Little has been revealed of the new Telltale game Tales From The Borderlands since it was announced at VGX last December. All we know is that it is in the style of Telltale’s recent hits The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, and that it will take place in the same universe as the Borderlands games from Gearbox. However, yesterday at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas eager fans finally got a glimpse of how the game is shaping up.
Polygon was at a panel at the show titled “Two Sides to Every Story - Tales from the Borderlands Unveiled at SXSW”, a panel that featured several key developers from GearBox and TellTale. The devs discussed, among other things, the new direction in which they are taking the game’s story.
Tales From The Borderlands’ two protagonists are not quite what we are used to seeing in Borderlands: rather than being daring Vault Hunters like the heroes of the previous games, they are a pair of “normal” citizens from Pandora. The two protagonists, smooth-talking con artist Fiona and cybernetically-enhanced company man Rhys, are a pair of unreliable narrators; both characters will tell the same story, but they will tell it differently. It is up the the player to decide for themselves which (if either) of the accounts is true. Kevin Bruner of Telltale said during the panel, “You never really play what actually happened, you’re playing this Big Fish version of what happened.”
Telltale has been at the forefront of game narrative in recent years, consistently pushing the limits of what we expect from storytelling in interactive media, so it comes as no surprise that their collaboration with Gearbox is following suite.
No new footage has yet been shown of the game, but here’s the original trailer in case you missed it.
