The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Batman, The Wolf Among Us, Minecraft, Borderlands, Guardians of the Galaxy… Telltale Games’ heyday was truly worth a visit Look. Between 2010 and 2016, the studio produced a number of games that defined game dialogue. You won’t be able to open the game magazine (or browse the home page of the game’s website) without information from Telltale. Its games are everywhere, all the time.
until they don’t. The studio reached critical mass, and the quality of its games suffered: Beginning in 2017, the studio fell out of favor after a studio restructuring affected its release cadence. To recreate the magic of The Walking Dead, Telltale creatively killed its employees and homogenized its output. A series of missteps tarnished the company’s reputation. Once the world falls in love with the studio, it forgets about it. Season two of The Wolf Among Us, along with the planned Stranger Things game, was canceled.
But that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with this formula: in fact, quite the opposite. In its heyday, people loved Telltale because it was reminiscent of an era of classic, narrative-focused adventure games. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way your game works, you’re not going to sell more than 28 million episodes, are you? To that end, you can find out why Gearbox Software has teamed up with “key alumni” of the original Telltale Games narrative team to relive one of the most sought-after games in the studio’s late catalog: Tale of Borderlands.
“You know, working with some of Telltale’s key alumni, we spent a lot of time talking about his style. We asked ‘how does it work? What’s best practice? But, in addition, we wanted to do something for Gearbox Something special and unique,” said Lin Joyce, head of writing at Gearbox Software. “How are we going to scaffold on top of that — stay effective, push the genre where it hasn’t been? Show what else it can do?”
To that end, the team made some pretty drastic changes to how the Telltale formula works, Joyce told us. Perhaps the biggest change she outlines is getting rid of the text prompt in the corner of the screen telling you'[a character] will remember’. It just doesn’t fit with Gearbox’s vision — even if it’s a key metaphor for this type of game.
“We no longer say ‘So-and-so will remember this’ because we now have access to [better] technology,” says Frédéric Scheubel, producer at Gearbox Studio Quebec. “We shoot everything using performance capture. So, our intention is that the impact should be felt through the performance, not the cue: if you offend a friend, or if you make a friend happy, you will see that through the performance. “
Scheubel admits that means more work for players. This time around, you’ll need to invest more emotionally (or at least more actively) into the game to see what impact your choices make. You can’t just tell a nasty lie and have the game say “you probably shouldn’t”. You need to use common sense and emotional intelligence.
“It gives the player some work to understand, ‘Okay, what choices did I make? When does this affect?’ It’s something we’ve purposely focused on improving the user experience.”
You need to ask yourself this question often, and this is the spiritual sequel to the first Borderlands. You’ll take control of three brand new characters into the universe; the altruistic scientist Anu, her ambitious “street” brother Octavio, and the angry, capitalist-weary Fran. Each of them had the worst day of their lives and they were all losers. The interplay between them is at the heart of the game – as you’d expect from a large corporate machine.
A new story from Borderlands actually seems to be a breath of fresh air for the series. By focusing on “little people” rather than super-powerful Vault Hunters or clever CEO sociopaths, Gearbox has the opportunity to inject more humanity and humility into the series — while still being able to crack a joke or two in it — the traditional Borderlands style.
Telltale games took off in the 2010s, but in abandoning the most distinctive parts of the formula in favor of something more human, we might see again – why the genre became so influential in the first place.
New Stories from Borderlands Released on October 21, 2022 for PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Switch.
