Borderlands 3 arrives later this year, and it’s a game that fans of the series have been waiting for for a long time. Borderlands 2 came out all the way back in 2012, and though we did get the Pre-Sequel in 2014, the wait for a true mainline sequel has been excruciatingly long. But why did Gearbox Software take so long to put out said sequel?
Speaking in an interview with Metro, Borderlands 3’s Art Director Scott Kester spoke of the same. Kester admitted that after working on Borderlands and Borderlands 2 pretty much back-to-back, the developer wanted to take a break from the series and work on other things (which ended up being the not-so-successful Battleborn), which 2K Games, Borderlands publishers, allowed them to do. As per Kester, Borderlands 3 has benefitted from the time Gearbox was able to take off from the series.
“We made 1 and we made 2 pretty back-to-back,” said Kester. “I was on both of those games and we were tired. And we were like, ‘Should we make another one?’ And we didn’t want to, we needed a break. Because if we didn’t have a break I think we wouldn’t have made something as good.”
“By the grace of the beautiful 2K they allowed us to say, ‘Hey, we want to try this Battleborn thing, we just want to kind of reset our palette, we’re gonna try this thing,'” Kester continued. “And we did it and… you know, if we didn’t make that game Borderlands 3 wouldn’t be as good as it is now. It made us think about things a little different.”
That makes plenty of sense. Being tied to a single property can be creatively restrictive, and I’m sure the time off has allowed Gearbox to come back to Borderlands refreshed and bursting with new ideas (or I hope, at least). We’ll see the fruits of our long wait soon enough when Borderlands 3 launches on September 13 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC- judging by how long Gearbox says the campaign’s going to be, it’s going to be worth that wait, at least in terms of how much content it offers. In the meantime, there’s a new Borderlands 2 DLC out to bridge the gap between the two games, so be sure to check that out as well.