Borderlands 3 - Q & A

JIMMY BARNETT, LEAD 3D WEAPONS ARTIST, AND KEVIN DUC, LEAD VISUAL DESIGNER (WEAPONS), ON BRINGING OVER A BILLION GUNS TO THE GAME

- Jimmy Barnett

You’ve tried to outdo yourselves this time with even more types of weapons, so how many do you think you’ve got?

Jimmy: Because of the nature of the system, over a billion is kind of accurate, the way the parts play together, what we’ve taken from BL2 and the technology that we’ve moved forward, those numbers compound and get big really quick, so the iterations are out there.

Kevin: But in the guns that you’re going through, and as you’re collecting the guns, we tried to get variety on a more human scale, and doing that by making very specific gameplay types from all the different manufacturers. And so finding the variety within has been a major focus, the number kind of came secondary, it was the result of us doing that.

Jimmy: We definitely reached a threshold where it doesn’t matter how big the number is because from a player perspective it is unachievable. So you start to expand sideways and up and down and left and right and see what we could do to add depth and variety, more than just a top line number.

Are all those weapon variations pretty much potentially available from the start?

Kevin: there’s definitely a level ramp, as you’re moving in. The rarer a weapon is, the more parts are available that the system is going to attach to it and that’s where the variety happens, it’s where the heart of a player’s experience comes from. If you gave someone everything from the very start, then what are you aiming to get later? and you’re not going to be surprised. And so we’ve got it so that the variety slowly exposes itself.