Borderlands 3 "wouldn’t be as good as it is now" without Battleborn, according to the game's art director

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We have Battleborn to thank for how good Borderlands 3 is

(Image credit: Gearbox)

I bet you thought you'd heard the last of Battleborn, didn't you? Back in 2017 Gearbox announced that the game wouldn't be getting any more updates (although the servers are still live), but we have the Battleborn to thank for Borderlands 3 being so good, apparently. According to Borderlands 3's art director Scott Kester, if Gearbox hadn't made Battleborn, Borderlands 3 would have seriously suffered, as it sounds like the team were enduring creative stagnation after having worked on two Borderlands games in quick succession. 

(Image credit: Gearbox)

In response to a question about why it's taken so long to make Borderlands 3, Kester told Metro that "we made Borderlands 1 and we made Borderlands 2 pretty back-to-back. 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." In-between Borderlands 2 and Borderlands 3 came Battleborn, which sounds like it came at the perfect time. 

Kester said that "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’. 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. I’ve worked on this game for over four years now, it’s been in development for a while. The second I finished Battleborn I essentially started going into this. To us it wasn’t about, 'Hammer it out, hammer it out! Let’s punch it out, let’s punch it out!' It was like, 'Let’s make the right thing. Let’s get it there and then we’ll take our time'." 

There you have it: we all owe Battleborn some thanks. Even though the game might not have been a huge success, it gave the team at Gearbox a change to reset their brains instead of getting Borderlands burnout, and that can only be a good thing. We'll have to see for ourselves if that wait was worth it when Borderlands 3 comes out on September 13!

If you're looking for another game to play, keep an eye out for the best Amazon Prime Day game deals right here, or look below to see our Borderlands 3 preview!

Zoe Delahunty-Light
Zoe Delahunty-Light
Former GamesRadar+ Staff

While here at GamesRadar, Zoe was a features writer and video presenter for us. She's since flown the coop and gone on to work at Eurogamer where she's a video producer, and also runs her own Twitch and YouTube channels. She specialises in huge open-world games, true crime, and lore deep-dives.