BORDERLANDS 3
What’s the craziest thing you’re proudest of
creating, weapons-wise?
Jimmy: Children Of The Vault weapons have
unlimited magazine size, and so, what does
unlimited magazine size mean? How do you
visually represent that and what are the
gameplay implications? And so we’re like, well
how about instead of some giant belt feed or
huge magazine down to the ground we have
what we call the Bullet Forge.
Kevin: If you look at those COV guns you start
them up like a motor and there’s a little forge
that’s on the right hand side of the gun that’s
building bullets and then dumping them down
the belt into your gun, so it’s a fun little way
that we explain the gameplay aspect of like,
alright cool, you just get to shoot as many
bullets as you have. And, er, we thought we
were pretty clever!
How did you go about balancing the loot when
it comes to ammo? We were running out of
ammo a lot in our playthrough...
Jimmy: Ammo ended up being one of the
trickiest currencies [for us] in Borderlands:
getting enough of it, not getting too much of
it, making sure it’s still something that folds
into the gameplay. It becomes a player choice
- if you’ve got a high rate-of-fire weapon,
one of the downsides of it is that you may
be running out of that type of ammo quite
a bit, and if you have a gun that you really
like and it’s chewing through ammo, the first
mod you want to get is the ammo upgrade for
that one. There are some ways it’s balanced
through gear, so even some of those higher
level weapons don’t consume ammo so fast,
so there’s something to hunt for and there’s a
way to balance it as you play through.Do all the gun types have different tactile
behaviour for the player?
Kevin: We played with differences in ADS
[aiming down sight] times, differences in
recoil, differences in where that first shot is“Hopefully there’s something for
everybody that they can zero in
on as they play through”
going to go. And, based on the manufacturer,
their aesthetic. Like Dahl is more of a Call Of
Duty guns type, it lends itself to that kind
of play style – hopefully those players will
come over and play our game too! Every
manufacturer has its behaviour and its feel,
hoping to lend itself to a type of player.
Hopefully there’s something for everybody
that they can zero in on as they play through.What’s the silliest gun type in the game?
Jimmy: We kind of got nuts on the engine
stuff. Torgue we got crazy with, because we
made the bodies actual engine blocks, and
if you look at some of the Torgue rifles, I was
looking at F1 cars so I put intake trumpets on
the right, and then the pistol ended up having
this giant curved exhaust on it.
Kevin: Borderlands is fun, it allows us
the freedom to do a lot of crazy stuff, but
somehow it all works. We’ve spent time with
the franchise and we’re aware of what can
and can’t work, but it does provide a lot of
freedom to do a lot of crazy things
and get away with it! QMore Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 055