I was recently invited by 2K Games to have a quick look at the upcoming New Tales From the Borderlands interactive story. The story follows three new characters, Fran, the owner of a dilapidated Frogurt store, Octavio, the young kid eager for fame, and Anu, a revolutionary corporate boss focused on helping society as a whole, as they aim to take one of the Alien vaults for their own agendas.

As with any interactive story, each and every choice will have a consequence, whether it be immediate or later down the line, and true to Borderlands form, the outcomes will often be weird and wacky. The half-hour session I was treated to included a small amount of gameplay, and as expected, there were plenty of jokes and smart-ass remarks made by the trio.

We were able to witness a couple of choices made, one of which ended in a quick time event that lead to one of the characters dying, with Marcus Kincaid announcing that “That’s not really what happened. The truth is, it was much stranger,” before the area was reset and started again. Known as a Hard Failure, you know for certain this is not the way you wanted the story to go. There are also sections where a soft failure is possible, which won’t force a restart and will open up some additional story and interesting dialogue as you play.

One particular soft failure I was treated to introduced the Borderlanders mini-game. Tucked away in hidden locations, or won by defeating enemies in glorious plastic combat, the collectable Borderlanders figures are just one of many mini-games, using similar quick-time gameplay in a tabletop gaming setting. Given my affinity for tabletop gaming and being the nerd that I am, one of the questions I posed to the development team was whether or not we’d see real-world versions of this, but due to the conflicting time zones and upcoming PAX West, I am yet to find out for certain. I certainly hope it becomes a thing, even if they release STL files that will allow me to print them off at home.

While I’m not really a huge fan of interactive stories, New Tales From the Borderlands is one that I think I will pick up. It promises to be full of the usual Borderlands humour and quirky enemies, and being able to spend a short amount of time with the 2K team as they passionately showed off some gameplay proves once more that Borderlands as a franchise isn’t going anywhere.

Written by: Mathew Lindner