The Borderlands series is synonymous with its signature, cel-shaded, comic book-esque art style, but it originally started life with a more realistic look that developer Gearbox had to take a massive risk to move away from.
Speaking in a new interview with Game Informer, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford explains: "Before we launched it, there were a lot of people going, 'Well, cute, but it's a post-apocalyptic vibe, and id Software is making Rage and Bethesda is making Fallout. You guys are screwed.' We believed in it, but a lot of people believe in things that don't work, so are we tricking ourselves?"
According to Pitchford, there was a point where the team had concluded that "'it's kind of got to be realism or there's just no market opportunity,'" but even so, "we knew it wasn’t exactly right; it just wasn't exactly right for what the look and feel and vibe of what Borderlands was supposed to be – it didn't match the gameplay." As Borderlands 4 art director Adam May puts it, "as we were working on it, other things started popping up, and we started seeing some of the art style, especially when Fallout [3] was first announced, and we were like, 'Oh crap. We're in the same visual space that they are.'"
With this in mind, Borderlands' art team approached Pitchford with a bold plan – to experiment with transforming the realistic art style into the comic book-esque look we associate the series with today. Pitchford gave them "two weeks" to try this out, but quickly began to regret things.
"It was, like, five guys with two weeks to go mess around with the look and the feel, and I immediately knew I made a mistake. I was like, 'Shit. We're trying to get to Alpha, dude."
Pitchford fully expected to have to shoot the idea down, but even so, he knew it was something "that we had to at least look at and explore" since "I knew we weren't right" with the realistic look.
Lo and behold, two weeks later, Pitchford saw the results. "I go into the meeting and, looking at it, it's fucking right; It's right. [...] And it's like everything we knew about what was wrong was confirmed when we felt it was right."
Of course, coming to that conclusion was the start of another major risk, with Gearbox having already been working on the game for years. Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins notes that "we rebuilt the whole game to match the new art style" over the course of around eight to nine months, which was "an incredibly intense time."
"We were already taking every risk: We were going out on a limb with design, we were going out on a limb with the universe and the story, it was a new IP; like, we were taking every risk known to man," Pitchford continues. "'Fuck it, let's do what our heart says is right.'"
Now, it's hard to imagine the Borderlands games looking any different, so it all worked out. In our own recent interview with Pitchford, he told us that "we went from an industry that predicted that we would die, that Borderlands would find no audience, to being one of the leading video game franchises in the world."
