When we learned that the final piece of Borderlands 2 DLC saw players jumping into a D&D game narrated by Tiny Tina, we knew that we had to sit down and speak to the man behind it all — Anthony Burch.
GON: When you’re making a D&D borderlands game do you have to take into account any of the meta level of play that players will be experiencing? I mean I don’t think Borderlands is a necessarily very serious game to begin with but if you’re going to run a game inside a game you’ve got another meta-level of concern to deal with. Does that mean you’ve got to be really careful with how the DM interacts or are you just balls-out and Tiny Tina changes things on the fly?
Anthony: The exact thing you just said. The balls thing. It wasn’t something we had to worry about, it was an opportunity. Because now when you’re in a world that is completely under the control of a character you suddenly can do things you couldn’t do before because you would have had to explain them. Like “Oh suddenly this boss fight changes from one boss to another one just because Tina got bored halfway through” or “Oh there’s no bar in this little village — well now there is because one just appears”.
It’s really freeing to actually just do stuff like that and have it be explained by Tina’s whimsy or whatever the hell.And not only that but it also allows you to surprise the player in a number of ways, like we have a quest “Oh solve this riddle, roll this insight stat to see if you can solve a riddle” and Brick rolls his dice too hard — and in front of the player the person who asked them the riddle gets crushed by an enormous ten-foot tall D20 that kills him because Brick threw his dice too hard and broke the miniature. Being able to play around with the meta-level influencing the game you’re inside was a real strength and something that I think will hopefully keep players surprised.
It’s what I was talking about before with the idea that Tina is dealing with this death so she’s bringing in characters from the meta-level, her real life and her memory, into the game you’re playing as a way of coping with it. I think that’s one of the things that makes the experience kind of really interesting.
I mean we could have just said “Okay you go to an island on Pandora that’s got orcs on it” and that would have been kinda boring. But I think the fact that you’re within a fictional fantasy world that Tina is controlling give us all these crazy options in terms of gameplay scenarios.
