![]() ![]() In this instance, winning the battle earned Octavio the Zane Flynt minifigure, which fans might recognize as one of the playable characters from Borderlands 3, a game that takes place one year before the events of this one. The game then thrusts you into a comical, action-figure fight that plays out with button clicks and quick-time events. It begins with you selecting a Borderlands-inspired minifigure, which doubles as a collectible found and earned throughout the story, from a very fighting game-esque character selection screen. One exciting aspect of New Tales from the Borderlands shown during its first gameplay demo was Vaultlanders, one of the game’s many minigames. It’s your story, after all, and when you veer off the archetypal path of each character, Lopez says you’ll see and hear characters react to that. On the subject of dialogue, Lopez says Anu, Octavio, and Fran have clear archetypes, but players are not required to follow those. Lopez says the dialogue choices shown in the Pax West demo are just some of the hundreds in the final game, and all of them will help determine which of the five endings you can get when the credits roll. When you get those moments where he calls this stuff out to you, it is an opportunity to go, ‘do I like this? Do I want to go back and make my bond higher?’” He’ll just go, ‘that was pretty harsh.’ There’s a mechanic, too, where he’ll measure the bond level of the group. “If you say something that is particularly harsh to someone, he’ll call you on it,” Lopez says. There will also be an NPC assassin bot that follows the trio around, acting as a Greek Chorus character for the party. In classic Telltale fashion, at the end of each episode, there will be a recap of what you did. ![]() He continued, “Instead of doing it like ‘this choice is the important choice,’ all choices may be important and may have led you to these circumstances later on.” Beyond diegetic reactions and moments, there are two other ways to grasp how your choices affect the game. We feel that every choice is important, so we moved away from the hints that we had prior in Tales from the Borderlands.” And some of those choices will have an impact mid-term and even longer term, affecting which ending you’ll see, so pay attention, see how the characters will react. “What choice you make…will have its own sequence that will play differently. ![]() “There’s an immediate impact there’s an immediate joke linked to what choice you made,” Gearbox Studios Quebec producer Frédéric Scheubel says of the demo’s first dialogue choice. Instead, you’ll have to decipher how that choice affects those around you based on what they do and say following it.Īs for why the team opted to drop those notifications, it’s to strengthen the impact of each choice. Don’t expect to see a “Fran will remember that” notification pop up after you make your decision, though, because unlike in Telltale’s game, the team has done away with on-screen markers like that. And the gameplay is nearly identical to that of Telltale’s first and only foray into this universe, which is to say your primary mode of input comes from selecting dialogue choices and watching how they affect characters and the world around you as well as the overall narrative.Īs you’d expect, when it’s time for a dialogue choice, you’ll see options pop up on the screen and a red bar beneath them to indicate how much time you have left to select one. The jokes are plenty, with some hitting harder than others, depending on your tolerance of Gearbox’s trademark Borderlands humor. What immediately stood out to me was how Tales from the Borderlands this gameplay was, from the actual moment-to-moment gameplay to the writing. In it, we see the unlikely trio of Anu, Octavio, and Fran attempting to escape dangers in an underground sewer system riddled with Tediore troops who want nothing more than to take them down. That authenticity and dedication to making New Tales from the Borderlands feel right at home was evident in its first gameplay demo, which debuted at Pax West in September. ![]() Lopez says Gearbox is partnering with developers from the first game to ensure its spiritual successor remains authentic to the series’ roots. That’s why this game looks more similar to Borderlands 3 in visual style than the first Tales from the Borderlands, and it’s why it features better, updated animation. Use the formula, use what worked, but do it Gearbox style.” Rather than trying to follow in those footsteps, we try to acknowledge the route those steps took but then try to do something different. “As someone who worked on the previous Tales, I was acutely aware it was a critical darling,” Gearbox Software director of production James Lopez tells me. ![]()
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