Borderlands 3’s Main Villains Are Based Around Streamer Culture

The writers of the much anticipated Borderlands 3 said earlier that they envisioned the series as continuing well past this entry, as an interconnected saga. But for now, we’ve got our eyes on the third game, and it seems it will have some fun villains in the form of the Calpyso twins. The influence for them came from a familiar place to a lot of players: streamers.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Writers Danny Homan and Sam Winkler spoke about how they crafted Tyreen and Troy Calpyso, drawing influence from popular video game based streamers. While they didn’t name anyone specific, they said they wanted to channel the charisma of the big name streamers as a way to make sense of how these two had managed to unite the various factions in the game. This is obvious as they “livescream” their carnage throughout the game, constantly topping themselves and taunting the protagonists.

“We wanted to make sure the voices of the villains were unique and felt relevant in 2019. We took this previous idea, where in Borderlands the villains are these corporate faces. They’re a hit squad, or they’re this megalomaniac charismatic tyrant. We went away from the corporations a bit and said, “What about this crowdsourced, homegrown cult of personality?”

That unlocked a lot of ideas for us. They’ve managed to do what no one could do before and take this disparate bandit clans and bring them all together. So then we asked, “How do you get that popular?” Well, these days you become a streamer.

Big streamers have that rare charisma, something about them. You have to be entertaining enough to accrue a mass following. Then the question becomes, how do you keep that following and grow that following? You have to keep on escalating and doing different things. That’s a cool formula for villains.”

It definitely is an interesting and relevant take, especially when you consider how big streaming has gotten over the years. The popular streamer Ninja was reportedly paid around $50 million to jump from Twitch to Mixer exclusively, for instance. Borderlands 3 is sure to be a streaming favorite when it launches September 13th, and even beyond, I’m sure.