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EXCLUSIVE: Borderlands 3 Art Director on Buster Swords and Robots
We talk to Scott Kester, the art director on Borderlands 3
Gamescom 2019 saw some new gameplay from Borderlands 3 released. The sequel to 2012’s Borderlands 2 is scheduled to drop on 13 September 2019. The game has always had a unique art style that has set it apart from other role-playing first-person shooter games in the genre. Scott Kester, the art director on Borderlands 3, weighs in on the inspiration behind the distinctive art style and where he draws inspiration from.
Kester has worked with Gearbox for more than 10 years and has had input on the Borderlands franchise since inception. Chatting about inspiration around the new game he immediately referenced South African director Neil Blomkamp as a big influence in a lot of his work saying:
“Don’t get me started about him (Blomkamp), he’s the best dude.”
He highlights FL4K, one of the playable characters in Borderlands 3, as having been inspired by Chappy, from one of Blomkamp’s films. But Blomkamp wasn’t Kester’s only inspiration. Another nod goes to Tekkon Kinkreet, an anime movie that Kester watched. He was fascinated by 2 characters, Black and White, and how they were different but still had colour balance. It was a slice of influence for the Calypso Twins who play the bad guys in Borderlands 3 (and have been referenced as the “ultimate douchy streamers”). Movies, music, anime and comics fill the influence and reference pot for Kester and he says video games don’t feature all that much. However, a character in Asura’s Wrath, a Capcom game, inspired some of the creative work behind Borderlands 3’s Amara. Kester says the character had an Eastern influence with multiple arms and he wanted more people to see that in video games. The Art Director is quick to point out that for any creative, influence isn’t about taking or just paying homage but rather reciprocal. With creatives choosing to glean off one another and explore their own creative loves.
It helps that he appears to be offered a large amount of freedom to explore new creative ideas at Gearbox, asking if he has complete freedom to explore insane ideas he says “it takes a minute” but then uses an example of how the art direction is allowed to develop: “In Borderlands 1 I said we should put robots in, but folks were like, there are no robots in Borderlands. But then with the General Knoxx fourth DLC we added robots and thus… robots. In Borderlands 2 you were fighting loader robots and robots were everywhere. Now, in Borderlands 3 I have a robot I can play as in the game! We have a lot of freedom.”
borderlands
© borderlands
While freedom is great, you may wonder how art creation and narrative work together to ensure both are not going off on a tangent. So what comes first, the narrative or the art design? Kester says its a combination of design, narrative and art. He gives the example of the narrative team having 3 sentences on travelling to a city. Those 3 sentences mean the art department needs to spend a year and a half building the city and it is up to Kester to determine how it looks. The team doesn’t have a specific “idea room” where things are set in stone but rather they’re encouraged to talk and work together to ensure the process is fluid and the final game is the best possible version of itself.
borderlands 3
© borderlands
With Borderlands offering up such a unique design it can’t be easy to balance staying true to the art style expected while also trying to present something fresh and new to the fans. Kester says they did try some new things in Borderlands 3 that went too far, like certain shadows and hatchings were all hand drawn and you can see them in the intro illustrations. There’s an extra fidelity to the work you see, which is all from the artist’s hand. He jokes about how when he sees Cosplayers and how they’ve drawn on the make up he wants to tell them that they’ve lived through the pain the art department has lived through.
For Borderlands 3 the game has changed engines and that has offered up a better lighting model with something called Physically Based Rendering - which is just a fancy term for the way the light catches and hits things. The focus for Borderlands 3 was less about how much better does the art look but more about the content being made. Meaning the team didn’t deviate too much from the art style Borderlands fans have come to love.
Kester was part of the process around the move from the realistic to more stylised look the franchise experienced in Borderlands 1. It actually takes twice as much time to make the game look the way it does than what it would take to just make it look realistic. Which highlights how much time and love went into producing the final product we’ll see come September.
The final nugget of insight from Kester was his take on his favourite Calypso twin to design. His answer?
“Troy. ‘Cause I gave him a big buster sword… and a big robot arm. I’m a sucker for that.”
