Borderlands Creative Director Q and A
Borderlands has been a long time coming from 2K Games and Gearbox Software, and on display at last week's E3 one particular facet on the game that caught Gaming Union's eye was the dramatic change in art style.
Previously borderlands had a much gruffer, more realistic look, but since then Gearbox has swapped the art style for cell shading and a lighter feel.
Speaking with Creative Director at Gearbox, Mikey Neumann, we asked about the change of art.
Gaming Union: What caused the change in Borderlands' art style?
Mikey Neumann: We were at a standstill where we weren't super confident in where we were at. We wanted the game to be beautiful, and it looked pretty good, but it wasn't like "that's going to make people turn and look."
GU: Was it an option that was always on the table? Or was there something that inspired the new style?
Neumann: It came up originally, and we did the concept art in that style. The concept art we have is beautiful, it's very painterly. We had our vice president at the entire company say, "You know what, we can make this happen, give me three artists and a programmer for a week and a half" and we were all like "What? We've been in development for a few years, you're going to change it at the last second?" We let him go crazy for a week and a half and he showed his stuff and we were like, "that's pretty cool, take it a little further." Gave him a couple extra weeks and he had the whole of Firestone done, and we were all blown away. We could not believe how pretty it was, so we took it to 2K. I mean, we liked it, but they're our publishing partner and we were like, totally changing our horses on them, and they loved it. Right away they were supportive of it, kind of the same way they were supportive of what Bioshock wanted to do with the art-deco style and things like that. They really wanted to take a chance there. So once everyone was on board we just went with it.
GU: The new style brings a lighter feel, did that change any other element of the game when you changed the art?
Neumann: Yeah it did, it made the skills crazier. A specific skill, Roland, he's kind of your Master Chiefy default soldier-type class, his main skill trees are more default, like shooter fans will love him, but his farthest skill tree is actually Medic. One of the stranger things on there is you can actually get healing bullets, where you fire your gun at a team mate and they heal them. I know that sounds abstract and weird, but when we tested it out we realized all this stuff we'd never thought about. If you walk behind people with a shotgun and shoot them, you're kind of this close combat medic. Or, you can go far away with a sniper rifle. And the skill test was so weird and so fun, we were like, "F--- it, we're doing it!" It's weird, but it's awesome. [The new art style] allowed us to embrace 'what ever is fun goes in and plausibility be damned'.
