With stacks and stacks of characters to choose from and both cooperative and competitive modes, there’s a lot of different ways to play Gearbox Software’s latest game, Battleborn. That’s part of why there’s been such a lengthy drip feed of details and previews focussing on different parts of the game over the last half year.
We looked at the Incursion multiplayer mode a few weeks back, but today it’s the turn of the story campaign and the cooperative gameplay. In the wake of playing the game, we sat down with Gearbox’s Randy Varnell once again to talk about everything that’s gone into the game.
TSA: So, you finally managed to get all 25 of the game’s characters out into the open! That’s been a long time coming, but why did you decide to drip feed them out over so many months?
Randy Varnell: I don’t know! That’s a good question for our marketing and PR folks!
There have been debates on that, but even when we last talked in October, I think I could have listed all 25 for you. To some degree, it’s because it takes so long. Every one of these characters requires about the same amount of effort as one of the characters in Borderlands. They require a lot of love, a lot of effort, a lot of tuning and a lot of balance – in some ways even more, when you get to the competitive game.
So to some degree, we’ve probably just paced it out because the last few in there were a bit like “Are they gonna make it? Are they gonna get in there?” In the course of iterating a character, they also change quite a bit. So sometimes you hate to announce a character early and say, “It’s so cool!” and then two months later, “He does something completely different!”
There are a lot of changes like that, so I think that some of that, but there’s just anticipation too. We debated whether we do a whole bunch at once or if you take your time…
TSA: Well, you get to give them a bit more space for people that are following the game to look at and go, “That one looks cool. That one’s a penguin in a mechsuit. Also cool!”
Randy: [laughs] Did you enjoy Toby?
TSA: Toby was good! I think I actually preferred Shayne & Aurox though.
Randy: Yeah, you were fantastic with Shayne! That was great.
TSA: I don’t play MOBAs very often, but I think that when I do, I seem to luck out and manage to pick a character that I can do well with? Turning that around, what’s your favourite character and why?
Randy: [sighs] I’m going back and forth on two right now, and it’s funny because almost any month that you ask me that question, I’d give you a different answer. It really changes all the time. I’m going to to give you two, because honestly, they rotate now for which is my number one.
One is Orendi, the chaos witch. I said before, I’m a stupidly aggressive gamer, I just run in all the time and usually die. One of Orendi’s abilities pops you out of combat. It deals damage and you’re out of combat. So she has range, but she is all about running in, popping out, running in, popping out. So she’s very well suited to me. […]
My other favourite is really different, but also makes up for my predilection to run in and suicide. It’s a character named Galilea, and she’s this armoured warrior with a shield and a sword. Galilea is all about owning this particular piece of ground. As she fights, she gets this field of dark energy around her that continues to do damage, but put another desecration pool down and she turns into this big demon thing. She can hit you with her sword, she can stun you with her shield, she is all about controlling this small area of territory. But because she’s an armoured warrior, she has a bit more survivability. She has some life steal baked into that, and she has a great escape where she turns into a dark pool of energy and can float away while healing up!
So for me, it gives a lot of escape and survivability, but in Incursion, there’s a lot of chokepoints in the map which can make characters like Galilea really important. It’s probably all the snipers on my team doing all the work, but I feel really great in the middle of it all!
TSA: You touched on this briefly, but coming four characters in Borderlands to twenty-five in Battleborn, was that difficult for balancing? Especially because it’s not just co-op anymore?
Randy: Yeah, it’s been an immense amount of work to get to this point, and we’re never going to be done with it. It’s starting to become a cliche now, but we say that at Gearbox that balance is a not an event it’s a discipline.
We’re never going to be balanced, but we’re going to be close and we’re going to keep watching it, because this is a game that’s full of choices, full of combinations. We know from playing lots of these kinds of games that once we get it into players’ hands, those devious players will do all sorts of things we never understood or intended, even with the amount of testing we do on the game.
Even more than with Borderlands, we are investing in the systems to watch what’s going on in the game. We have massive databases with dashboards where you can what what players are doing, if they’re winning or losing more, which team combinations are doing well, what places on the map people die… We’re watching it from every possible way we can.
TSA: Would you say that you’re working towards particular archetypes with the character design?
Randy: Yeah! We really have these three archetypes in the game that we talk about. […] We want there to be an approachability to it, so if you want to deal damage, you’re going to pick an attacker, if you want to be big and beefy and survivable, you’re going to want a defender, and if you want to heal or shield or debuff, you’re going to want to go with support.
So those are good generalisations and I think they’re working OK right now, but there are a few that are really hard to tell apart. I think that’s been OK, because to some degree every character is it’s own special flower. Shayne & Aurox is a great example of that, where they’re technically a defender if you look at the description in the game.
I think it depends on how you built it, though. A lot of our characters are built that you can lean either way. You can take abilities that increase shields or healing, but you can lean into dealing damage and turn Shayne & Aurox into a great brawler.
I think what allowed you to do that was that I was – I just want to call this out! – I was playing an amazing Rayna behind you, and every time you’d go and engage enemies, I’d tap that overshield on you. I changed it to add a boost of health, to recharge your shields a bit too, so every time I hit you with it it kind of super strengthened you. That was a really cool loop that we had going on!
TSA: Let’s talk about the single player and the variety in that? How are you trying to keep people engaged and stop it from being slogging through waves of enemies?
Randy: So you saw a couple of the things that we’re doing today. We have nine story missions including the prologue, and they really fall into three broad archetypes. You have the classic raid form – mini-boss, mini-boss, boss – but the two we played today were not that.
We played one that was more of a horde defensive mode, and even in that it wasn’t a single room the whole time. We did some waves, then you got to travel and you got to another room where you did some waves. We have a couple missions that do that and I like those, I think they’re a good mix of still feeling that you’re moving around to see the world, but also getting to bunker in and defend with a narrative reason to defend something.
Then you have the escort stuff. We have a couple of missions that are all about escorting something through. Again, that’s a really neat way to do something defensive and really give defensive archetypes and support players a way to do something, but do that while still moving through the world.
A couple other tricks you saw in that were the level challenges which come up. A few times through each of the maps that we played today, you had a temporary challenge that came up and you had a 30 or 40 second timer on that. It’s something that you have to do in that area, to kill certain types of enemies or collect shards, or whatever.
TSA: They felt quite easy to gloss over, though. It might just have been because everything was very new…
Randy: Well, I think some of it is very easy to miss in your first few rounds because there’s so much that’s going on with the game, but I think that really speaks to the depth of Battleborn. For us who have played some of these levels 15 or 20 times, I saw every one of them today. I’m like, “OK guys, we’re going to do this!” and you guys were just, “How do I use this ability? What’s that thing over there?”
TSA: [laughs] There’s someone just stood in the corner spinning around.
Randy: [laughs] They just want to watch themselves taunt again!
But we really intentionally designed and layered systems on there. We’ve got the score system that we didn’t talk about today, where you can really measure yourself every time you play the level. Every character has got a stats page for the missions and the difficulties that show your rating on a big grid. So if you’re a completionist, you can get diamond stars on all the missions and all the difficulties, and there’s some rewards and titles that you’ll unlock.
We do some practical things like vary the dialogue. We even swap out the mission dialogue, so the same events get talked about, but with a completely different conversation between characters, just to keep it fresh if you come back and you engage in our systems and replayability.
There’s legendary gear that drops from bosses, so if you get into the gear system you can go back and re-run bosses, just like we had in Borderlands. These drops are some of the most remarkable gear in the game, so there’s that kind of replay in there too.
Hopefully, even though it’s nine solid story episodes, I hope people come back and play them at different difficulty levels, challenge yourself and then compare yourself to other people with the score. I think there’s some cool ways to come back in at it.
TSA: Speaking of the loot, you said to ask about it after not really talking about it during the presentation… It’s not really there in this build of the game, is it?
Randy: It is! It’s absolutely there. We have about four hours with the game here, but you’re only really going to get to play with three characters out of the twenty-five today!
I think the loot system’s great. It was in our closed technical test last fall, and we’ve iterated since then to deal with user feedback. Some people were able to do things they weren’t supposed to, so we’ve found some creative ways to make it still be interesting to combine stuff, but keep it from over-stacking certain stats.
TSA: And is the loot system focussed on boosts to your character? Because each character has their set of attacks and abilities, so you can’t really do infinite guns again.
Randy: There are two different things that the gear system does; it’s a little bit of both. One is that there is a statistical approach where you take 20 or 25 of the core stats – damage, shield regen, whatever – and you have gear that’s able to stack and layer those to take a strength of your character. If you play with a gun-based character, you could boost reload speed to keep that time down.
But you start to get into the rare and the legendaries, and you start to see some really interesting effects come in. One of my favourite legendaries is a piece of gear that drops health pods every time you sprint. It’s immensely useful in boss fights, especially on advanced difficulty. In fact, our team that ran advanced hardcore ended up running a couple of pieces like those, because it let them overcome that final boss fight without having to have a fully dedicated healer. They were able to keep damage up while running around, sprinting and keeping each other healthy by pooping out these little health orbs!
So we’ve got some creative stuff that I think opens up the gameplay. We also have some character themed legendaries, where if you complete the character lore challenges, you can get a thing that’s almost like getting another augmentation choice, another mutation to the character, because when you turn that on it augments a character ability and makes it better.
So there’s ways to continue to grow and explore characters, and I think that makes it more than just stats and buffs. There’s something like 75-80,000 items, I can’t remember, but again, it’s a procedural system just one that’s not as big as the gun system we had in Borderlands!
TSA: You like to shoot for these big numbers, don’t you?
Randy: We do, but it was important to keep things designed systemically, but in a way that we could also think about balance. So while that number is pretty big, the parts that go into that are in a way that we understand what’s going in. We can restrict the range on any given thing, so we can keep most of the stats within reason.
That said, I’m absolutely sure that once we launch the game someone’s going to completely break it, and we have to be ready to fix it. Like I said, we can’t wait for the community to get their hands on this. They’re going to do ridiculous things and we’re going to work with them and be sure that the game’s still balanced. Those first videos and those first few months are going to be hysterical!
TSA: It’s pretty much the way with any big game launch! Turning to the multiplayer, you’ve been brining across and adapting all of these MOBA ideas and blending them with a shooter. It kind of feels like this is the current “Big Thing” in the industry. Do you agree with that?
Randy: Yeah, I think that there are two ideas that we’re all responding to. The first is the idea that teams are awesome and that teams of very different superheroes are awesome. You see it in the movies, where you can’t just do a Batman film anymore, it’s got to be Batman vs. Superman, but they’re going to throw Wonder Woman into the mix too.
We’re in this age where the world at large loves watching superheroes cooperate and overcome their personal differences to defeat a bad guy. The MOBAs started it, but now the hero shooters are coming along. We’re getting better at making characters and we’re investing more in that.
I think the other part with the MOBA, and certainly what we were looking at responding to, is how they found a way to really broaden out the variety of play styles that are viable in a competitive setting. I grew up playing Doom and Quake, where it was high speed, high octane twitch all of the time. Then I followed everyone else and went to Battlefield, Call of Duty and all of that. I’ve played a lot of shooter games, and I’m not great competitively, but I’ve always tried! [laughs]
What I really love about the MOBAs is that they found a way to take different roles and different ideas and mix them together with a team dynamic where I don’t have to be the best at aiming at your nose and pulling the trigger over and over. I can be the guy that goes and builds the stuff at the back. I’m not going to fight anybody, but when you get back there, I’m going to have the big fortress of doom built to make our defence really good. I like that kind of asymmetrical role and I think other people responded to that too.
Thanks to Randy for taking the time to talk to us. You can head over and check out our hands on preview from the single player here, but there’s also details of the game’s open beta, which will run from April 8th on PS4 and April 13th on XBO and PC.