Gearbox Software is presenting its upcoming multiplayer shooter Battleborn at PAX Prime, but they're taking time out of their busy schedules to talk to the Shacknews Chatty directly. Today at 9 AM PT / 12 noon ET, creative director Randy Varnell will be joined by several other lead designers to answer your questions. Just hop into the Shacknews Chatty and ask whatever's on your mind about Battleborn, Gearbox Software, game development, or favorite gentlemen robots. (It's Marquis, of course. The answer is always Marquis.)
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Shacknews
replySteve Watts posted a new article, Shack Asks: Talk Battleborn with Gearbox Devs today at 9 AM PT / 12 noon ET
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I'll get the ball rolling. You've mentioned that the characters are an amalgamation of different influences from your childhood, from vampire fiction to Masters of the Universe. My question is: Marquis is the best, right? Where did he come from?
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Marquis is amazing! Strangely, he was one of our first batch characters, where a few of our awesome GBX concept artists drew like ...crap...over a hundred concepts for characters, just to imagine what we COULD do. The early Battleborn team looked them through, and there were some clear winners for a few of our first characters. Marquis, Phoebe, and Miko were all in that set. I think Thorn was just behind them, but we actually made her first, fully modeled.
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Let's see some of the ones that didn't make it!
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I've got a handful of questions from our resident enthusiast and Corpses 'N Souls developer valcan_s. I'll sporadically sprinkle them in, starting with:
"Is the PC version going to be upgraded to Unreal Engine 4 or is it Unreal Engine 3 as well with the Borderlands engine?"
-valcan_s -
The game has a very unique art style. (As most gearbox titles do) Any inspiration there?
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How did your work with the Borderlands series prepare you for Battleborn? Also, will there be any references fans of the series could stumble onto?
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Did a lot of work with the character designers for BL2, especially working through the talent trees to be sure they were cool. A lot of that work drove us to want to expand our character promise - to do some character things we couldn't do in BL2. Also, I Looooved playing with the talent builds, and as a dev we could instant re-spec and pop off different combinations all the time. That experience was awesome, and to a great degree contributed to the fast in-match level loop we have with Battleborn. At the core, that's how the RPG in Battleborn works
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this tickles me greatly
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Hehe, I bet :)
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From myself, how have you tinkered with the Helix System over the course of development to get it to where it is now?
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In a word: simplified.
In-match growth and choice (that kind of "rapid talent tree") was one of the first pillars of the game we wanted to make.
We learned, though, through a LOT of playtesting and iteration that when you're experiencing the game as a match-based FPS, your brain just doesn't have as many cycles for RPG decision making. So, we simplified.
We moved to something very similar to what you see now about a year and a half ago, and in that time we've even dropped the number of in-match levels a few times, originally at 20 down to the 10 we have now. They're better choices now (less simple numerical enhancements, and far more non-comparable tangible choices).
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Where is the meat bicycle?
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where it's always been -- inside your heart
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Where it will remain forever.
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Why would you not include an amalgamation of Orco, Snarf, and Scooby Doo. These characters are iconic and still recognizable to this day do you plan in the future to include such amazing DLC characters or have you kept this character behind scenes until the big reveal? I know it exists because it's the next obvious character choice.
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Duke Nukem as a playable character confirmed? :)
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This needs to happen!
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Hey Scott! WELCOME TO HELL
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We should probably let him know we do have chips and dip.
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tell me more
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Hey Scott, what were some of the influences behind the art direction of Battleborn?
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GOTY 2016
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:)
Yean, it's all demons and marines man.
The story is pretty ambitious. We're trying to tell how this group of badass heroes who spent years fighting each other came together with only one star left to try and save it from a joint venture of two seemingly unlimited foes. But really, we each ofthe 25 characters have their own background and stories to hear. Some, you'll learn a lot about. Some, you'll be able to dig around and uncover what they're about. I think it's going to feel different than what you've seen before.
Game length - 30 is our typical magic number. Especially in competitive, we find for a FPS if we go beyond that we start to wear down. Of the three Versus modes we have, though, they vary in range from about 10 minutes to a good 25-30 minute average. For Story Missions, they typically run 30-45 minutes, but that time depends a lot on your skill with the game.
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So for characters typically everything begins with a "pitch" or a high level theme from someone in the studio. The ideas come from everyone across all departments, which is really cool -there is constant iteration and inspiration back and forth between different departments. For example Benedict (bird guy) started out as a rough prototype of Axton with a chicken head- which then evolved over time to be what he is today.
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Hey! Part of being a concept artist is being able to bend your natural style to support the look of the game. Luckily for me my sort of "default style" is actually pretty close for the Pixar+Anime look Kester was pushing. In general though, I would say draw a lot from life, and pull influences from many different sources. I also try to pull a lot of inspiration from real people that I know.
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It is a bit of a challenge, but I think one thing that helps keeps things consistent is having the different factions. We know that the Peacekeeper dudes all have GI-Joe inspired armor, LLC has a steam punk influence, and so on. We did a lot of work early on to help hone in on the style, level of detail, way we exaggerate anatomy, and the general aesthetic.
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Well, I just asked GBX_AmandaChristensen and GBX_ScottKester about the Draper question, and they said I'm not enough of a chauvenistic womanizer to qualify for the industries Don Draper. Though, I am quite handsome to a certain niche audience. (At least one, I promise.)
Evolution of the project? In the big ways - surprisingly, not a lot. Our original goal was to make a character-centric FPS game with fast-moving RPG elements and a revived focus (from GBX) on competitive to complement our great BL co-op play. That's pretty much right where we landed.
In small ways - a few fun anecdotes. Some of our first competitive matches lasted well over an hour. We've streamlined that considerably, with matches typically not going beyond 20 minutes, and often designed to soft cap around 30 as an outlier.
Characters, and their skills, have changed quite a bit for numerous reasons (both technical and creative). Example - when we demo'd last fall (2014) Oscar Mike's LB and RB skills were both grenades (one frag, and one anti-shield). We got overwhelming feedback that was TOO MANY GRENADES. So, we dropped the shield grenade and gave him a stealth suit, which he desperately needs when Rath gets on his tail.
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Welcome! Nice to have a packed house today!
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Are you planning to offer any modding or map creation tools for the game?
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what is this ;
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Nice to have you both back, and I am glad to see you didn't forget how to Shack :)
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;_;
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Your amigo up there Scott Kester once said that he thought each of the BB characters "as a main character of a game that hasn't come out yet"
How hard is it to flesh out and tell the stories of so many unique personalities?
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I feel the same way as Kester -- we love these characters, and I see every one of them as being worthy of a game unto themselves.
Because of the sheer amount of investment we put into each of the 25 playable characters in the game, it's definitely a challenge, but we have a lot of tools at our disposal for storytelling: roughly 600-700 lines of battle chatter VO for each character; character-specific dialogue callouts in PvP and PvE (for instance, Montana and Oscar Mike are squaddies / super best pals, so they have unique dialogue when addressing one another); a metric assload of lore generated by Randy Varnell and myself, and so on.
Our hope is that our passion for these characters will translate by way of the sheer amount of /stuff/ we're layering into them. But yeah, it's a lot of work.
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AWWE LINDIE ITS OK
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They have tons of influence. It's a back-and-forth kind of thing.
For instance, Mellka, who we just announced, was one of the characters that I initially concepted for Story Mode. Then Amanda did the initial concept, and we kicked around some ideas about character backstory -- she would revise, I would revise, that kind of thing. Also, several of the characters in the game were presented to me with some attached narrative concepts and ideas pre-attached, which I would riff on, then they would riff on, et cetera.
Kester and Amanda are both top-tier badasses, and they've brought as much to the narrative of Battleborn as I have.
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Next up:
"For the PC version is there going to be a FOV slider? What is your teams view on FOV in FPS games in general? Does your team feel a FOV slider should be in every FPS?"
-valcan_s-
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What have been some of the challenges of merging these three styles of game experiences (MOBA, FPS, and RPG) into one? Did you have a chance to look at a game like Destiny to figure out what not to do?
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A few things:
* FPS's have a lot less brain time for decisions and choices during a match. We started out with much bigger talent trees, and have simplified them several times. The Helix was one of our best innovations in keeping the choice relevant but accessible.
* Character names are always the hardest thing. Seriously.
* We knew we wanted to mix widely different archetypes of characters - so, not just gun characters, but sword characters , magic characters, etc. That ranged vs melee design took a while to get right, but I think its working quite well now.
Destiny is a great game! I played it for a while, and loved seeing how they responded to challenges post-launch. BL2 still serves as a bigger inspiration for us, though.
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What's it like to work with the former -- talentless -- staff of Shacknews?
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We're still talentless.
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Speak for yourself, Danny Boy!
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lol
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Or is it that you've been writing for us all along??? Spooooooky!
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How many servers have been dropped during his reign at Gearbox?
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dad is that you
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Also, has working for Steve gotten any of you chicks?
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what exactly do you mean by drop
can you be more clear as to this server thing
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Next one:
"Was there ever a point when you wanted to make Battleborn F2P? What is your view on F2P?"
-valcan_s-
For a lot of reasons, Battleborn locked in as a AAA full-price retail release game very early on. I definitely believe that what you'll get in that retail box will be "chunky" and well worth that price.
Personally - there's some F2P I love and some F2P I hate. I despise paywalls. I hate when I want to play a game, and suddenly find myself waiting behind timers. It's incredibly disrespectful of my time and fandom, I think. I also really dislike pay-to-win in almost every circumstance.
On the positive side - I love what F2P or F2P elements do for games like LOL. Part of that strategy let them rapdily increase their fan base, and I think their rotation model of characters kept it fresh. HOTS and other games have continued that trend. There's something there. Something for the future, perhaps.
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Are you guys concerned about a toxic community developing, as is common with competitive arena games? If so, what are your plans for managing the community?
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I am, certainly. I played LOL heavily about 3-4 years ago, right at the time Riot was really digging into the problem and trying to find ways to address it.
I think that having single-player Story Missions is a big outlet here. You have a execellent way to play the game and experience the characters without having to get curb-stomped by squeakers. (I'm the father of a an ex-squeaker...I'm sorry!)
We have some of the typical bits .... you can mute chat and voice chat for teammates, and you can't chat with the enemy team during the match (at very least by default). There's a lot more to it than that, of course, and we're planning on supporting the community and the game post-launch to help caretake the community.
I'm as active as time allows on our Gearbox Battleborn forums right now, and I'm working pretty hard to be sure that core community is solid, inviting, and positive. SHOUT OUT GBX FORUM FOLKS!
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What was the inspiration for trying to do a shooter MOBA?
How much are other games looked at when doing a project like this? In terms of what may have worked or just been a bad idea. -
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We announced the signup page for our closed technical test yesterday! http://rsvp.battleborn.com
SIGN UP TODAY CATCH BATTLEBORN FEVER ETC
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What is the dev team playing besides Battleborn?
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Come play rocket league with us sometime! Let us thrash thine rears, harshly.
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Can we expect any witty banter between characters?
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Assloads. Every character recognizes a lot of other characters for spot/kill lines; we have conversations that invoke player characters in Story Mode, that kind of thing. Our master excel grid of VO is huge, and occasionally crashes Excel because it is /so jam-packed with obscene levels of oscar-worthy writing/.
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Any lines of dialog you can share? What's are some of your favorite lines?
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This sounds fantastic! I can't wait to see what kind of interactions characters will have with one another.
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Please make this happen :)
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Thank you very much for joining us!
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Thanks for stopping by the old stomping grounds! Much appreciated!
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Thank you for stopping by!
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Thank you!
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Thank you for hanging out and for answering our community's questions! Much appreciated!
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Thank you!
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Thank you for stopping by! We appreciate you taking time out of a busy PAX for us!
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Thank you!
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Special thanks to our Chatty community for representing! You all made me proud today!
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We have more coming!
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Given how well this went, I'd say we'll definitely be looking to have more sooner than later.
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This thread was pretty awesome. Thanks to all involved!
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