Wonderlands
Gearbox
With my obsession with loot and shooting, needless to say I am very much looking forward to Wonderlands, the new quasi-Borderlands spin-off taking the franchise to a new genre, and leaning more into RPG roots. The idea is that we’re playing Tiny Tina’s version of Dungeons and Dragons, which involves not just guns this time, but melee weapons and spellcasting too.
One major change from Borderlands, however, will be the idea that we can fully create our own custom characters, rather than having them be preset Vault Hunters, long a staple of the series. New information about the character creator has me excited that this is something I’ve always wanted to see from the series.
A recent GameSpot interview sheds light on how this is going to work, and why this time around, we don’t even have to be human (or a robot):
“Your voice, your appearance, all of that is independent,” Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands senior producer Kayla Belmore told GameSpot. “You get to choose your own voice and some other fun stuff that we can’t quite dive into yet, but it goes into even your character’s personality, not just aesthetics, and it’s all independent. You could look and sound however you want within those sets of choices. We don’t really tie the player into any one thing. Not even every feature is humanoid—you can have shark fins on your head or look like an orc.”
Wonderlands
Gearbox
Choosing your own appearance, voice and personality reminds me of Saint’s Row’s famous character creator, decoupling all those long before any other game bothered, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the potential results here.
The creator is separate from combat functionality, and that too is different from Borderlands. You can look however you want and then spec into whatever of the six skill trees you want, and also combine them, taking elements from different ones to suit whatever playstyle you’re going for. It’s leaning harder into RPG elements and the Dungeons and Dragons theme with multi-classing. So you’re not just an archer, you’re a mage-archer, and so on.
All of this sounds exactly like the kind of freshening up of the Borderlands system I’ve been wanting to see. Not that I wouldn’t totally play a Borderlands 4 with the traditional four class Vault Hunter system returning, as I think that also has its place, but this seems like a nice change of pace, and I like the idea of the ability to create an entirely custom character within this sub-universe.
Wonderlands will be released March 25, 2022, barring any delays, and we’ll likely learn more about all this well before then. But so far, so good, if you ask me.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.
