14 DAY TRIAL // Handsome Jack is the iconic bad boy of the Borderlands series, a complete sociopath that spends his time erecting statues of him, oppressing everyone, and hunting and killing you and your friends.
In the upcoming Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Gearbox wants to present a tale that shows Jack's descent from mild unpleasantness into full-blown villainy, in addition to giving you a new bunch of weapons to collect.
They have even released a trailer, showing a Handsome Jack that doesn't quite have his footing yet but shows clear signs that it's going there. One of the goals that the design team had was to show players how and why he became the monster that we all know, and to challenge our perception of right and wrong in the process.
The trailer shows him a bit self-obsessed and braggy, but he's far from the bumbling sociopath that we all love to shoot in the face in Borderlands 2.
"We wanted people to look at Handsome Jack differently, obviously. We at least tried to explore a different side of him, but also remind you that he was a villain," says Gearbox's Chief Creative Director Mikey Neumann.
In Borderlands 2, Jack comes out of nowhere, being the de facto dictator of Pandora, but players don't really know what happened to make him into what he is.
"One of the targets for the Pre-Sequel is to put him on this curve and see where it is that he's come from and why he is who he is...People know the jerk Jack, but they haven't seen where he's come from, so that just feels like a tremendously rich, fertile plain to dive into," says Maurice Suckling, one of the writers on Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.
The task to take the Jack everyone knows and offer him a solid backstory provided a unique challenge for the creative team to tackle, where they had to somehow make players feel sympathy for a character whose descent into the dark side they had already witnessed.
Another writer, Anthony Burch, has said that it's difficult to surprise players in such a setting, because suspense can't simply come from showing what happens to every character that the players are familiar with, and that the writers have to come up with other avenues of surprising the players.
"The hope was to take characters that the player has already seen before and contextualize them in different ways. You might end the game thinking the 'good guys,' the Vault Hunters, are a little less morally upright than they were when you played Borderlands 2, or that Handsome Jack is a little more sympathetic," he continues.
