It may be unfair to the admittedly interesting and somewhat under the radar MOBA/FPS smash-up Battleborn, but there’s a legion of gamers that are salivating for the end of its post-release support cycle. At a PAX East panel this week, Gearbox Software made it known that development of the next Borderlands game would be coming as soon as Battleborn and all of its DLC is released. In other words, it’s out of preproduction and things are getting under way.
Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software, laid it all out in his usual panache.
“We don’t even know if we’re going to call it [Borderland 3]. We could call it Borderlands 4 for all we know.”
Gearbox will be keeping the band back together, with Mikey Neumann returning to writing BL 3/4 (???), as well as voicing Scooter and possibly Scooter’s son, Scooper. He relayed his toying with the Scooper idea to those at Pax.
“I did this whole Scooter thing, then I pitch-shifted it up like seven semitones so it sounds like a chipmunk and it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.”
Of course, this character isn’t official, but it certainly seems like the ridiculousness of everyone being related in a vast galaxy could be lampooned by the special humor of Borderlands. We’ll see.
Pitchford also added that Battleborn would see plenty of Borderlands easter eggs embedded in the game, then cryptically added that Borderlands items and characters we’ve never seen could be added in as DLC. Future Borderlands in present Battleborn? Interesting. But then, Battleborn might already feel too familiar.
“There’s already a lot of Borderlands easter eggs in Battleborn, but they’re all from previous Borderlands games. So what if we put easter eggs for future stuff in the DLC?”
The world deserved a break from the Borderlands series, which tried to innovate using restrictions in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, but that game felt like an unneeded and unwelcome scoop of ice cream plopped on a sundae that you didn’t even finish. Hopefully Gearbox has learned some lessons over the last few years, let their premiere IP breathe a bit and comes out swinging in, let’s say, 2018.
(Via EuroGamer)