The upcoming genre mash-up title Battleborn from 2K and Gearbox Software takes you on an absurdly hilarious galactic journey. The titular Battleborn are soldiers who band together to take down an evil guy who wants to destroy the last Star in the universe and all of the resources along with it. The Battleborn want to save the Star and bask in the glory of victory.
iDigitalTimes recently spoke with Randy Varnell, the creative director for Battleborn, about Gearbox Software’s newest title. Battleborn appears to be a first-person shooter at first glance, but it’s not that simple. Developers pulled inspiration from their favorite genres to add elements of each to Battleborn.
“It’s a first-person shooter game and that’s about where the similarities to other games ends,” Varnell said. “We're doing that thing at Gearbox again where [Battleborn] is kind of a mix of a lot of other games. You can definitely see some inspiration from RPGs, a lot from Borderlands in there, we looked at strategic games, some RGS games and we certainly looked at the MOBA genre. We mixed a lot of that together to make this unique twist on what we call a ‘hero shooter.’ At the foundation it’s about all of these playable characters.”
In Battleborn, you will start with eight characters and have to unlock the rest of the 25 total playable heroes. They’ve got dudes with guns, elves with bows, a sociopathic butler robot, a four-armed, chaos-wielding magic witch, your typical swordsman and mushroom healer guy just to name a few.
Pretty random mix of heroes, right? That’s the point of Battleborn. Varnell’s team came off of working on Borderlands 2 and had “fallen in love” with the character development process for that franchise. They were inspired to continue creating unique characters and not give themselves any creative limits.
“At Gearbox we’re all gamers, we play a lot of games, we love a lot of different things so we were like, ‘Let’s design a universe in a game where we can let our imagination run off the rails.’ We really pursued cool presentational archetypes of characters that we like,” Varnell said.
Varnell also wanted to make the Battleborn storyline fun and light. The team worked hard to fill Battleborn with humor without losing some of the game’s edginess and sense of adventure. The goal was to make a game a broad group of people can enjoy without losing the spirit of adventure in Battleborn. This is why the developers looked to Marvel when creating the story.
“We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the Marvel movies,” Varnell said regarding the character development and storylines. “They’ve done such a good job [of keeping things light.] Avengers is a superhero movie with big stakes. There’s this big cosmic trouble that’s about to happen, but the superheroes have fun with their powers. They have fun working together. While they might hit a struggle here and there we come away with that franchise saying, ‘That was awesome. I want to be Captain America. I want to be Hulk.’ I hope we’re doing that same thing with Battleborn.”
Battleborn’s character level system is based on a simple helix setup. When you level up during a mission, you’ll have options to unlock certain skills in the helix. Every time you play a character, you will be able to increase their rank and with that you’ll be able to unlock new skins, taunts and mutations. Mutations are five more abilities that wedge into their helix system. You’ll have three ability choices instead of two. They’re not necessarily more powerful skills, but they give you a different way to build your character.
In general, your playtime in Battleborn is based on skill. It’s about 30-40 minutes a mission for story mode. Multiplayer can go around 10-30 minutes depending on the style you want to play. There are three multiplayer modes with different styles of gameplay including a competitive mode. You can either play with your friends or use the game’s matchmaking system to build a team. There’s a story mode if you want to play by yourself. Of course, there’s also lots of loot, gear and different ways to customize your character.
“We’re Gearbox, so we make gear,” Varnell said. “You’re going to have gear and loot in the game that you can collect and add to your characters. If you’re a grinder like me, you’ve got gear and challenges and we’re going to do some leaderboards and scoring things later on and really let you compete with your friends.”
It was also important for the team to give Battleborn players their money’s worth by including many variations in their dialogue and gameplay to keep it fresh. They also wanted to keep the missions in the “sweet spot” of 30 minutes so they could pick up the game as they please without having to put in hours of work.
“You’ve got 25 characters with 30 minute missions. You’re going to play the game 12 hours before you’ve even played all the characters at least one,” Varnell said. “We know players are going to want to dig in and do other things. Whether you play competitive or story mode, we wanted to be sure there are ways to come back and replay the game.”
Battleborn is set to hit the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on Feb. 9, 2016.
