Interview: Steve Gibson, Vice President at Gearbox

Next month marks the release of the latest Borderlands 2 downloadable content, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon’s Keep.

We managed to sit down with Steve Gibson, Vice President at Gearbox, to find out more about the content, as well as the new character Krieg the Psycho.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Who are you and what’s your role? 

Steve Gibson: Steve Gibson, I’m the Vice President at Gearbox Office.

First of all, can you talk to us a bit about the new character? Guide us through the highlights.

Steve Gibson: So, he is Krieg the Psycho. By the time Krieg comes out, it will have been eight plus months since the launch of the game. Now we are in a situation where anybody who is looking to get downloadable content for Borderlands 2 has probably been playing for a while. So, we were thinking that if we just throw in another character with a simple skill that’s quick and easy that it could work but we know that anyone who is playing Borderlands 2 at this point is familiar with it and we can get a little bit more advanced than usual.

We can add much more layered stuff beecause people really understand the game by now. So that’s what you see, with Krieg the Psycho, you have this situation where you can have three skill layers deep, where each thing is affecting another thing and people can actually plan their skills trees to have things compliment each other much more. Where with Borderlands 2 proper, most characters have one skill that compliments another skill and and two layers deep. Okay, you can combine this thing with this thing and it’s fine. But Krieg is up to three/four layers deep and they all compliment each other.

So he is much more advanced for players who really want deeper situations that way. So that’s what is going on.

How do you make sure that when you add a new character, the game stays balanced?

Steve Gibson: It’s kind of hard. It involves a lot of Excel spreadsheets. All you really want to do, at the base level, is take a look at the think – what is the combination of skills and what damage this guy can do in an amount of time. There are some situations where some classes are better than any other, and that’s just part of the fun of using a class. So, for example, the Gunzerker actually focuses on a single target, with the proper duel wields and the proper setup, and has the highest damage per second on a single target. That’s just the way he is.

Krieg the Psycho actually, his advantage is that he has so many abilities. If you go into a downed state and then go back up (play with only a small amount of health left). He is actually better at that than anybody else when it comes to it. So you’re least likely to go to a new state with Krieg because you have like the Fuse skill, which actually allows you to go around dealing more damage while he is technically in a downed state.

So, they are not uneven. They all have their own advantages. But ideally there is not one clearly better than all the others. But ideally, each one has a strength that can be used.

So that’s where he comes in(Krieg). There was no character that had this strength and different states. Now Krieg is that guy.

So, you mentioned that this is a character that players who’ve had the game since the beginning could get used to. Would you suggest it’s a character that someone who just started the game could get used to?

Steve Gibson: I wouldn’t recommend Krieg be the very first character you play in Borderlands 2. I reckon that if you are an advanced gamer, perhaps so, but I would recommend you start out with someone easier to understand. That would be Axton, probably the simplest of the characters to understand. You have a turret and you deploy it. And that’s your skill. Axton shoots things. Krieg, you can still hit the fun button, as we call it, and you start mashing on people. But to really take full advantage of Krieg, it does take a lot more understanding.

How does this character fit in with the game? Does he interact with other characters?

Steve Gibson: Well, actually we are going to be putting up a cinematic/ kind of introduction to Krieg. We are hoping to put it up within the first week or two of him being released. That will fill in the back story. Where did this guy come from? You’ll get a bit of introduction to him. We kind of did that with the Mechromancer. We did audio logs. That was kind of fun. We want to take that a step further this time. So there is about 4/5 minutes of story for Krieg.

We will show you how he was there in Pandora, and develop on some of the teases that were already hidden in the game.

To go again with Krieg. You always come up with unique characters in the Borderlands world. Is there a process you work towards while adding characters to the game?

Steve Gibson: Yes. That is one of the more fun things to do at Gearbox. We get together and pretty much anybody in the company gets involved. Heck, even I was in there when we did the first original characters. Anybody and everybody can get an idea up on the board and for when we first started Borderlands, there were even things like combat mortician and all these other things. And we just threw them on the board. We have this process where everybody votes out of ten. We ask ‘how excited are you to see this kind of character?’  Then we went through the process of how exciting does this character sound to you. And then we go to the next process where a bunch of designers are going to prototype the skills. Rate them again. How exciting is that for you? We just keep narrowing them down from there. That’s how we did the originals.

For Krieg the Psycho, this was a – okay there is a new set of circumstances from now. Before, one of the criteria was, anybody who plays Borderlands has never played this game before. Now this is a downloadable character so you played the game before. So, it’s a new area we can explore and we can have much more advanced characters.

A few months later, we were like: “Man, this simply will not work”. But now we are like, awesome, we know the game worked out well and we know people liked additional characters like the Mechromancer. So that made this possible. Before, we simply wouldn’t even consider this sort of character.

You mentioned before that you had to go through lots of stats and Excel spreadsheets. Did you find any challenges whilst developing the downloadable content for the game?

Steve Gibson: There wasn’t anything that jumped out . But, oh man, there’s the typical challenges that are true to any downloadable content , like thinking about memory and those kind of things. But we’ve got a little better at it these days. The real concerns are things that we anticipated. There were no surprises this time. Like, performance, we were worrying about those explosions for example. There is a certain transparency that you have to worry about and performance. Because if you layer too many of those across, the whole frame rate will drop because of frame rate nonsense.

Brick was too big in Borderlands 1, so we had to adjust a whole bunch of the world and with the Psycho we wanted him to be able to transform to the Mega Psycho. So we had to understand things like, how does that scale work? Are you going to adjust his viewpoint or anything like that?

These are all challenges that we have seen now as we worked in Borderlands. This is our twelfth or thirteenth release of Borderlands content, if you go across both games.

So there were challenges but no surprising challenges this time. Which felt great. Nothing caught on fire(much laughter).

As for the downloadable content, what can players expect from this downloadable content compared to what was previously released?

Steve Gibson: This is the biggest downloadable content we’ve done. At least double, if not triple the amount of enemies and new content . It’s gigantic. It’s the whole fantasy theme, which is obviously a new thing for Borderlands. We had a lot of guys get really excited about this and they worked late nights and weekends. At Gearbox we’ve never done anything fantasy based. It’s always been Brothers in Arms and Aliens and Borderlands. Which is always sci-fi or historical. So there’s a bunch guys who were like, I know this isn’t even the project I’m on, but I’m going in after because I want to make these goofy ideas, like fantasy based vending machines. I mean, that wasn’t on the original design doc. That was just some artist that really wanted to do it.

So all that stuff got gigantic because a bunch of us wanted to contribute to it.

In fact, the whole concept that it’s a board game is quite a stark difference from the main game. How did you come up with such an unique idea?

Steve Gibson: It was… originally the idea was quite twisted. We love Handsome Jack. But what if this guy who has it together has like a nephew or niece and they have like a little side area they get to manage, because crap, you’ve gotta give your family a solid, and give them a little area to manage that doesn’t really matter.

We were thinking like this niece or nephew, they are so goofy that they control things and treat them like their own little game. You’ve seen that before, the guy just treats real life like a game. Then we had the other thought of like, the guys who do that treat it like a board game. And then we started playing with that idea as as we got more into it.

We think: “Man we would love it if design could make things change on a dime and there’s these guys wanting it to be a board game”. And we wanted design to be able to do that. Why don’t we actually just push that further on. And then it became, if we are going to push it that way, then it might as well become a Dungeons and Dragons kind of game. It just evolved from the idea. Jack has a nephew or neice that has his/her own thing. And then when we got to the point, who would make a great games master? The most unpredictable character in Borderlands is probably Tiny Tina.

So it was all just logical steps that we took. It wasn’t a quick idea like: “Let’s make a board game”. It was all step by step. In the end we feel this is awesome but it wasn’t just one guy that ended up with the idea.

 

Tiny Tina’s Assault on  Dragon’s Keep releases on 25th June. We were lucky enough to play it for a bit. Find out more about it in our hands-on preview. Krieg the Psycho is out now and is eagerly awaiting for you to cause some serious mayhem.