Borderlands 2 Postmortem Interview

In a new article-style interview on Polygon, Borderlands 2 creative director Paul Hellquist and writer Anthony Burch talk about how they wish they had “added more personality” to the game’s playable characters and why they’re ready to tackle something “a little more serious” in regard to future titles. A snip:

Burch said he would love to explore characters’ backgrounds from a story telling standpoint and have the game be more aware of which character they have chosen.

“Like when you meet Lilith as Maya Maya’s whole backstory is allegedly looking for a Siren but when she meets Lilith, she is like ‘Oh hey, what’s up?’ and nothing is different. She should be, ‘Holy shit! I can’t believe it!” Hellquist said. Burch gave another example of where the character of Roland meeting Maya would be very different from Lilth’s reaction.

“And we can get a lot more characterization of the main characters by having the game be more aware of who you are and who is interacting with the NPCs,” Burch said. “That would be very exciting to explore.”

Burch explained that they almost did go down one path in adding more depth to the characters, a “Left 4 Dead style” of conversation that would trigger when the player was idle.

“We have pages and pages of dialogue between the vault hunters,” Burch said. “The idea being that if you left your controller idle for a while, the game will check if there was other vault hunters around you, and a conversation would just happen.

“And in terms of the amount of dialogue, because I went overboard and was overly productive, ‘I’m just doing to write stupid dialogue,'” he explained. “And I wrote too much, like production-wise scary. It is still sitting around somewhere.”