Everyone in the Borderlands is trying to eke out the best existence they can—and when you aren't a Vault Hunter or a psycho bandit, your life doesn't constantly revolve around violence. New Tales from the Borderlands gives you a closer look at the everyday lives of people on the megapolis planet of Promethea, which our heroes Anu, Octavio, and Fran all call home. And where there are people, there will be corporations to exploit them—corporations like Tediore, pursuing a new pipeline for profits under the leadership of Susan Coldwell. How do these otherwise average people get by in such a hostile universe?
Just as she did in New Tales Dev Diary 1, Lin Joyce, Head of Writing at Gearbox Software, is here to provide more insight into the making of New Tales from the Borderlands. Read on for details about how the team crafted the lives of regular people and corporate CEOs alike—from the bottom to the top of Promethea's capitalist food chain, if you will.
Promethea's everyday populace
The people of Promethea just can't catch a break. During the events of Borderlands 3, Promethea's cities were besieged by the Maliwan corporation during its attempted takeover of Atlas, and everyday citizens were inevitably caught in the crossfire. Orbital lasers rained down from the sky, including the beam that took out a sizable chunk of Fran's Frogurts. Now, roughly a year after the dust from that skirmish has started to settle, another merger-turned-warzone seems to be just around the corner.
"You play the mainline Borderlands games as the Vault Hunters, and what I love about New Tales is that it begs the question, 'What happened for everyone else? What about them?'" says Lin. "This game is us saying 'Yeah, let's talk about that! What did happen for the rest of society? What is life like if you're not a Vault Hunter? What's the day-to-day?' A lot of other recent media is looking at that concept these days, like superhero shows asking 'What's it like if you don't have superpowers? What's that power dynamic?' This is our opportunity to poke at that question in the Borderlands universe."
Promethea's neon-trimmed concrete jungle is also a far cry from the harsh desert wastelands of Pandora that Borderlands fans are intimately familiar with. Population density and life expectancy are exponentially higher; citizens aren't forced to constantly fight for their lives, freeing up their time for thrilling activities like shopping at the mall, grabbing a bite at a taco truck, or updating their social media. Life is comparatively pretty good, even with the constant thread of corporate invasions.
"Personally, I really liked the idea of being able to take a closer look at a more metropolitan environment—something that's very different from Pandora, or one of the Eden moons," says Lin. "One of the opportunities there is that you can tell a small, focused story that has huge ramifications. What the rest of the city doesn't know is that what these three people are doing will change history for everyone; it's happening right under the city's nose."
How our heroes get along
Speaking of those three people, Anu, Octavio, and Fran each have their own motivations for trying to effect change in the world around them. You'll get to know them better over the course of the game, but at a high level, Anu hopes to invent technology designed to help instead of hurt, Octavio dreams of entrepreneurial success to back up his natural bravado, and Fran just wants what Tediore owes her in the way of insurance money to fix up her wrecked froyo shop.
From the moment that Anu, Octavio, and Fran's paths converge early on in the story, their relationships will be monitored and evaluated by L0U13, a debonair assassination bot and Octavio's longtime buddy. As discussed in Dev Diary 1, the way your bonds are calculated based on your words and actions all happens behind the scenes—but at the end of each episode, L0U13's readouts will give you a snapshot of where things stand between our trio of lovable losers.
Along with an overall team bond score, you'll get further insight into how things are going between the three possible character pairings: "Brain 'N Brawn" (Anu and Fran), "Sis 'N Bro" (Anu and Octavio), and "Yogurt 'N Tacos" (Octavio and Fran).
"For me, the most challenging pair to write for was Fran and Anu, but that's the nature of the story," says Lin. "Fran and Octavio know each other already as employer and lone employee, so there's an assumed level of intimacy there. Similarly, Octavio and Anu have the family history as adopted siblings to pull from. But Anu and Fran meet for the first time in front of the player, so their relationship is starting from zero; there is no assumed intimacy or history to refer to.
"You can't call back to a moment that they had off-screen; everything is onscreen. Because of that, Anu and Fran don't have a ton of one-on-one experiences; there aren't a lot of moments where it's just the two of them alone, so a lot of their relationship-building happens in a group, with all the group dynamics that come with that. So that pairing was a little more complicated."
As for writing the dialogue of our three protagonists, each character holds a place in Lin's heart. "All writers approach the characters differently, but we had pillars for who these characters are, what their touchpoints are," she explains. "I consider myself a Fran stan, but Anu was the easiest for me to write, as she's the most like me. I rarely had to question what Anu would do—writing for her flowed naturally. Anu's pillars are my pillars. Often with Octavio I based his responses off one of my children, who has a lot of those same qualities. Funnily enough, he got his first job while we were writing New Tales, and I kid you not, it was at a froyo place."
[b]A tour of Tediore[/b]
Standing in opposition to our protagonists is the monolithic Tediore corporation, headed by the ruthless CEO Susan Coldwell. Though Tediore has been a part of the Borderlands universe since the very first game, players haven't had much visibility into this corporation's inner workings—particularly the cold-hearted capitalism currently coursing through its veins.
"Some fans were thinking that Tediore might've been 'one of the good ones,' but it's more like shades of gray," says Lin. "Susan Coldwell is an individual; she's the voice of the company. What we don't establish is how long she's been there. We know that Rhys Strongfork is still pretty new to running a company; he's not always been the CEO of Atlas, as we know from the existing Borderlands story. We know there's a lot of history with Jakobs as well, and with Maliwan. So I think this is just the first page that we're filling in for Tediore, but it's absolutely not the whole story."
Susan herself is the perfect foil to Anu, Octavio, and Fran: an untouchable elite who would loathe such commoners if she could even spare a moment to think of them. Her belittling, holier-than-thou demeanor stands in stark contrast to the southern charm of Wainwright Jakobs or the impassioned, expletive-laden yelling of Mister Torgue, for example.
"We looked at our CEOs and said 'Who do we have, and what's missing?'" says Lin. "Who else needs a seat at that table, what kind of personality, what kind of leader, what kind of business views? It wasn't necessarily just about putting a face to Tediore—it was about how we add to the spectrum of corporate CEOs that we've established, trying to fill in a component that we felt was missing and exploring it. But it's also asking the question 'Sure, Tediore markets itself as being for everyone… How much do they believe that? How much of that is marketing spin?' These are all questions we had fun playing with."
The very notion that any massive, universe-spanning corporation could have humanity's interests at heart may be flawed. "At a base level, the Borderlands corporations run weapons companies," says Lin. "Weapons are for very specific things, and it's generally not to keep people healthy. That created a critical talking point for us that New Tales allowed us to really sit with. What does it mean to live in a universe ruled by corporatocracy, where those corporations are all weapons manufacturers?"
