Lockdown 2: Isolation Boogaloo #2 – Something Out of Nothing

The Borderlands series, among other things, is frequently praised for its wacky humour and surprisingly serious storytelling. It’s a great blend of over-the-top action and well-realised characters.

Or at least that’s what I’m told. Because until this week the only game in the series I’d played was the original. And the story in the first Borderlands… doesn’t really exist.

There is a lot of great worldbuilding. The giant corporations that ominously pull strings in the background, the gangs of raiders who ravage Pandora, the concept of the mysterious and invaluable Vaults – all of that is really nicely set up in the game. Those few characters who you can actually talk to and have conversations with about the world hint at further background too; arms dealers and bandits and dodgy doctors. The environments are gorgeous too, and huge. The setting – the world – is well-constructed.

But it feels… empty. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing – in contrast to the zany, over-the-top humour of the later games, the atmosphere of the original Borderlands is bleak. You wander alone across a colossal wasteland on a selfish quest, gunning down bandits and wild beasts and mercenaries. You have few friends, and those you do have honestly aren’t really friends at all – they’re just vendors who are better off doing business with you than trying to kill you. Borderlands is dark. It’s desolate. When you get shot and die (and you do, often), you die alone.

[image error]It’s big, it’s bleak, and it’s brilliant.

But there’s also really not much of a plot to go in this bleak world. There is a main questline, revolving around you trying to get to the Vault and some other people trying to get there first, but you can play for whole stretches of the game without encountering a mainline mission, and when you do you might not even realise it. When cutscenes do pop up and give you a little burst of story, they’re ok. But they’re nothing special. The actual plot of Borderlands is practically nonexistent. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it’s a sandbox game, where you just go out and shoot stuff and get loot and repeat.

But I was always confused when people praised the storytelling in the rest of the series – because I never really saw any.

Then I started Tales From The Borderlands. And I found it.

I’ll clarify at the start that I’ve only just started the game – I’m one episode in – but what a start. The game brings in its core cast – wannabe cut-throat executive Rhys and his friends – straight away, not wasting time on anything but the bare minimum of background before they’re hurling themselves into an elaborate scheme to steal a priceless alien artefact and get one over on their murderous boss. It helps that the voice acting is also brilliant – including none other than Patrick Warburton, voice of Kronk in The Emperor’s New Groove, as the aforementioned arsehole boss.

[image error]Oh yeah. It’s all coming together.

Obviously, a game format that’s literally narrative with a few quick-time events is set up to have storytelling leaps and bounds ahead of most other games (not that all such games do, of course), but it’s still an amazing contrast – and it shows the importance of that initial worldbuilding. If I hadn’t played Borderlands, if I didn’t know what Pandora was like, what the endless risks of walking around that world were and how incredible the rewards could be, then Tales‘ introduction wouldn’t have had anything like as much meaning.

It also helps that Rhys and the other characters (well, not all of them, but I don’t want to spoil anything here…) are ‘everymen’. They’re executives, living and working on a floating satellite near-paradise, safe and happy. They’ve never been down to Pandora, smelled the dust and tasted the blood. Their violent introduction to the ‘real’ world of Borderlands mirrors that of the people who’ve played the original game. You get off the bus, you have two seconds to look around, and then you’re knee-deep in spent shells and wiping blood off your hands before you have time to think. Tales gives Rhys and co. the same introduction. When you play through it, you can sympathise. After all, you did the same, once upon a time.

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This is what good writing is all about. You build a proper world: countries, locations, myths and legends; you flavour it with stories that you only have to hint at – because no real world has answers to every question, and nor should a fictional one. And then you take some characters, some really good characters, and you drop them in it and see what happens. That’s storytelling. At least it’s one way of doing it – and coincidentally it’s the way I like to do it.

Borderlands laid the groundwork. It built the world, and it did it well – and then Tales started telling an actual story. And it’s a good one.