Two less than heroic protagonists will share their stories in the game

Mar 10, 2014 10:05 GMT  ·  By

Telltale Games and Gearbox Software have just revealed a few more details about their upcoming collaboration – Tales from the Borderlands – which will star two less than heroic protagonists who tell wildly different stories about the same thing and flesh out the whole universe of the franchise.

Gearbox Software released Borderlands 1 and 2 as first-person shooters with a distinct emphasis on cooperative play and RPG mechanics, as players uncovered better and better guns while upgrading the skills of their chosen Vault Hunters, which were heroes that looked after the peaceful residents of Pandora.

Telltale Games, the studio behind recent adventure games like The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, confirmed last year that it was working alongside Gearbox on a new project called Tales from the Borderlands.

The adventure game has now received quite a few more details thanks to a panel held by the two studios at SXSW, via Polygon.

While in the regular Borderlands titles players controlled the heroic Vault Hunters, in Tales, they'll get to play as two of the more regular residents of Pandora – Fiona, a con artist, and Rhys, a Hyperion employee with cybernetic enhancements.

The two individuals will tell their own versions of different stories and players won't actually get to explore what really happened, as both Fiona and Rhys are quite prone to lying and exaggerating past events.

Both characters have special skills and powers, as Rhys can use his robotic arm to hack electric devices, while Fiona can employ her fast talk and convince others to do her bidding.

Just like with previous Telltale titles, choices will have to be made, but the studio emphasized that this time it's more about choosing the better of two extremely desirable options, unlike in The Walking Dead, where it's the lesser of two evils.

The tone of Tales from the Borderlands will be a more comedic one, as Telltale highlighted just how much it wants to go back to the humor of past franchises like Sam and Max, after focusing on grim and dark stories in The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us.

There will be plenty of action scenes that will progress the story, according to Telltale's Kevin Bruner, as they are inherent to the Borderlands experience

"It's a Borderlands game, there has to be crazy stuff going on," Bruner said. "I'm glad that people recognize it in [The Wolf Among Us], because figuring out how to do action and storytelling at the same time has been tricky to do without reverting to a traditional, run-around video game."

"We want to keep things cinematic, and have action sequences tell stories. We got better between Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, and I think we'll get better as we move into Borderlands, because you have to have crazy, over-the-top action scenes, or it's not a Borderlands game."

Unfortunately, Tales from the Borderlands still doesn’t have an estimated release period, so it's unclear when it will debut.