In the new shooter Borderlands 3, MMORPG fans meet an old acquaintance. Paul Sage was Creative Director at The Elder Scrolls Online at the release. Now he says his focus is on coop for Borderlands 3. He wants to play the shooter with his son, and two of his coop ideas have already caused a stir.
It’s about him: Paul Sage was probably the main figure during the turbulent early phase of The Elder Scrolls Online, aside from boss Matt Firor, to whom fans looked up most. The MMORPG went through a tough time during its PC release in 2014.
Just when things started to look better for ESO and the versions for PS4 and Xbox One were released, Sage suddenly left Zenimax and The Elder Scrolls Online in June 2015.
At that time, it was said that he had the chance to go back to Texas and he had to seize it. Sage studied in Austin, Texas, and wanted to return to his home state.
As we now know, Sage actually, as suspected, started at Gearbox back then: For over 4 years he has been the Creative Director there and has worked on Borderlands 3. And you can see that his focus remained on the multiplayer aspect he developed at ESO.
The best coop experience Borderlands has ever had
This is his focus: Sage says in an interview with Venturebeat:
“My goal was to achieve the best coop experience ever in a Borderlands game. I play with my son. It was really important to me. This is how we got level syncing into the game and the instanced loot.”
What requirements did Sage have? He says when he joined Borderlands 3, there were two major tasks for him:
- We are making multiple planets
- and the other, which was not spoken, was: Respect the franchise
What Sage says further: According to Sage, Borderlands 3 is very ambitious. There is so much in the game, you travel to different worlds. Just getting all the multiplayer systems into the game was apparently very extensive.
Sage says: “These things [multiplayer systems] often seem small to players, but they introduce larger things and amplify them. All these features often look small, but a lot of energy goes into them.”
The length of the campaign in Borderlands 3 is about 35 hours, if you only play the main story.
These are the two coop features: The two features that Sage talks about have already been shown during the presentation and praised by fans:
- Each player will have their own loot, so you can play together without fear of someone stealing your loot
- And level sync ensures that players of different levels can play together without issues. The enemies are dynamically adapted to the respective player – their level is “synced”
During the presentation of Borderlands, there was a bit of applause for these features. It seems that we owe these coop ideas to Paul Sage and his son.
