpowered, it doesn’t make sense. The characters would be legends at that point, they’ve accomplished great things, they’ve defeated the vault monster and destroyed this entire corporation, they’re legendary, so they’re the new mentors.
So we did that and of course you run into the situation where gamers get the mindset where they think “Well, they’re legends, obviously nothing bad can happen to them, so this makes us have to have a villain that’s even stronger to present an actual threat. So you get things like Handsome Jack and the Sherriff and Wilhelm, they’re like legendary villains, they’re legends too, so you get to go back and show how they became legends, which is a fantastic thing, you can follow this arc for their characters.
So for me, it’s ultimately all about the characters, having a world where we can have Tiny Tina, who’s funny and you laugh and it’s great but her history is really tragic and dark and she has real personal problems in her relationships and she’s kinda living a life in a really dangerous place.
Did you know from the outset that The Pre-Sequel would be focused primarily on last gen consoles? I guess the most obvious question would be are there any plans to bring to current Gen?
Tony – It was a decision that we thought where the main thing to consider was that fans really wanted another Borderlands game and what we could do to facilitate that, so we made some choices right there and then. The install base for the Borderlands games is on 360, PS3 and PC, so we really wanted to make sure that those guys could access the game; another thing was, to really develop the game in the time frame, using the previously existing engine allowed us to make something fairly fast.
So those kinds of things made us make an absolute decision to service current fans who were using those consoles and that’s where we’ve decide to focus at the moment.
Thanks for your time and great job on the game! I look forward to picking up a copy when it drops 16/10/2014.
About the Author
Sean Warhurst Avid gamer. Cinephile. Considerate lover. Neither the word Protractor or Contractor accurately conveys my position on how I feel about Tractors.
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