Gearbox discusses Borderlands ending

By Ellie Gibson Published 25 November, 2009

Spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler.

Gearbox Software's Paul Helquist has said the studio is aware some Borderlands players were disappointed with the game's ending.

The team did their best, though, the senior designer said. "We went through lots of different iterations on what the ending of the game was," he told MTV.

"We ultimately ended up with what you get to play. We didn't know how people were going to react to it. Obviously the reaction hasn't been as strong as we had hoped [laughs]. That's something we're going to be keeping in mind as we do new things, whether it's download content or other games in the future."

So what alternative endings did Gearbox consider? "They were all pretty much doom and gloom," said Helquist. "We had all kinds of things that we ultimately didn't like and changed. We had things like Marcus showing up at the end. All kinds of weird things with the Guardian Angel."

Next time round, Helquist added, the studio hopes to get more feedback prior to the game's release - "So we can ensure that we'll have an ending that you guys like." However, Gearbox hasn't started work on a Borderlands sequel yet.

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About Ellie Gibson

Since joining Eurogamer in the mid 2000s, Ellie has written about subjects as diverse as the fall of Gizmondo, the rise of Hollyoaks actresses in Red Alert games and the noise a bear makes under NSFW circumstances.

Read more articles from Ellie by visiting the Ellie Gibson archive page.

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Comments (36) Latest comment 2 years ago

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  • RumpyStumpy #1 2 years ago

    Finished this last night and quite frankly I wasn't expecting a great ending as the game lacked a decent plot from the off.
    However I enjoyed the game for what it was and can't wait for more of the same.

    Sometimes its not about the destination but how you get there!!!

  • Tyronne #2 2 years ago

    Sad thing is that this is but yet another game where the ending was bloody awful.

    I love the game but when I finished it the first thing I said was `oh come on, what a cop out`

    You would think by now that developers would be able to construct a decent completion for a game instead of something that acts as a glorified `game over` screen from back in the day of old arcade/8 bit titles.

    After spending hours putting all the pieces together, I wanted to see what was behind the door, not just hear that its closed again after a fat space slug dies in the keyhole.

    Was very very dissapointed by how it finished.

  • Lotos8ter #3 2 years ago

    I wanted the Vault to open and then the Guardian Angel do something filthy to me with a piece of loot.
    Its a poor ending in my opinion. It commits the cardinal sin of making the journey to it seem "meh" afterwards.

  • suicida #4 2 years ago

    +1 to the "the ending was shit" comments...
    Edited by 1 at 25/11/09 @ 13:29

  • penhalion #5 2 years ago

    This is what I said ages ago. The ending makes the journey pointless. You kill the creature and then the vault closes?!? Why? Clearly whatever the creature is guarding must be seriousl loot given that some ancient race put it in there to kill whoever opened the vault. I mean it must have taken some seriously powerful race to put the creature in there to begin with!

    A funny thing for Gearbox to do would have been to have it turn out that the vault was actually the ancients version of a tube system, going from one planet to the next (like stargates) and that the destroyer was the ancient equivalent of a pesky rat. The problem would then be that, unlike the ancients, the remaining races don't have the technology to deal with them like they were trivial distractions........man I've been in game design too long......

  • Shinetop #6 2 years ago

    So for those of us that didn't bother, what exactly is the ending? Spoiler tags please.

  • Tyronne #7 2 years ago

    ANYTHING would have been better than the nothing they left it with.

    I know you cannot make everyone happy but at least spend more than 5 minutes on thinking about what could happen.

    Its almost like they reinacted the bit in Monty Pythons grail, where the graphic designer has a heart attack at the end of the movie and then they thought `sod it` and went home.

  • JahB #8 2 years ago

    @Shinetop
    the entire game you're being told about the vault and the amazing loot inside it. at the end, you find that vault, its doors open, and out comes some giant monster, which is the final boss fight. you beat the thing, and the vault closes again. no angel, no loot, no riches, no super-uber-alien technology. game end, credits roll.

    while i totally loved the game and can't wait for the DLC, that ending was total fail.

  • octavedoctor #9 2 years ago

    The ending didn't really bother me that much, the journey there was pure Awesome though... on a 2nd playthrough and just downloaded Dr Ned..... weeeee

    Game of the year for me.

    OD

  • kinky_mong #10 2 years ago

    I'm with Rumpy Stumpy here, the game was all about the journey.

  • schnide #11 2 years ago

    With this and the DLC released at the same time as the game, I'm not bothering.

  • Xarius302 #12 2 years ago

    thought the ending was alright! little twist and kept it open for a new game. only thing that annoyed me was the fact that you didnt get any uber cool weapons. just some loose change a few crap guns!!! there was just no pay off for all the time we invested in it...

  • kangarootoo #13 2 years ago

    @penhalion

    "This is what I said ages ago"

    I'm getting a sense of dejavu here ;)

  • PlugMonkey #14 2 years ago

    only thing that annoyed me was the fact that you didnt get any uber cool weapons. just some loose change a few crap guns!!!

    Yep, that's what pissed me off. That must surely be what pissed everyone off. The game was entirely driven by loot, what little plot there was revolved around a vault full of the best loot.

    What I expect when I get there is at least ONE piece of decent kit for my trouble. It's what I've been looking forward to for hours. What do I get instead? I bundle of credits to put on my enormous pile of credits I have nothing to buy with. Boo! I want a big gun!

  • Balboa #15 2 years ago

    You'd think people would be happy you saved the universe, but all you sods want is dark orange loot. Greedy buggers :)

    The idea is that you were tricked; The Destroyer isn't guarding anything. The Eridians forced it into the "vault" to stop it from destroying all life.

    It's not explained why it opens every 200 years, but I'd imagine it's got something to do with it weakening the portal, or needing to beat it down regularly to stop it growing too strong.

    The Bioshock phrase right at the start was a tip-off. I pretty much expected to get the shaft at some point.

  • Phattso #16 2 years ago

    The ending was a surprise (in a bad way) for sure, but that in no way invalidated the 24hrs of real time I'd expended to get there, and the brilliance that was my co-op experience. Near the end of our second play through now, and got the DLC yesterday which is all kinds of awesome, so in the context of the 60 hours and counting I've spent loving the game a slightly shonky ending isn't hard to forgive. :)

  • TTP #17 2 years ago

    I don't even recall what the ending was. Such a forgettable story indeed.

  • Gurrah #18 2 years ago

    Sometimes it's wiser not to do a twist at the end, especially when the story isn't that great anyways. Sorry Gearbox, I thoroughly enjoyed the game, so much that I squeezed in a 14 hour session which I haven't done for quite some time, but the story was, well, redundant. A guardian of some sort at the end would have been totally ok, but not letting the player see the inside of a vault was a big mistake. All the way there I was wondering what sort of one-handed Planetdestroyer I would find, instead I got 200k on top of my 5 million credits and Marcus didn't sell any planet destroyers.

  • dbranchevans #19 2 years ago

    Agree was a bit rubbish although my flatmate and I loaded up our second playthrough virtually straight away so it can't of been thaaaat bad! Couldn't believe you didn't get to fight ninja claptrap though

  • Mark1412 #20 2 years ago

    Surely just a little testing would have proven what you only need four brain cells to figure out on your own; leaving players with nothing to show for spending 20 hours in your game world is not going to appease anyone. I cant believe they've come out and said that was 'the best they could do 'and 'next time we'll do some testing'! Way to totally embarrass yourself as a studio.

  • Xerx3s #21 2 years ago

    "This is what I said ages ago. The ending makes the journey pointless. You kill the creature and then the vault closes?!? Why? Clearly whatever the creature is guarding must be seriousl loot given that some ancient race put it in there to kill whoever opened the vault. I mean it must have taken some seriously powerful race to put the creature in there to begin with! "

    You didn't follow the story then? They didn't put the creature there to guard something, they put it there as a final attempt to lock it away from this universe.

  • octavedoctor #22 2 years ago

    I foolishly buttoned the credits and missed the Ninja Claptrap :(

    Can't wait to play more co-op in Dr Ned...

  • butler` #23 2 years ago

    every person i talk to about this game says "yea............................ ending was shit"

  • KDR_11k #24 2 years ago

    It skipped the outro monologue for me because I died just after I finished the boss off so all I know is that there was a big monster and it died. The end.

  • dmt2 #25 2 years ago

    The ending was poor... but the getting there was great. A little bit more plot might have been good, and bigger more mental loot... but I'm halfway through a second playthrough. All in all a very solid 8/10 and a 10/10 for addiction. Co-op is awesome!

  • RumpyStumpy #26 2 years ago

    They should have got Lloyd Grossman to say "Who lives in a vault like this?"

  • reddin321 #27 2 years ago

    Plot ended at "Hahaha, get of my bus."
    And I don't really mind/care..

  • Vivid #28 2 years ago

    The 'plot' of PSO ended with a pretty 'meh' boss fight too. That didn't stop is being one of the best co-op online games I've ever played.

    Borderlands is pretty much the spiritual successor to PSO and all the better for it. I find both games pretty pedestrian in solo mode but team up with three mates and it's one of the best gaming experiences evah.

  • penhalion #29 2 years ago

    @kangarootoo

    I'm getting a sense of dejavu here ;)

    Yea tell me about it. EG print a story. I make a comment. Get loads of -1s and then a week or so later they print something like this and everyone suddenly agrees with what I said the previous week and acts like they came up with it! It wouldn't be so bad except the people suddenly changing their tunes are the ones who totally disagreed the previous week! Frickin' hypocryte central here sometimes!

  • Balboa #30 2 years ago

    @penhalion To be fair, you're probably getting -1s because you've misunderstood the ending. The guardian angel explained why.

  • SylarsStubble #31 2 years ago

    In all fairness, it wasn't that terrible considering the planet was called Pandora and, well, I'm sure you can see where it might have gone from there.

    Something to do with opening a box of some sort?

    The stuff after that end battle was weird though, I'm not sure what they aimed to achieve with that.

  • persus-9 #32 2 years ago

    You know the plot of Borderlands wasn't actually that bad. It wasn't told explicity, it was quite character driven and it was very tongue in cheek but I really think it stands up to most other shooters and action based games. The main story for me was that of Tannis' journey into insanity so I felt really let down that she never got a proper ending. The ending was rubbish but not because it didn't let you into the vault but because it didn't resolve the stories of any of the main characters (apart from Steele).

    I think it's worth thinking about 'the heros journey' to see where it went wrong. Theory goes that all good stories retell 'the heros journey'. They take a character in their normal setting, use some device to drag them out of that everyday state and put them on the road to adventure, tell the story of challenges they faced and overcame in a heroic fashion and then places them back into another fairly normal state where they can live happily ever after. The problem with borderlands was it screwed up the final step, it didn't return the character, it just dropped them in the middle of nowhere with the key to a door that door that won't open for another 200 years with basically nothing to do but go and sell it to Tannis. What is my character going to do from there? He doesn't have a friend in the world unless you count Tannis and now he doesn't even have any reason to cause trouble. He's just left wandering Pandora with no motivation and no jobs left to be done. He doesn't heroically ride off into the sunset in search of new adventures because he has no reason to. He doesn't settle down in New Haven and live happily ever after because he's not that kind of guy. He doesn't do anything in particular because he's just had his sole motivation in life, searching for the vault, ripped out from under him.
    Edited by 1 at 25/11/09 @ 17:44

  • Farfarer #33 2 years ago

    I was thoroughly disappointed in the fact that you don't get to see inside the vault. I was expecting loads of cool loot and alien weaponry/shields/etc and possibly an entire area inside. That said, I understand why they did what they did. The story was never a drive behind the gameplay so it ending as it did (or at all) wasn't that much of a let down.

    Having the world change in some way would've been neat, though. Or giving the character something properly cool they could take with them into the next playthrough. At least you'd have felt like you'd had some sort of effect on the place once you went back and mopped up the remaining bits and pieces you'd left.

    It was a shame they'd left the characters you meet along the way hanging a little, too. As much as they were essentially inanimate quest giving machines, you get sort of attached to them at least a bit.

  • metalangel #34 2 years ago

    Does anyone else hate Claptraps? Hearing them say the same half-dozen unfunny things ("Check me out, I'm DANCING!";) over and over and over and over again while you're at a vending machine or bounty board... and then being told at the ending that the whole game has been their scheme all along? Are we meant to laugh? Sure you go 'aha!' and finally understand why the Guardian Angel is obsessed with your repairing all the damaged ones, but that's about it.

    Gearbox: Claptrap isn't nearly as funny as y'all think he is.

  • ChaK #35 2 years ago

    so we have to wait another 200 years?

    I'll be dead by then, damnit, gotta write a letter for me grand grand grand children saying what an hero I am !

  • Gecks #36 2 years ago

    aye the plot was balls. especially in co-op where every moment stood reading through mission blurbs is missing out on shooting midgets with everyone else (the game doesn't pause), so you soon just give up on the stuff.

    not that it matters, really. this is a co-op loot game, and i am happy with that. if you want an RPG with a plot, characterisation, and the rest, well, other games are available.

    (persona 4!!)