14 DAY TRIAL // Borderlands franchise Director Matt Armstrong has revealed that developer Gearbox Software is trying to flesh out the universe of the series through external collaborations with studios like 2K Australia for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, or Telltale Games for Tales from the Borderlands.
Gearbox Software released Borderlands 1 and 2 in recent years and delivered a great mix between first-person shooting and role-playing dungeon crawlers that provided not just an interesting universe but also plenty of potential for new stories.
Currently, not one, but two different Borderlands games are in development, although they both treat different aspects of the series and are being made by outside studios under the supervision of Gearbox.
According to Armstrong, who talked with GameReactorTV, the potential for all these new stories was a conscious effort from him and the rest of the development team when building the two games. Now, he's thrilled to see that they're being developed by other studios.
"One thing we've actually done that people are going to see is because the Telltale game is very story-driven and because the one in Australia is also very much a strong story, but there's a few threads and plot lines and stories that myself and Anthony Burch and some of the other people at Gearbox have sort of been stringing subtly throughout the universe. And we have an opportunity here to take some of those threads and pull them taut."
While Armstrong doesn't rule out the possibility of Gearbox not doing any other games in the series, he emphasizes that the Gearbox team has lots of things planned out in terms of story, so that it knows what to do with the universe and how to develop it in different ways, such as with the Pre-Sequel.
"Whether we do any other games ever again or not we're prepared and we understand what happens to the universe before and what happens to the universe after. And also what happened to the universe in between these two games, which as it turns out is something we've been able to leverage here in some really entertaining ways."
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is set to debut this fall for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 platforms. The Tales from the Borderlands experience is also scheduled to appear in the future but, so far, Telltale Games is keeping a tight lid on the new experience.
Gearbox mentioned that it had other projects in development, but revealed that they're not related to the Borderlands franchise.