Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands looks to encapsulate everything that makes the Borderlands games special, with its own unique flavour and flair. If there’s one thing that I took away from my interview with the game’s creative director, Matt Cox, and its Senior Producer, Kayla Belmore, it’s that Wonderlands is its own experience, and should be treated as such. While the trailer shown at PlayStation’s recent showcase doesn’t share much of the narrative, there’s lots of shooting, magic, loot, and mythical creatures to gawk at. Here’s what they had to say.
Matt Cox – Like you pointed out this in the timeline takes place after Assault on Dragon Keep so it’s the younger 13-year-old Tina and she is the bunker master of the entire world of the Wonderland. Everything that’s crazy in the entire world comes from her reign. She is the bunker master serving as the one who guides us through the story at the table, alongside Fred and Valentine. So her main role is the bunker master in the real world.
Kayla Belmore – We are absolutely stoked about our all-star cast, what they’re bringing to the game and really bringing Fred Valentine and the Dragon Lord to life in such a cool way. And of course, we’re always happy to have Ashly Burch back reprising the role of Tina.
M.C – We’d have to compare like to compare but I will say that the performance of the Dragon Lord has plenty of charisma, and comedy and heart. I find myself attached to the Dragon Lords performance. I think it’s excellent. With regard to the other characters at the table, it’s a wonderful feeling. You know, feeling like you’re playing a game with friends and voices that you’re very familiar with.
K.B – When Assault On Dragon Keep came out, there was a lot of thinking about, wow, it’s really fun to put guns in fantasy, folks seem to like the theme of Tina running this game and the craziness of it. What other stories can we tell there’s a lot more to do here, it could be a whole game. And so it is. We took elements of that as a jumping off point, but then also added more robust gameplay features like the overworld, the character creator, and then made spells and melee more robust as well. It truly is a standalone title, but absolutely, we had some inspiration from the jumping off point of Assault On Dragon Keep.
M.C – You pick your primary class at the very beginning of the game. We have six classes and each of the classes has two skills each. Once you pick your primary class, you’ll get skill points you’ll be able to spend in a more streamlined skill tree. And then during the main campaign, you will be granted the ability for a secondary class. You will then be able to start spending skill points in two different skill trees and gain the abilities of both classes as well. Like a tabletop RPG in addition to skill points, you will be spending Hero Points on more classic RPG stats like strength, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, and attunement. Those traditional sounding attributes hero points actually speak to things like skill cooldowns, and spell cooldowns and whatnot. Also, the new types of gear that you collect, also speak to your build. So, you have multiclassing and a lot of ways to chain your build through here.
M.C – They do not. We do have endgame to talk about that. We’re not talking about that today. The Hero Points are something that you get right off right off the bat alongside Badass Tokens.
K.B – Melee now has a slot as its own loot. Melee weapons have different manufacturers, different types. You can choose your melee weapon, regardless of your class, which is much different than what we had before. It will have all the stat boost attributes that a traditional piece of loot would have. You can also use it to complement some of the gameplay abilities for example there are ways to use the crossbow bolts, like while it’s in an enemy, it increases your melee damage. You can stack and work things synergistically together. There are also elemental effects on some of the melee weapons, and other things that will work well with other pieces of gear or other classes. It’s still a secondary combat system, but it is more in depth than previous titles.
M.C – You still have four slots for guns, and then a different entirely different slot just for the melee weapons that you find in in your loot.
M.C – It definitely will impact your character build and stats. It does have cosmetic implications as well.
M.C – We don’t have grenades in Wonderlands. But I would say spells are more like mini skills rather than grenades because there is a lot of different delivery systems; fire and forget, repeating spells, channeling spells, self-casting spells, and a variety of different types from fireballs, hawks, hydras, meteors, and circles of protection and a lot so we are having a lot of fun with different types of spells for sure.
K.B – One of my favorite ways that we’ve directly translated the idea of a tabletop RPG outside of you know, the character sheet style stats is the overworld itself, which functions as the game board. It is the entire world of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. As her vision, as the bunker master has it, and you can traverse that world and move through it, explore it, that’s the way that you get from one map to another. There are some many quests to do on the map. You can also do a random encounter which is very old school JRPG where little characters and enemy will pop up on the menu it will put you into a first-person combat space and in that space there’s all this opportunity to get loot, and then it pops you right back out once you’ve completed it into the overworld itself. If you do a little bit of extra exploration, you might even find some of our side maps that are semi related to the main story, but also carry their own independent major quest stories, almost like a whole separate module.
M.C – We’re having a whole story set up later this year. We can’t really tell too much. But what I can tell you is that, were taking inspiration on how Assault On Dragon Keep is, we do have the dynamic of the characters at the table, and then the story that is happening in in the world, and I am excited to see everybody’s reaction on like how we’re building that story.
M.C – Our art team is phenomenal. Like there are a lot of classic environments like with castles and green spaces, and just some weird environments that you wouldn’t expect like that you saw a little bit of our Weep Wild, which is kind of a mushroom forest. Players can expect a blend of both classic and crazy.
K.B – There’s a lot of experience in the Wonderlands, we have the entire main campaign that you can go through and each one of those main maps has side missions in it. There’s the overworld to explore lots of activities to do within the overworld. And of course, major quest missions in those different maps, you can actually see a little bit of that in the trailer where you’re approaching as those little bobble head characters in the overworld, that big goblin head cave, and then you see it in the first-person mode. All of that is a standalone story map, which also has its own side missions in it, in addition to replayable endgame content that we’ll be talking a little bit more about in a later beat. There’s lots to do in the Wonderlands.
M.C – Safe to say that there might be some nods there to people who have played Borderlands before. And I mean, in the trailer, you saw that torque makes a very distinct appearance. We wouldn’t want to spoil anything, though.
K.B – That is a reload on one of our new magical barrels. Commonly they’ll have elemental effects but there are other types of magical barrels out there that I’m sure we’ll showcase a little bit later. We definitely have those very fantasy-rooted guns being that they’re actually magic. We also have crossbow, crossbow barrels so you can shoot crossbow bolts out of your guns, which for me is an intensely satisfying experience.
K.B – One important thing; while there are nods to existing Borderlands games, and some things that some fans might notice, which is fun easter egg stuff, the story is completely standalone. Anybody can play it. You don’t have to be familiar with a franchise or any other Borderlands titles. You can just jump right in and enjoy.
M.C – For me, answering the question of what if we put guns into a magical fantasy world, adding spell gameplay, melee gameplay and skill gameplay. We’re creating combat loops that that will make players want to use everything. So even though guns are the star of the show in this in this fantasy world, we want to make sure that people have fun experimenting with lots of different types of types of combat.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands launches on March 25th, 2022, for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series Consoles, and PC.