This created a different sort of narrative friction that Burch didn't realise until he'd put an unfinished build before a group of focus testers (which included Kirsten Kahler, who would become a co-writer on Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel). In fact, it's full of characters who talk endlessly (and hilariously) about their eccentric lives and the insane world they inhabit.
If you want to make the world feel a bit more lonely and haunting, silent protagonists can be great."īorderlands 2, however, is neither lonely nor haunting. "If your franchise is built to be more 'immersive' and put the player in a more investigative frame of mind (like, say, the pre-Infinite BioShock games), a silent protagonist can give the audience space to be a little curious, a little confused. "I'd latched onto the Blank Protagonist as a universally applicable principle, when in reality it - like every narrative tool in existence - serves a particular purpose," he said. However, he soon realised this is a case-specific strategy, not a ubiquitous rule. "You're not at risk of your protagonist saying something that you personally disagree with." "This kind of characterisation works, in theory, because if your character never says anything you (the player) disagree with, you're more 'immersed,'" Burch explained. Initially Burch was a huge fan of the silent protagonist, because he didn't want there to be any friction between what the player wanted and what the character wanted. How do you NOT have anything to say about this? Later, a much bigger audience would do the same. The former Gearbox employee wrote a fascinating postmortem on Borderlands 2's player character dialogue at Kotaku where he found himself following in the footsteps of Valve (Half-Life, Portal) until a focus group convinced him he was wrong. Borderlands 2 writer Anthony Burch regrets making its playable cast so quiet.
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