Borderlands DLC Interview

The guys over at Edge Online recently caught up with Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford and grilled him about the development of Borderlands and the specific goals they had for its The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot, and The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC.

And then The Secret Armory of General Knoxx had a very different aim: story-driven end-game content?

We wanted to continue the story with Knoxx, but also to provide a real heavy-duty raid boss for people who had hit the new level cap. I think we all had different objectives, but certainly, one of the things with the storyline was that we originally thought that the final twist in the tale would be more interesting than it was. In fact, I’m not sure it worked. In hindsight, maybe we should have just paid off on exactly what we seemed to be promising in the first place.

I’ll go ahead and spoil the ending here: The whole build-up of the game is that you’re going to find the Vault and get all this loot. If you study all the little recordings in the game, you come to discover that it’s not a treasure vault after all it’s a prison. It’s a prison to protect the Eridians from this beast that can destroy planets, and you’ve been tricked into going to the Vault to deal with this monster.

That was the twist, but when you play the game and you get to the end and there’s this boss especially if you’re really stacked by this point and you can burn him really fast he just dies and that’s it. So, first of all, “Where the fuck is my loot, because I just found the fucking Vault?” And second, “What the fuck? That’s an ending?”

So one of the big things with General Knoxx was, in the act of continuing the story, to have a really great climax, and to really pay it off this time. The armory itself is actually another treasure vault, but this time it really is loaded with treasure.