Tales from the Borderlands hit the scene back in 2014, during the height of developer Telltale Games’ foray into interactive narratives. For those that played through the episodic Tales, they experienced a rich character-driven adventure that showcased a new side to the Borderlands universe. A franchise that up until that point had been all about action and comedy in a sci-fi world, where looting and damage numbers sat alongside countless weapons and the act of creating an unstoppable Vault Hunter. Tales from the Borderlands presented likable and lovable characters dealing with a series of dramatic and fun escalating events through dialogue, quick-time events, and choices.

Although Telltale Games is no longer creating adventure games like it once did, the studio closed in 2018, Gearbox has taken the initiative to bring more narrative goodness set in the Borderlands universe with New Tales from the Borderlands. Out on October 21, it’s a new narrative adventure with a look and feel that is very much classic Tales. In fact, during the early stages of development, the team at Gearbox Software brought in Telltale alumni that worked on the original episodic series to help kick start the project.

New Tales from the Borderlands immerses players in a deep and original story full of unexpected turns, heartwarming emotion, and classic Borderlands humor. Within the perpetually war-torn metropolis of Promethea, players will decide the fates of three underdogs out to make mayhem their business, with altruistic scientist Anu, her ambitious "streetwise" brother Octavio, and the fierce, frogurt-flinging Fran.

Players will face down a planetary invasion, vicious vault monster, and cold-hearted capitalists in this cinematic thrill ride where what happens next depends on their decisions. Every choice big or small can impact how the story unfolds, often in unexpected ways, and only by playing through the game will players fully understand how their decisions can change the Borderlands.

With the release right around the corner, we had the chance to sit down with James Lopez, Director of Production at Gearbox Software, and Frédéric Scheubel, Producer at Gearbox Studio Quebec to get a glimpse at New Tales of the Borderlands, and talk about its development. Right from the get-go, it was clear that nothing had been lost in the journey to get here, with these New Tales retaining all of the character, humour, and outlandish stakes that the original Tales and franchise is known for.

---

“Borderlands as a franchise has always been an interesting one, the first game kicked things off with a bleak sort of hellscape, but with cynical humour.”

---

“Borderlands as a franchise has always been an interesting one, the first game kicked things off with a bleak sort of hellscape, but with cynical humour,” James Lopez tells me. “And people really liked it and responded really well to it. With Borderlands 2 we tried to add a splash of colour tried to bring a little more levity to this intensely violent, very entertaining game. By the time we got to Tales, we were very much interested in building more depth in our characters. And that's kind of the three-way intersection that a game like this challenges you with when writing a compelling story with stakes involved. One that also has room for characters to have considerable growth both individually and interpersonally.”


What made the original Tales from the Borderlands stand out wasn’t the fact that Telltale delivered an experience that featured great characters with equally great writing, after all that was the studio’s bread and butter, but that it managed to tap into the franchise’s comedic sensibilities. “[Borderlands] has to be funny and fun too, and to tackle that we brought on some of the original Telltale alumni to share their insight with what they had learned when making the original Tales,” James adds.

“We also have an amazingly talented writing team, we've got Lynn Joyce who has a Ph.D. in interactive narrative writing. We also worked with a fantastic comedy writer, so it’s a really great team to tackle that problem. I don't know that any one writer could have really tackled it, so we took a collection of good writers and put them together.”

As seen in the gameplay above, New Tales from the Borderlands benefits from the modern Borderlands tech in ways that expand things like mini-games and exploration on top of adding a modern dose of visual fidelity and detail (New Tales features both performance capture and facial mapping technology).


“There are exploratory areas, with interactive elements within environments,” Frédéric Scheubel explains. “For example, you can explore Fran’s shop when you play the first episode and interact with characters. You can do background checks on them, you can find Vaultlanders, acquire currency for customisation, and things like that. The first Tales from the Borderlands was kind of on rails so you have more free-roaming and freedom to explore in New Tales from the Borderlands.”

---

“The first Tales from the Borderlands was kind of on rails so you have more free-roaming and freedom to explore in New Tales from the Borderlands.”

---

Homage and parody are a big part of Borderlands, and in New Tales you collect Vaultlanders and use these figurines of iconic heroes to do battle in a Street Fighter meets Pokemon sort of way. The cinematic side also introduces fun nods to properties like Metal Gear Solid as the cast looks to avoid combat where necessary. “We have three lovable losers, as Marcus would put it,” Frédéric says. “One of them really condones violence, one is a brawler, and one is a street rat that relies more on his social skills than actual combat. The idea with this is an intimate experience with people that are not Vault Hunters. So they have to use more cunning.” Where cunning here can be the act of moving around in a big cardboard box to avoid being seen.


New Tales from the Borderlands is very much a spiritual successor to the first outing, with all five episodes playable on day one, and choice playing a role in deciding the outcome. For the team at Gearbox, it’s all about making decisions that help shape the story and reinforce the characters they’ve created. “There are gonna be choices, especially initially, that reinforce the core idea of where these characters start, but there will always be another option,” James Lopez says.

“The philosophy is that you can play these characters the way that we wrote them, or you can change them over time. There are legitimate changes to each character, depending on what choices you make. Fran does not have to always be the bruiser, you can turn her into a reformed bruiser if you want to. Someone who realises that violence is not always the answer. We want to give people the opportunity to pursue the initial idea for each character if they want to, but also change it. For us, it's about reinforcing the player's choice in any situation.”


“When you purchase New Tales from the Borderlands you'll get the whole season at once, all five episodes,” Frédéric Scheubel adds. “And with that, you have your setup, your crescendo, and your resolution in each episode. But you also get a cliffhanger that moves you to Episodes Two and Three and Four and Five and then one of our five endings based on the choices that you've made.”

---

“There are legitimate changes to each character, depending on what choices you make. Fran does not have to always be the bruiser, you can turn her into a reformed bruiser if you want to.”

---

“Having worked on a couple of traditional Borderlands games, it's a little bit different,” James Lopez explains. “The whole thing is about how you get from point A to point Z and you tell that journey through missions, and side quests to round out the characters and provide more insight into the world, and level up. Here we don't really deal with concepts of XP and we don't really have side quests. Both Tales and New Tales treat the characters as if they're actually living a life that has been completely derailed, so we don't use those traditional tools that an open world game would have.”

For the team at Gearbox, New Tales from the Borderlands presented a challenge in not only creating a new entry in a beloved off-shoot but in meeting that challenge head-on. “Writing for a game like this is tricky because it's five episodes and you don't quite have a clean three-act structure that movies rely on,” James concludes. “Also, you don't want to have three clean acts with filler in between because that filler might be where you lose people that aren't quite vibing with the game. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep things moving to maintain the pacing. Also, how do you squeeze in character development without action? When action is a thing that keeps a lot of people really interested. Ultimately, we learned so much about how to write one of these games just by doing it.”

New Tales from the Borderlands launches October 21, 2022, for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.